When a company like Microsoft releases an app for Android, there’s usually a lot of murmurs along the lines of “my, my, but Google is a competitor“. I don’t buy into that – companies release their products on whatever channels they can make money on. Competition is rarely allowed to get in the way of profits (just look at “Google vs. China” for proof of that). It’s not surprising that Microsoft thinks Android is as good a mobile app platform as any other for shifting applications on. What interests me more is that the very first application that Microsoft has announced for Android is it’s mobile barcode reader, Tag Reader.
What’s Tag Reader?
Tag Reader is the software Microsoft released to enable your phone to scan it’s proprietary barcode format, http://www.gomonews.com/microsoft-tag-plays-chess-with-mobile-barcodes/ Microsoft Tag
Thanks to their colour formatting, Microsoft Tags can hold a but more information than other standards – but it also makes it more sensitive to ambient light and the ease with which the Reader can scan the code.
What we think?
While it is interesting that Microsoft believes Android is a viable platform for shifting Tag Reader, it’s also worth nothing that this release has come at the end of a series of releases that have put Reader on Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian S60 already.
