Microsoft, the software giant has surprisingly released an application - 'Seadragon Mobile' - for the rival iPhone, rather than its own Windows Mobile. The application allows users to view images with giga-pixel resolutions.

Available for free on the iTunes App Store Saturday onwards, Seadragon Mobile is a free image-browsing app that allows users to quickly "deep zoom" images while online, and is intended to demonstrate what is possible with a mobile platform. The application makes use of the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities - users can zoom in or out on an image by tapping or pinching their fingers.

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

Answering the question why Microsoft released the application for iPhone, Alex Daley, a group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, told TechFlash: "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."

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.