Edible Apple

Looking to capitalize on HP’s recent announcement that WebOS devices are going the way of the dodo, Microsoft is offering WebOS developers free Windows Phone 7 devices and developer tools.

Brandon Watson, Microsoft’s Senior Director of Windows Phone 7 development, tweeted the following past Friday.

“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.”

Not too shabby, but to be honest, if there were a significant number of WebOS developers out there than the platform would probably still be alive today.

But you have to give credit where credit is due and Watson is certainly tackling social media with gusto in an effort to evangelize Windows Phone 7.

In mid-July Watson offered Dilbert creator Scott Adams a free Windows Phone 7 device and said he would give $1,000 to the charity of Adams choice if he didn’t like the experience. The offer was prompted by a blogpost from Adams where he was complaining about the battery life on his Android phone.

Scott –

My name is Brandon Watson and I am responsible for the developer platform on Windows Phone. Since your readership has a high probability of cross over with our developer base, how about I make you a deal with one of the phones we reserve for developers. Take Windows Phone for a spin. I’ll send you a developer phone with the new Mango OS on it. Give it an honest run, and if you don’t love it more than either of your iPhone or Android experiences, I’ll make a $1000 donation to the charity of your choice. You can’t really lose on this deal.

Do we have 500K apps? No. Do we have 25K, growing as fast as iPhone did, and 2x as fast as Android? Yes. Do developers love the dev environment? Uh huh. Do we have the only phone that puts people and communications first? You bet. If Androids dream of electronic iSheep, people dream about people – and that’s what you will get with Windows Phone. Keep in constant contact with those most important to you with Live Tiles, groups, messaging threads, and native Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And no special instructions on how to hold the phone to make calls. Oh, and the battery lasts a long time.

I can be reached at ThePhone [at] microsoft. You can call me if you want – 425-985-5568. Windows Phone devs will tell you that’s the right contact info, because it’s shared with every one of them.

I hope you take me up on this one…there’s no reason to hate your phone.

Watson also made the same bet to CNET reporter Molly Wood via Twiiter,

@mollywood Sorry to hear you are having troubles with Android. Care to take the the Windows Phone challenge? @thurrottcan vouch for me.

Well, you gotta admire the man’s persistance.

Meanwhile, the upcoming Mango update for WP7 is expected to drop sometime in September or October.