Angry Birds Running Poorly On Some Android Phones

One if the most popular apps in mobile phones is the addictive Angry Birds by Rovio Mobile. They have brought the game to the Android platform, but if you have an Android phone, don't assume you can run the game.The Rovio blog lists 17 phones that suffer from poor performance, so much so that they are going to be writing a lightweight version that should work.

These are older phones, but remember, Android phones have only been out two years, starting with the T-Mobile G1 announced in September of 2008. While a two year old phone isn't exactly bleeding edge technology, it shouldn't be considered so old that developers have to write multiple versions of their software to work with those devices.

The Droid Eris is also on that list. That phone just had its first birthday, being released on November 6, 2009. There is really no excuse that a phone that was less than a year old when development for the game was started isn't up to the task of running the software properly.

There are others like the HTC Hero that were released in the 2009 timeframe that also are having issues.

So if you have a newer Android phone, you should be ok, right? Wrong. The HTC Wildfire, which went on sale just a few months ago, is also on the list. Now, granted the Wildfire doesn't have a processor that will set record benchmarks with a 528MHz processor, but that highlights an issue with Android devices.

We know there is fragmentation with the platform itself as each carrier and manufacturer adds their own special sauce, which can cause compatibility issues, but with no base hardware specs, manufacturers can make devices as cheaply as they want. Windows Mobile had the same problems and you could have two devices released within weeks of each other that had very different performance levels.

At the time, Microsoft touted this as a benefit as phones could be targeted at all levels of the market. The reality was though that it just frustrated users and gave the entire line a black eye. That is one reason they switched to the chassis specifications that set a minimum processor speed, RAM requirements and more to ensure that no matter who purchased the phone, performance would be good.

Will Google's partners wake up to this, or will some of them continue to put out devices with below average specs that will cause consumers frustration as their devices cannot run some of the newer software?