SAN FRANCISCO - Angry Birds will be coming very soon to the Android and Symbian^3 platforms, but Symbian will get a full version of the popular game first, representative from game developer Rovio said here at the CTIA Wireless trade show.
Everybody seems to love Angry Birds, a popular iPhone and Palm WebOS game where users throw chubby, flightless birds at pigs hiding in easily destroyed towers. The game has been number one on Apple's paid apps chart for quite some time now.
But users of Android and Symbian phones have had to settle for Angry Birds Lite, which only has 15 levels on Android and six on Symbian. That will change very soon, Rovio reps said. The Symbian^3 version, initially compatible with the Nokia N8, could come as soon as next week, while the Android version of the full game is a few weeks away.
The two new versions of Angry Birds will largely mirror the iPhone version, except without the new "mighty eagle" plug-in because the other platforms don't support in-app purchases.
Android is harder to program than Symbian^3, Rovio reps said. Symbian's QT programming framework makes it easy to develop a version of Angry Birds that works on various different devices, while Rovio is scrambling to make the Android version compatible with Android's many screen sizes, with phone screens ranging from 320-by-240 up to 854-by-480.
Future versions of Angry Birds may allow players to sync levels and achievements between different devices. Angry Birds users with both iPhones and iPads have been wanting to move their games between their gadgets, Rovio said, and they're working on it. That trick may actually be easier to do on Android than on iPhone because Android makes it easier to move files between devices, the game developers said.