LOL but its true, read below for more as MS plans to release even more
new technology on the powerful iPhone.
http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/14/mi...indows-mobile/
Microsoft tests Seadragon on the iPhone because it can’t on Windows
Mobile
MG Siegler | December 14th, 2008
In an interview last year following Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone,
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer laughed off the new device.
He’s not laughing anymore. Or at least, various Microsoft divisions
under his rule aren’t. The company released its first application for
the iPhone today, Seadragon Mobile.
Truth be told, Seadragon Mobile is less of an app and more of a
technical demonstration for a Microsoft technology that’s pretty cool.
Seadragon powers applications like Microsoft’s 3D photo-browsing
Photosynth and is incorporated into its rear-projection TouchWall
product. It basically gives users access to extremely high resolution
images (we’re talking gigapixels) without requiring huge bandwidth or
processing power because it stores several resolutions of an image and
only pulls down the information it needs depending on zoom level.
But Seadragon still requires some amount of graphical processing on
the client side, which is why the iPhone, which has its own graphics
processing unit (GPU), is a good fit, Microsoft Live Labs group
product manager Alex Daley told TechFlash. And that’s the thing. Even
if it wanted to, Microsoft couldn’t run Seadragon on a phone that runs
Windows Mobile (Microsoft’s mobile operating system) because there is
none powerful enough. So it must turn to one of its biggest rivals,
Apple, to showcase its technology.
To a certain extent, that speaks to the rumors flying about Microsoft
possibly entering the mobile hardware business at some point next
year. Rumors of a “ZunePhone” at CES seem misguided (at least
somewhat), but Microsoft definitely appears to be working on some new
things in the mobile space beyond Windows Mobile, which looks old and
stodgy compared to the newer mobile platforms like the iPhone’s OS X
mobile version and Google’s Android.
The fact that the Microsoft Live Labs team is the first Microsoft
group to bring an app to the iPhone is somewhat surprising. A few
months ago, all the talk was about TellMe, a voice-recognition company
that Microsoft acquired, working on an iPhone app. Unfortunately, the
team stated that it wouldn’t likely release anything before 2009
(which still seems pretty ridiculous to me — especially considering
that Google released its excellent voice app much quicker). There has
also been talk about a version of Microsoft Office for the iPhone, but
who knows when or if we’ll actually see that.
Seadragon Mobile is available for free in the App Store. It contains
about 50 sample images, but you can also add your own Deep Zoom
content or images from your Photosynth account
Linear Mode
