Microsoft Releases its First iPhone Application

Microsoft has released its first application for Apple's iPhone even before making it available on it's own mobile platform. Seadragon Mobile is a free image-browsing application that allows users to quickly "deep zoom" images while online 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 iPhone and BlackBerry. A Microsoft representative told my colleague Ina Fried in September that a public version of that program would likely be released in a few months.