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Microsoft develops for Android
SOFTWARE BEHEMOTH Microsoft has decided that it will have a foot in two camps in the mobile market.
On one hamd it is developing its Windows 7 Phone OS for mobiles which is, according to all who have seen it, nice enough.
On the other hand it has started churning out apps for the products of its sworn mobile phones enemy, Google's Android OS.
Tag was developed specially for Android, and it is the first time that the company has designed an app for the Google mobile platform. Apart from Android and the Iphone, Tag also currently works on Windows Mobile, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 phones.
It is nothing particularly special. Just a mobile barcode reader. A user just points their phone's camera at a tag, snaps a picture, and the Tag program will interpret it.
However it does indicate that the Vole believes that its competitors are going to still be around after Windows 7 Phone mobile gear hits the shops.
We have seen this before. In 2008, Vole launched an Iphone app, Seadragon Mobile into Apple's App Store.
This Microsoft application is now available in the Android Market for free. µ
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I share your opinion of the facebook for Windows Mobile app being terrible. Having grown accustomed to the gestures and kinetic scrolling on my Touch Pro2, the one thing that I cannot stand in the app is their non-kinetic scrolling.
I really do think they should hire some mobile app devs to help on this front and/or sponsor the community to make apps that don't suck.
As for the article itself - Tag is a visual "barcode" and from what I understand, it's just an encoded URL that the app can understand in a variety of lighting conditions. No service dependencies AFAIK but that is just an educated guess on my part.
I actually think that its great big developers like Microsoft contribute to other platforms.
However, as a Windows Mobile owner, I would rather they concentrate on creating some great apps for their own mobile OS first before expanding elsewhere. Point in fact, their piss poor attempt at Facebook for WM which is anything but useful forcing many like myself to use the mobile or touch versions of the facebook website, certainly not ideal.
Why would Microsoft developed barcode reader on Android? Any analysis on that?
Maybe some of their (upcoming?) web services uses the data stored in barcodes, so this would actually increase the usage of that service...
But what would that service be? Is it out already? Bing? Can one input data from barcode to Bing?