Nokia and Microsoft are giving away 25,000 free Lumia 800 smartphones to developers who will write apps for the Windows Phone platforms.

Executives from the two companies announced the offer during the launching of the Lumia 800 and 710 at the Nokia World 2011 conference in London Thursday. Lumia 800 and 710 are the first Nokia handsets based on the Windows Phone platform.

On top of the free smartphones, Nokia and Microsoft are co-hosting 1,000 events like code camps and hackathons and parties in the U.S. in the next several months to recruit 100,000 developers to attract them to write apps for Windows Phone, the Seattle Times reported.

The parties will feature bands and food. Two of these are on Nov. 7 in New York City and on Nov. 21 in Seattle.

The events and giveaways aim to increase the Windows Phone market, which currently has 35,000 apps. The number is way below the more than half million apps available in Apple's iOS store and nearly half million apps available on Google's Android market.

Nokia and Microsoft hope to increase their share of the mobile app market, which Berg Insight forecasted to reach $11.8 billion in download revenues in 2015 mostly coming from consumers in the Asia-Pacific region.