On my quest to find a way to test my windows app I finally came across Nokia Developer Remove Device Access.  It’s a bit of a mouthfull and does pretty much exactly what the name implies.  They give you free access to a pull of real nokia devices that you can control from a program on your computer.

It isn’t strictly Windows phone devices that they have either, they have a plethera of other nokia devices that you can hot wire and take for a spin.  Most noteable however, is that they give you access to their full Lumia line that’s running Windows 8.  Not to say that Android and iOS isn’t nice either…but there are some nicer alternatives to testing on those devices.  Like Sauce Labs or running Android as a virtual machine.

The big drawback here is that there is immense lag.  For each action you take it takes about 30 seconds for the device to realize you’ve done something and react.  Obviously this makes testing features a bit like pulling teeth.

But it’s free and (eventually) does the job   So you can’t complain 😉