Perhaps recognising that it’s faintly ridiculous to licence a rival’s media streaming technology when you have your own sitting back at the lab, Microsoft have finally got around to announcing an availability date for the Windows Mobile version of Silverlight.  From Q2 this year, developers will be able to get their coding hands on Silverlight 1.0 for Mobile, supporting animation, media playback and vector graphics.  The company licenced Silverlight for Symbian earlier this month. 

Silverlight supports WMV, WMA and MP3, as well as H.264, and Microsoft have suggested that video quality is better, using the same bandwidth, as Adobe’s rival Flash format.

The company also announced beta availability of Silverlight 2.0 for desktop.

[via TBG]