Bad news for anyone expecting to use HTML 5 on a Windows Phone 7 OS device. At a recent press conference, Microsoft's Frank Prengel stated that there are currently no "concrete" plans for HTML 5 support in the OS. There are plans for Flash support from Adobe, but that won’t happen until about 6 months after WinPho 7 has been released.

This came up during a demonstration of WinPho 7′s new hybrid IE 7/8 browser, which uses hardware acceleration for text scaling and other processes. The bigger question here is not when the OS is used in a phone, but rather how it will impact the current tablet computing craze. If Microsoft doesn’t support the new evolving web standard, that could be a major stumbling block for early adopters.

Yesterday the big news was of course Android surging past the iPhone to become the top selling mobile platform in the U.S. What many, including ourselves, missed though was what was happening at the other end of the scale. The 'sick man' of the mobile OS world, Windows Mobile, was quietly staggering on, but had dipped to single figures, just 9% market share in the last quarter. There are two main reasons for this, both as obvious as each other really. On the one hand you have the likes of Android and iOS tearing up the asphalt with new customers and grabbing all the headlines, and on the other hand you have the fact that Microsoft has effectively abandoned WinMo in favour of its new OS Win Phone 7. Windows Mobile has been cast out like a sick member of the heard to die, or be eaten by the wolves. It's also worth mentioning that Nielsen's figures don't take into account corporate customers, which, if they were included, would probably see WinMo riding just a little higher. At any rate it's one more sign that this relic of the past has had its time and must give way to the future.

Windows Phone 7 has generally been received warmly from the few interactions with it that have been made public. Not everyone has taken to it though and that camp have another thing to add to their list of reasons for thinking Win Phone 7 will be a bit of a damp squib. It seems that HTML emails are playing as nicely on Win Phone 7 as they did on the old Windows Mobile paltform. That is to say not very nicely at all. The sticking point comes with images, which Win Phone 7 apparently doesn't download automatically. Sure you can select to download them yourself, but it is a bit annoying to have to do it every time, especially given that both Android and iOS allow automatic image downloads in HTML emails. It's all allegedly to do with security so this doesn't look like something that is going to change before the official launch later this year.

It's been how what, three years since Windows Mobile 6 hit the scene? The wait for version 7 is nearing an end. Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner spilled the beans that Windows Phone 7 will arrive in the October November 2010

Redmond's new hope to regain some footing in the mobile market (after the KIN project flopped badly) is Windows Phone 7 a pretty drastic departure from the 6.x line. Mr. Turner says that WP7 phones will not like any other we’ve seen from Microsoft and that it’s a good thing.

It is a good thing indeed, but will it be enough, remains to be seen. Apparently Europe will get Windows Phone 7 devices first, some time in October, and then the US in November.

In that time plenty of droids will have received the Android 2.2 Froyo update (some HTCs are getting it right now), even Symbian^3 may have debuted with the Nokia N8 (we’ll have to wait and see what kind of reception this one gets too). And Apple released four new OS versions starting from about the time WinMo 6 launched.

There are some quite interesting devices running Windows Phone 7 on the way, but by the time they come out competing OSes will have some serious lead.

An SLR Camera instrumented with our image deblurring attachment that uses inertial measurement sensors and the input image in an "aided blind-deconvolution" algorithm to automatically deblur images with spatially-varying blurs (first two images). A blurry input image (third image) and the result of our method (fourth image).

Abstract

We present a deblurring algorithm that uses a hardware attachment coupled with a natural image prior to deblur images from consumer cameras. Our approach uses a combination of inexpensive gyroscopes and accelerometers in an energy optimization framework to estimate a blur function from the camera’s acceleration and angular velocity during an exposure. We solve for the camera motion at a high sampling rate during an exposure and infer the latent image using a joint optimization. Our method is completely automatic, handles per-pixel, spatially-varying blur, and out-performs the current leading image-based methods. Our experiments show that it handles large kernels – up to at least 100 pixels, with a typical size of 30 pixels. We also present a method to perform “ground-truth” measurements of camera motion blur. We use this method to validate our hardware and deconvolution approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses 6 DOF inertial sensors for dense, per-pixel spatially-varying image deblurring and the first work to gather dense ground-truth measurements for camera-shake blur.

Examples

Automatically Deblurred using data from the Sensor Attachment (images are blinking between the blurred image and our deblurred result)