Monday's Digest
Angry Birds developers are going to release a new original project; tablet shipments will decrease this quarter; the release of the iPad 3 is overgrown with rumors.
Rovio launches birds into space
The creators of a money printing press called Angry Birds have announced that a new game in the series will be released on March 22.
The project is called Angry Birds Space!, and, according to Rovio, it is “a completely new project with innovative gameplay and elements familiar to players from previous franchise games.”
What the developers had in mind, we will be able to find out only in the first days of March, when a detailed announcement will appear. Until then, it remains only to revise the tempting teaser, and study the official page of the project, which depicts a giant slingshot installed in the middle of the Moon (somewhere nearby there should be an American flag stuck by Armstrong).
The game will be launched on March 22 simultaneously on all platforms. On the same day, Rovio will also release a cartoon and start selling accessories based on the game.
By the way, the Finnish analogue of Disney Land – adventure park Särkänniemi (it reads as it is written, you just need to pull “a”) is going to build an entire section dedicated to Angry Birds.
Tablet shipments are falling
Global tablet shipments will decrease by 30.6% in the current quarter compared to the previous one, but will grow by 77.6% compared to the first quarter of last year, according to Digitimes Research experts.
According to their forecast, 11 million tablets will be shipped by Apple. In these figures, analysts included both shipments of the iPad 2 and the yet-to-be-announced iPad 3 device. In percentage terms, the reduction in shipments will mainly affect non-iPad devices. Digitimes Research believes that their downloads, on average, will decrease by 50.8% and amount to about 4 million. Moreover, 1.5 million will be on the Kindle Fire and another 300 thousand on the Nook Tablet.
The fuss over Apple
The closer we get to the release of Tim Cook’s new device, the more speculation, scandalous photos and rumors surround it.
Since many “leaks” have a real espionage spirit – somewhere on the verge between James Bond and Indiana Jones films – they must be treated with a certain degree of skepticism.
Unknown people take pictures of Apple’s internal warehouses in Chinese towns with poor cameras and spare parts for unknown devices, then send these blurred pictures to Chinese bloggers, who, in turn, guess based on the data obtained, what the characteristics of the future gadget are.
Other bloggers somehow inexplicably get these same spare parts and begin to study them under a microscope, making regular conclusions, for example, about the screen resolution.
Still others, having carefully studied the photo of the cover of a possible iPad 3, make amazing discoveries that would do honor to Sherlock Holmes himself.
The funny thing is that such adventures (albeit adventures of the mind) often turn out to be very effective. Thanks to them, users who are looking forward to the appearance of the new “king of tablets” will once again find out that the resolution of its screen is twice the resolution of the current iPad, that the camera is likely to be 8-megapixel in the new device, and the battery will become noticeably larger.
