WinDroid announced!

In news just out today: Microsoft will be selling phones based on merging the best features of Windows Phone 7 with the Android Honeycomb, these phones will be produced by Nokia and sold under the moniker 'WinDroid'. Expect to see these phones ready for Christmas. Microsoft refused to be drawn on the rumours of a tablet version being readied.

They plan to use the marketing slogan: 'Powerful Action Is Now For Universal Locations'. The marketing slogan in part derives from the fact that Microsoft will be releasing the phone with multiple carriers in the United States, and also that the phone will be available world wide. However, it will be released in the USA a few months before Europe. The reaction of many industry observers was to wince, and say "Oh no, not again!".

Microsoft and Nokia must have listened to what Google had to say!

Why Google is dropping support for H.264

Google is dropping support for H.264 in its Chrome browser, preferring to put more effort in free codecs like WebM, as Google sees that H.264 is licenced in a way that stifles innovation.

YouTube (owned by Google) is in the process of converting its contents to use WebM. If you want to access it now, you can join the testing phase. Firefox 4, due out in February, will fully support WebM as part of its HTML5 upgrade. There are a number of browsers already supporting WebM, and Google is planning to add WebM functionality to Safari and IE9. Note that Android, the operating system widely used in mobile phones, supports WebM from version 2.3 (Gingerbread) onwards - so Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) destined for tablets will also provide WebM functionality.

See also my more recent posting about for how the codecs vary in their 'openness'.

Problems with H.264/AVC/MPEG-4
While the MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video is free for end users to watch, people still have to pay large fees to create software that either encodes or decodes using the H.264 family of codecs. So the H.264 is not appropriate to be used in software under the General Public Licence (GPLv2 & GPLv3 – note that the Linux kernel uses the GPLv2 Licence), nor is it suitable for any software developed by people with limited budgets.

WebM advantages
Mainly that WebM is a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone – not just to use, but also to people writing software that either encodes or decodes using WebM codecs. So the WebM codec is fully compatible with both the spirit and technicalities of open source software licensing. Soon lots of hardware will support WebM natively, which will further reduce the initial advantages of H.264.