The Live Labs from Microsoft recently released a mobile application for the iPhone. This is a surprise, considering that the Redmond giant made this application available on an Apple platform before releasing it for its own Windows Mobile. The application was released on Saturday and it is available at the App Store for free.

Seadragon is an application that allows users to browse through photos and has a powerful zooming feature. It also allows users to stitch different photos to a virtual 3D panel. The program is integrated with all the iPhone’s multitouch gestures so the users will find the program easy to use.

Group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, Alex Daley, explained that the application needs a dedicated graphics processing unit and that the iPhone was the ideal platform for the initial release because it is the only widespread mobile device with a GPU at the moment.

Seadragon displays a panel with hundreds of photos from where the user can zoom to the image they want, and furthermore in the image itself to a remarkable scale. It is impressive, though, that all this process works flawlessly, as there is literally no lag between displaying the entire photo panel and a couple of pixels within an image.

Now, the bad side. Being an implementation of the Photosynth technology, Seadragon requires a different file extension proprietary to Microsoft. That means you will first have to convert your images and, after that, you will only be able to open them in a Photosynth environment. So long for interoperability with other applications.

All in all, Seadragon is a beautiful showcase of today’s technology and it won’t be long until it will become popular.