New ultra-competitive Angry Birds game is out for iOS and Android; has deep Facebook integration

Another iteration of the addictive Angry Birds game has hit smartphones. Angry Birds Friends, the newest game, is more or less like the previous ones, wherein you have to fling birds to destroy pigs. While the gameplay may remain pretty much the same, the game now comes with a new, interactive social angle. It tracks and stacks up your score against friends via Facebook. You get to compare and pit your score against other players of every platform the game is available on. This means, players on Facebook, iOS and Android can judge each other’s score. The new version is free on both platforms. Get socially interactive with Angry Birds Friends Angry Birds Friends features tournaments offering new levels every week. The interactive angle allows players to brag, send gifts, and invite Facebook friends to play. It comes with four classic power-ups, plus one exclusive to Angry Birds Friends on mobile. You can challenge your Facebook friends for bronze, silver, and gold trophies. Expect daily rewards, and also free bird-coins just for completing the tutorial.  Angry Birds has been one of the most celebrated games of the mobile platform that leverages on the touchscreen. Moreover,  Rovio has kept dishing out several iterations of the game to keep up the entertainment quotient. Early last month, it had teased mobile gaming fiends with a possible Angry Birds Seasons, giving us a hint or two about the forthcoming update. Considering the popularity of the game, Rovio has announced the all-new animated series wherein fans will be able to watch the latest adventures of birds and pigs with the Angry Birds Toons.

Apple could price the budget iPhone around $350 and not lower: JP Morgan

There’s some more discussion around the budget iPhone and this time it is about the price. While many have been speculating that Apple will launch an iPhone with middling specifications for as little as $200, two analysts from JP Morgan think they have worked out what the actual price could be. They claim that the "budget" iPhone could sport a $350-400 price tag. According to AllThingsD, the theory put forth by Gokul Hariharan and Mark Moskowitz, analysts from JP Morgan, has very strong historical precedents. They cite the example of the iPad mini, which was priced at $329 at its launch. Many felt that compared to its competition then, the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire, the mini was overpriced as the Nexus 7 started at $249 and Amazon’s media consumption tablet cost $199. They felt that this would make the iPad mini a difficult device to sell to the budget conscious. The roaring success of the iPad mini, however, has proved them wrong with almost 12 million of the smaller tablets being sold in the last quarter, making up almost 55 percent of the total iPad shipments and helping Apple maintain a near 40 percent share of the tablet market. The pricing of the iPad mini has thus helped Apple carve out a new slice of the tablet market with a middle price band of $329 and in the process, also dominate the tablet market as a whole. The plastic back of the rumoured budget iPhone A similar strategy was seen with the iPod nano. The launch price of $199 was again perceived as too expensive as the low-end MP3 players of that time were significantly cheaper. But the iPod nano proved to be immensely successful and ensured Apple’s near monopoly of the MP3 player market. This strategy of sacrificing some of its margins in order to unlock yet another segment of the market has been spelled out by the company’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer. “We are managing the business for the long term and are willing to trade off short-term profits where we see long-term potential,” he said during Apple’s most recent earnings call. According to JP Morgan, we could see this strategy being played out in the smartphone market too. The middle section of the smartphone market is dominated globally by Samsung. The Korean company has a market share of over 35 percent in the $200-500 price range. Apple’s current flagship smartphone iPhone 5 starts at $649. The analysts from JP Morgan opine that launching a new product in the $350-400 level could see Apple secure nearly 25 percent of that market share in a matter of just 12 months. There is definitely a market for Apple phones in that range and the recent sellout of the two-generations-old iPhone 4 priced at Rs 26,000 (approx $480) in India is a good indication of that. A new Apple phone priced in and around Rs 20,000 ($350-400) will be in sync with its strategy thus far and help it grab a chunk of the smartphone pie in the middle segment.

Acer to launch 8.1-inch, 32GB Windows 8 tablet soon

Yesterday, we reported that Microsoft would be working on a 7.5-inch Windows 8 tablet in order to compete with Apple’s iPad mini and Google’s Nexus 7, both of which have been runaway hits. It turns out that this isn't the only small-sized Windows 8 tablet that we’ll be seeing. An "accidental" listing on Amazon.com of an 8.1-inch, 32GB Windows 8 tablet by Acer was reported by PC World. The tablet was listed at a price of $379.99, which is extremely competitive given that a 32GB Wi-Fi-only iPad mini costs $429.00. The listing was spotted during an event by Acer in New York where it unveiled a wide range of gadgets. The Taiwan-based company introduced a 15.6-inch Acer Aspire R7, an 11.6-inch Acer Aspire Ultrabook, the 7.9-inch Iconia A1 tablet and a series of touch notebook computers. The Iconia W3 that was listed on Amazon.com wasn’t unveiled, which is probably why the listing was yanked off in a matter of minutes. The leaked listing (Image credit: PCWorld) The listing of the Windows 8 tablet revealed that the 8.1-inch tablet was running on a 1.5GHz Intel processor and 2GB RAM. The presence of an x86 architecture processor means that the tablet would be running the full version of Windows 8 rather than the Windows RT OS. The leaked listing also showed that the tablet sports a 2MP rear camera, with no mention of a front-facing camera. The screen resolution was listed as 1280 x 800 pixels, which  is on par with the Nexus 7 and higher than the 1024 x 768 reslotion of the iPad mini. The early range of Windows 8 tablets had displays that were 10 inches or larger and recently Microsoft has tweaked a whole lot of features and specs of the Windows 8 OS in order to make its environment compatible with tablets sporting smaller displays. The OS's hardware certification program recently reduced the minimum allowable screen resolution for Windows 8 tablets from 1366 x 768 down to 1024 x 768 pixels. The leaked builds of the Windows Blue update, which will be out soon, all sport a Snap feature that works well on smaller tablets. This is a major tweak as the feature worked only on displays with the approved 1366 x 768 resolution in the earlier version of the OS. This new tablet by Acer is expected to be launched in the coming weeks and this along with the other rumoured smaller Windows 8 tablets will give Microsoft some chance of increasing its share in a market dominated by Android and iOS