Flash Player 10.1 beta supports H.264 acceleration... for Windows

The novelty of the next version of Flash Player - scheduled for the first half of 2010 - is the hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264. For now (temporarily, we hope) this feature is only available for Windows XP, Vista and 7. While this seems like a blow for Mac OS X and its Open CL technology, the acceleration already supports a large number of AMD, NVidia, and Intel cards as well as some Broadcom integrated chipsets (like those found in certain Netbooks).

In addition to Flash Player for PC/Mac computers, mobile phones have been invited to the party. Version 10.1 will include an anthology of new features: support for accelerometers, support for multitouch, orientation-change-mode (landscape or portrait), hardware-accelerated graphics, a "sleep" mode to conserve battery stopping the animation when flash when the phone goes into standby or receive a call, and finally, adaptive management of the refresh rate based on available resources.

Although it might look like a feature set dedicated to support the iPhone, don't get your hopes up. Some Android phones already incorporate all these hardware features (accelerometer, multitouch, portrait / landscape, ...) -- and flash is supported...