14 DAY TRIAL // HP has just announced that it would discontinue all of its operations for webOS phones and for the TouchPad, a move that determined many developers to quit their accounts.
All those developers who are considering abandoning the webOS ship will certainly find various other options to continue the building of applications for mobile devices, and one of them would be Microsoft's Windows Phone platform.
Brandon Watson, director for Windows Phone 7 at Microsoft, has just posted on Twitter that webOS devs will be offered free phones to join the team, along with all of the necessary resources.
“To Any Published WebOS Devs: We’ll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl.free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,” Watson said.
While announcing that they would be killing webOS phones and tablets, HP did say that they would continue supporting the platform.
The company was looking for new opportunities to push the platform forward, and the development of applications for the OS was expected to continue.
However, since webOS failed to take off as initially expected and since HP decided to move away from mobile hardware for it, many developers considered it fit to move away from it, seeking new opportunities for them.
As for the Redmond-based Microsoft, they are gearing up for the release of a new flavor of their mobile operating system, called Windows Phone Mango, with a wide range of new features and improvements included into the mix.
The company is confident that it's mobile OS will manage to gain a lot of market share in the smartphone area, and is trying to attract as many developers to its side so as to ensure that this would happen sooner rather than later.
Thousands of developers already joined the ecosystem, and they already released appealing applications to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
However, Microsoft is looking to add more devs to the list, so that a higher number of application arrives in the Marketplace, pushing the entire Windows Phone platform upwards.