Microsoft app hits iPhone before Windows

By Steven Musil on 15 December 2008, 10:02am

Engineers in Microsoft's Live Labs have released the company's first application for Apple's iPhone -- even before making it available on Microsoft's own mobile platform.

Seadragon Mobile, which was added to Apple's App Store on Saturday, is a free image-browsing app that allows users to quickly 'deep zoom' online images and is intended to demonstrate what is possible with a mobile platform.

Seadragon is the backbone for Microsoft's Photosynth, which allows users to take a grouping of photographs and stitch them together into a faux 3D environment.

Other iPhone apps are reportedly in development in Redmond -- Microsoft's Tellme unit was expected to release the company's first iPhone app in the form of a voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including the iPhone and BlackBerrys. A Microsoft representative told CNET UK's sister site News.com in September that a public version of that program would probably be released in a few months.

So where's the Windows Mobile version of Seadragon?

Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, told TechFlash, "The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a [graphics processing unit]. Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do."