Microsoft's Seadragon Mobile (non-iTunes link and direct link to iTunes Store; will launch iTunes) is a new application for the iPhone that lets you quickly and easily browse high-resolution pictures on the iPhone. It works very similarly, oddly enough, to Google Earth on the iPhone, but the zoom capabilities seem to be almost infinite. Pinching and pulling zooms in and out and the default pictures available are pretty cool to explore, especially the pictures of Mars. The app is free, so if you have an iPhone you might as well download it, give it a whirl, and see what you think. It installed quickly and launched quickly on our first generation iPhone.

Perhaps more notable than the application itself is that Seadragon Mobile is a Microsoft application released on the iPhone before a comparable version has been made available for Microsoft's own Windows Mobile platform. Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, notes that the reason for this is simply that the iPhone is one of the few phones on the market today with accelerated graphics.

The real question is whether this is a one-off product that arrived on the iPhone because of the hardware, or if Microsoft has other applications for the iPhone on the horizon. The release of Seadragon Mobile has many people wondering if a mobile version of Microsoft Office could be on the way for the iPhone. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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