Developer: Oh, man, I’ve got this great idea for a new game!

Boss: Does it include birds that happen to be angry?

Developer: Um, no.

Boss: You’re fired. Oh, and please help yourself to Angry Birds merchandise on your way out—we need to get rid of it to fit in more piles of money.

Stuart Dredge reports from Nokia World for The Guardian, where Rovio’s marketing chief Peter Vesterbacka was talking Angry Birds:

We’re really excited about making the Angry Birds experience available to the world. We can reach totally new audiences in India, in Africa and all the emerging markets.

Angry Birds: Solves World Poverty edition.

We’re really excited about that. We have 400 million-plus downloads, but hopefully we can add another 400 million together with Nokia in the next few months.

Angry Birds: Making Yet More Money From The Same Old Shit edition.

We haven’t seen ourselves as a games company for a long time…

Angry Birds: Don’t Expect Us To Ever Make Anything Other Than Angry Birds Because We Like Rolling Naked In Money edition.

We’ve now sold over 10 million plush toys, so a million a month, and we also have other products: board games, card games, and we’ve recently launched our first book.

Angry Birds: Not Even Restricted To A Sodding Screen Any More edition.

You can expect to hear more about Rovio books in the not-too-distant future. We’re building the first entertainment brand on the planet with a billion fans. Right now we have 400 million downloads, but we’re only getting started.

Angry Birds: You Will Never Be Rid Of Us edition.

We have 70 million unique users on our HTML5 game online, so we’re deeply versed in HTML5. For us it’s not so much about the technology, it’s about using whatever is there to create the best possible experience for our fans.”

Angry Birds: Just Wait Until We Take Over Facebook, Too edition.

You can expect to see other Angry Birds games, just like Mario. When Mario drives a car, it becomes Mario Kart. When he goes to space, it becomes Super Mario Galaxy… Our birds will do things and go places, and they will go to unexpected places. And some of those places will turn out to be games.

Angry Birds: And You Thought We’d Milked These Characters Enough, But You Really Have No Idea edition.

Still, great to see Rovio being a leading games developer by innovating off of the back of its success, eh? So, let’s all look forward to the exciting, original, inventive Angry Birds Tennis, Angry Birds Kart, Super Angry Birds, Angry Birds 2, Super Angry Birds 2, Dr. Angry Birds, Angry Birds Teach Typing, Angry Birds Teach You How To Cook Pork, Angry Birds Golf, Angry Birds 3, Angry Birds Paint, Angry Birds Are Missing (Only Joking—They Are Fucking Everywhere), Angry Birds All-Stars, Angry Birds Time Machine, Angry Birds Party, Angry Birds Puzzle Collection, Angry Birds Baseball, Angry Birds: GTA, and Angry Birds Classic.

Michael Degusta, writing Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support:

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent.

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.

Degusta adds that such motives and intent might not be real, but it’s certainly how an awful lot of the Android ecosystem comes across, and the chart he presents is hugely depressing.

Hat-tip: Matt Gemmell.

With the publication of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, the internet exploded over the following quote about an Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV):

It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud… It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it

Without the book, I’m not sure in what context the quote was placed, but the idea of an Apple TV isn’t new. And, predictably, opinions range from the extremes of thinking an Apple TV would be the best thing ever, to people who think Apple would be crazy to enter the TV space.

I’m in two minds. People argued cellphones were a crazy move for Apple: they were cheap, regularly disposed of, and there was little potential for disruption. The iPhone has since proved otherwise. I’d certainly be interested to see how Apple could ‘reinvent’ television, but there are hurdles the company would have to clear.

Televisions are not devices that are regularly upgraded, and I’m not sure even Apple churning out shiny bi-annual upgrades would change this. Therefore, whatever kit Apple released would have to have longevity beyond even the sturdiest of iOS devices. It would also have to be competitive within the current market—not impossible, but certainly a tough ask.

