According to Droid Life, the upcoming new Android OS (Google’s answer for the vast array of different phone platforms available) will be called “Gingerbread” and offer a drastic redesign of the user interface (UI). The reason? Phone makers have been creating their own unique skins to put on top of what Google offers. The results have been mixed and Google sees non-standard—and therefore different levels of quality—tweaks to its Android OS as something that it wants to avoid.

The whole point of the Android OS was to make a sort of standard in terms of software, operating system and hardware in the smartphone arena. With phone makers like Motorola itching to throw out their own skins that go overtop of Google’s provided one (and probably eventually charge money for them), Google had to make a stand before its influence eroded. Let phone makers change Android’s user interface and the next thing you know, they will be trying to change the whole thing.

Gingerbread is “currently planned for Q4, 2010,” so the wait will not be unbearable. It will also include support for WebM, a new open web media project that Google is a member of. According to the official WebM website, “WebM video files play directly in your web browser using a new technology called HTML5.” Support for other media types is expected but the project is still in highly in development. Google wants WebM to be the new standard for HTML5 video playback and has already started releasing updates to Google Chome that allow you to watch YouTube through the new system. Mozilla also is supporting WebM and has starting doing the same for its Firefox browser. Opera has followed suit.

Looks like everyone is taking aim at Adobe and its ubiquitous Flash Player system at Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs took aim at it in an open letter earlier this year. Jobs basically just came out and told everyone in the letter that Apple will not support Flash Player because it is buggy, slow, and was never designed for touch screen phones. Microsoft agreed, and has said that like Apple, they see HTML5 as the future of the web, not Flash Player. Microsoft’s choice of implementation for video playback at the moment though is H.264, not WebM. This might become the next format war and the Android OS may get to play a part in it.