Eyebrows were raised in the smartphone business today when, following their unveiling of the Windows 7 Phone platform at MWC2010 recently, Microsoft launched an Android app. "Tag" is a barcode reading app which they also launched on the iPhone, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 handsets. On the face of it this is hardly revolutionary, but the trend to have a single app for all popular platforms may be what's behind this move. The barcodes Tag can recognise though are different - they are color, and so hold much more data than the usual black and white (even 2D) ones.

The color barcodes hold the URL where the data is stored, meaning the app then goes online to retireve and process the info about the item scanned - info which could change depending on the application.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has released an app on a rival mobile platform as Seadragon for the iPhone was released in 2008. The recent announcement of the Wholesale Applications Community also plays a part in this - this is where a grand vision of a universal app store has been set up by various operators and distributors fearful of Apples dominance of the app store.