Apple would also have to convince a sizeable chunk of the media industry to radically change its thinking. At present, television and movie studios are clinging to the wreckage of the 1990s, still for the most part believing in keeping media expensive and relatively inaccessible. Digital TV shows are priced on iTunes in excess of the RRP of DVDs and Blu-ray, to keep you buying shiny discs, and region-blocks of all kinds mess with worldwide commercial access to shows, despite the same shows being available as torrents mere minutes after broadcast.

Having mulled this thinking over on Twitter today, I’ve had responses along the lines of “but what about the music industry?” It’s true that Apple was disruptive there, and was also largely responsible for the current DRM-free and affordable model for individual tracks and entire albums. But whether the lesson the TV/movie industry’s learned is more along the lines of “and there’s no way that’ll happen to us” rather than being inspired will be key to any hope Apple has of making it in the world of television.

The Apple TV unit and iTunes have already shown that Apple’s clout—even while Steve Jobs was involved—isn’t always enough. TV shows remain expensive. Movies are regularly removed from rental, so users can be ‘forced’ to buy them, and then they’re plonked back once the studios realise there’s a sequel on the way. There’s no consistency to this, nor in availability worldwide. The USA’s rental and purchase selection is massively superior to the UK’s, and yet plenty of UK shows aren’t available in the US. And then there’s the TV-show rental debacle, where Apple only managed to get Fox, the BBC and Disney-related properties on board—and even then, many hit shows were absent.

But there’s still plenty of potential in the Apple TV. Drop pricing and up the range of shows and it moves from being quite a nice device to a must-have. (If you’ve a networked PC or Mac and AirVideo, it’s a suitable unit for watching shows in any format, too, rather than just those sitting in iTunes.) And so if Apple can fix these things, perhaps an Apple-branded television could also have a shot in the market.

Pocket Gamer’s headline writer seems to have made a massive typo. I’m pretty sure that Top 10 tablets that could topple the iPad 2 should have read Top 10 tablets that won’t topple the iPad 2, although one of them will replace it and another might cause it a bit of grief. Tsk! You just can’t get the sub-editors these days, can you?

Entering serious mode for a moment (sorry), I wonder why publications continue to churn out the same old list, including tablets that haven’t made the slightest dent in the market. As has been remarked by various writers, there really isn’t a tablet market right now—there’s an iPad one. Hardly anyone cares about the PlayBook and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and even fewer people are excited by whatever Asus, Motorola, Toshiba and Lenovo are firing on to store shelves, cunningly forgetting to back up their efforts with the kind of ecosystem that made the iPad the success that it is.

Here are my predictions for 2012, regarding the tablet market:

• The iPad 2 will continue to sell like hot cakes.
• The iPad 3, assuming it’s released, will also sell like hot cakes.
• Idiot tech hacks will leap on any slide in the iPad’s marketshare as proof the iPad is finally ‘doomed’ and that Android tablets are ‘gaining ground fast’. Said Android tablets will remain, relatively speaking, a niche concern, with one important exception…
• The Amazon Kindle Fire will sell like hot cakes, appealing to people who can’t afford an iPad and/or only want a device primarily intended for media consumption. Hacks will use the Fire’s sales as further proof of Android’s impending dominance, ignoring the fact Amazon’s tablet is far from a standard Android device and that Amazon itself barely mentions Android at all.
• Assuming Windows 8 ships on time, it’ll grab some of the market, but it won’t be nearly as dominant as Windows on the desktop, in part because Microsoft’s late to the party (see also: Windows Phone), but also because Windows 8 for tablets is looking like it will be a ham-fisted amalgamation of radically different interaction models, rather than an entirely user-friendly touchscreen experience.

I think that’s it. Next year won’t be all about the iPad, but it will be all about the iPad and the Kindle. I’ll be very happy to be wrong about this—Apple and Amazon could both do with extra competition, in order to push them even more towards making the best devices possible. But where’s it going to come from? Which other companies have shown even the slightest understanding of what people really want? Which of them cater for what people want to do rather than just checking off bullet-points on a list? And which have the ecosystem to support their tablets?