I have the game on my android phone and like it, so I put it on my wife's new ipod touch. I am amazed at how much better the graphics and gameplay seem to be on her ipod. The graphics seem much more detailed, and the controls seem more responsive.
Weird; I had the opposite experience when I played it for a few minutes on my friend's iPhone 4. The graphics were strangely inferior on the iPhone compared to my Nexus One. This surprised me, because I thought it was mostly an iPhone game and that Rovio viewed Android as just a secondary market.
Is your Android device not quite top of the line? I read recently that Rovio felt that they'd aimed a bit high with their required specs, and that they would focus on increasing performance on mid-range devices in the near future.
Byte code vs native code? I have a hard time believing that anyone would make an Android game without the NDK (without which you're basically CPU starved - Android isn't the platform for heavy CPU work), but maybe Angry Birds is Dalvik-only?
I have it on good authority[1] that Angry Birds is a native-inclusive app. Also, I wouldn't look down my nose at Dalvik-only apps. The JIT (which, AFAIK, is the target of the litigation) gets pretty close to optimal code the longer it runs - and theoretically games run the same code a lot more than your average application.
In fact, my EUR0.02 is that native-inclusive apps (just like any Java apps which rely on native libraries) are worse, in my opinion, because it limits the number of platforms that one can execute the apps upon. And as a huge Linux fan, current Mac user, and user of x64 Windows at work, I can assure you that I get left out in the cold a LOT.
It's one level of bad to tie your app only to Windows, which coincidentally includes 90% (last metric I heard) of the world. It's another thing entirely to say, "oh, sorry, your Android isn't the same as my Android: too bad for you."
Also, I wouldn't look down my nose at Dalvik-only apps. The JIT (which, AFAIK, is the target of the litigation) gets pretty close to optimal code the longer it runs - and theoretically games run the same code a lot more than your average application
That's interesting - are you sure about that? There's a big difference between a static translation JIT and the more modern and memory-intensive progressively-optimizing JIT's that are used outside mobile. My understanding was that Dalvik's JIT was a one-time-only translater. Its difficult to find any comprehensive benchmarks of the 2.2 JIT - there are plenty of benchmarks showing the 2.1 interpreter eating CPU cycles compared to native code (think 20-to-1), and Google themselves claimed that the 2.2 JIT would mean a 2-5x improvement in CPU efficiency, but I'm still waiting for a set of comprehensive cross-platform benchmarks.
What is your Android phone? I've played the game on my Nexus One and on an iPhone 4, and I find the experience close to identical. The iPhone 4 without argue has a GPU that absolutely trounces the Nexus One -- though it is matched in the Galaxy S, Desire Z, and close to matched in the Moto Droid 2 variations -- however Angry Birds doesn't really exercise the limits of it so that doesn't come into play.
So presuming that you're talking about the "Full" version, and considering that there is no lite version, I'm curious how such a difference of perceptions could possibly be.
