Angry Birds for Android (Beta) preview
September 3, 2010 2 Comments
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Angry Birds has been a breakaway success since it’s release on the Apple App Store in December 2009, having some 6.5 million downloads since then. Now they’re looking to spread the love, branching out to other popular mobile OS. Having recently been released on WebOS, a beta of the aggravated avians has been unleased onto Android’s Market. I went hands-on with this very raw copy of the game, to give my thoughts on how well it shapes up to it’s sister product.
Well, that was going to be the plan. As I couldn’t seem to get the application to show up using various QR codes shared online, I decided to get the app pushed to me from AppBrain’s website. I now understand why it wasn’t initially showing up for me – it clearly isn’t designed for devices like mine (HTC Hero) – the graphics on-screen were clipping with each other or overlapping, and some buttons crucial to progressing in the menus were almost completely off-screen. I would have really benefited from a 3.5″ screen, and it really cut short my testing of the application.
From what I could get out of it, it ran smoothly enough, but a lot of the graphics had no textures and white blocks featured in their place. There was the occasional stutter when the birds made any collisions with the environment, too, which is the key mechanic of the game. I’ll keep an eye on it over the coming months, hopefully the next update to it will add support for smaller screen sizes.
Application tested on GSM HTC Hero (T-Mobile G2 Touch), Android version 2.1 (3.31.110.1).
About Michael Davies
It works perfect on my Nexus One.
I really wish that I had one – the HTC Hero only has a 3.2″ screen compared to the Nexus One’s 3.5″, and currently the smaller screen size isn’t supported. That’s the cause of all the UI issues in the screenshots.