With the advancement in power and speeds available in mobile phones in recent years, especially with the introduction of smartphones, phones have gone from devices allowing you make and receive phone calls and messages to smaller, more mobile computers. There is almost nothing that you are unable to do on your cell phone that you can do on your laptop these days, and this has led to a massive amount of apps, games and mobile websites for you to work and relax on the go. Our favourite ways of relaxing on your mobile device are listed below in no particular order.

Flappy Bird

Although this game has been pulled by its creator in recent times due to “it destroyed my simple life” as Nguyen Ha Dong said on Twitter, it is a fantastically addictive game that sees players have to tap the screen to flap the wings of their bird to navigate through the gaps in the Mario-esque tubes. The game was downloaded more than 50 million times from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store before being pulled and it has spawned numerous copied versions, so those new to the game can still try a version of it.

The joy of the game is that simple to pick up and play, but frustrating to master and get any sort of rhythm and, as such, high scoring going. Despite this, it is still a game I’m struggling to put down on my commute to work!

Angry Birds

Another bird featured game that has gained massive popularity since its creation and release late in 2009 is Angry Birds. It has spread from the iPhone to all smartphones and can be played in your browser too, with a film being released in 2016. The game, and its myriad of sequels, have been downloaded over two billion times and have been described as “the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far”.

The premise, again, is simple in that you must fling your angry birds from a slingshot to destroy buildings and the evil pigs on the battlefield. The fewer birds used, the higher your score. It is another devilishly simple and massively addictive game that cannot be put down once started.

Gambling Apps

As a massive online gaming junkie, I regularly play poker and bingo as well as casino and slot games in my free time on my laptop in the evenings and at weekends. Thanks to the speeds of both smartphones and mobile connections increasing in recent years it is now possible to play all of these games on your mobile device while on the go as long as you have stable connection.

There are many different versions of mobile apps and specifically designed mobile friendly websites available for all aspects of online gaming. Of all the games that you are able to play, I love the ability to play free online bingo games at Butlers on my mobile devices as the quick games allow several games while commuting, although I do switch it up on longer journeys with either poker or a long session of online slot games played on my iPhone.

Candy Crush

After being released in early 2012 on Facebook, it did not take long for this simple game of connecting three of the same candy together to release them from the board to help complete a set task to migrate to smartphones and become an even bigger worldwide phenomenon. It could even be up to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange!

As of the end of last year, Candy Crush has been downloaded more than half a billion times and it’s Facebook page has more than 61 million likes. Everyone is playing it and it is certainly as addictive and challenging, infuriatingly so, as the other games that fill my commute with a combination of fist pumps and expletives! If none of these tickle your fancy try Weather Doodle!

No doubt you know that Angry Birds is a bit of a sensation. The mobile game has been downloaded more than 30 million times across different platforms, some 12 million of which were paid downloads from iOS devices. The game is also on Android, but the game is free there, supported by ad revenue. Rovio Mobile, the game’s developer, says it expects to see monthly ad revenue of a million bucks by the end of the year.

Check the video from Google’s new admob mobile success stories:

I’ve heard of mobile developers doing well – just look at Tapulous – but Rovio and Angry Birds might be the first instance we’ve seen of a developer monetizing its product so well. Rovio is turning huge profit from the game, but also turning around and merchandising the product into plush toys and soon, a kids television series.

As cell phones continue to become more and more like what we used to know as a PC, we’ll start to see more of the problems crop up that the PC faced. Chief among, it’s becoming clear, is fragmentation. With the advent of operating systems like Android and Windows Phone 7, handset manufacturers are increasingly under pressure to put out better handsets.

With the iPhone, everyone has the same hardware, and because Apple earns profits from both the hardware and the software and controls the production of both, there’s no real rush to make a new handset. The hardware manufactures for Android and WP7, on the other hand, are in a sort of arms race. Every month it seems there’s a newer, faster Droid on the market. Something with a better camera. Something that runs Flash. Something with more RAM. Something better. That race is leading to a serious fragmentation, at least with Android, and it’s affecting the user experience.

Angry Birds has become one of the most popular games across several mobile platforms, but the developer has struggled to keep its product functional on all Android devices. The developer, Rovio Mobile, said that it will be creating a second version of the game for lower-end Android handsets, citing “severe performance issues.” While this isn’t a huge issue now, imagine two years down the road when there will be ever more hundreds of thousands of apps and a marketplace cluttered with new and old handsets. It will be a mess.

Of course Apple isn’t totally exempt from this issue. Its own handsets have changed significantly year after year, giving way to some high-performance applications that simply won’t run on the original iPhone or even the iPhone 3G. As time wears on, though, I would expect Apple will see significantly less fragmentation than the operating systems with secondary hardware manufacturers. There have been rumors though, that Apple is creating an iPhone “Lite” as well as the current iPhone 4 and a CDMA version of the phone for Verizon. Sounds an awful lot like fragmentation to me.