Software giant Microsoft has become invested in both the PaaS and mobile markets, and Azure is proving to be a very handy tool bolstering the company’s market share on both ends. Microsoft took an interesting approach by offering Azure toolkits for Windows Phone 7’s two main competitors (alongside the platform itself): iOS, and now Android.

The company launched version 0.8 for Android devs – what is essentially a carved out core product without some of the add-ins that would finally push it up a notch. ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley explained:

“The numbering sequence (0.8) is not consequential at the moment,” a spokesperson told me. “The only reason the toolkit is v0.8 is because 1) we haven’t yet built out the documentation for the API, and 2) the sample application (while fully functional) is still an extremely basic application and not as functional as the iOS/WP equivalents.”

In addition to the launch of version 0.8 for Android, Microsoft took the opportunity to update the two other versions of its Azure toolkit on the same day.  The one for Windows Phone 7, v1.3, now features SQL Azure support as a membership provider and data source using OData, and the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Release Candidate.  The iOS edition, v1.2.1, can now power Objective-C and XCode-based iPhone and iPad apps.

Microsoft is just as aggressive about Azure as Amazon is about AWS, or the very least making efforts to follow the latter’s price slashing campaign that’s been going on throughout the past couple of years. A couple weeks ago, Microsoft lowered its rate for extra small compute by 20 percent and offered customers an introductory deal.

Going back to the mobile twist on Azure, VMware is another example of a company gunning for the mobile space with a cloud offering; it launched the fifth version of its desktop virtualization offering two days. View 5.0 is priced at $150 per concurrent user for the Enterprise Edition, and $250 per concurrent user for the Premier Edition.