Are you a student in the US? Get a free Windows Phone | Hacker News Reader

Are you a student in the US? Get a free Windows Phone

dennisdel.com

38 pointsDenDen19 comments

All you have to do is write two Windows Phone apps in the next month! You can test them on real hardware after you release!

You can write free versions of paid apps and release the paid version after you have hardware, or just release apps that would've been free anyway.

I think it's a good deal and I'll be taking advantage.

What part of the deal is good for you, the developer?

Uh, the part where you get a free $600 phone? I thought that was pretty explicit from the headline.

Assuming your time is free though...

How many hours will it take you to write "two high quality applications"? I'm guessing more than a couple hours depending on the strictness of the term.

If you're a student, "your time is (close to) free" is not an entirely unwarranted assumption. In fact, most students are paying people huge sums of money to take up their time, so one could even argue that their time has negative value. Anyway, let's assume you are rather unambitious and go with an app that takes, oh, 24 hours to write. You would only have made $240 before tax in your job at Starbucks, so the contest is a win on a monetary level. And that's not even counting the fact that it gives you some rather marketable experience (which, again, is something students normally pay for).

Not sure who pays for someone "to take up their time", usually its an exchange of time for skills, or time for experience. Also, assuming students can only achieve unskilled minimum wage jobs is kind of silly. It's not that hard to get a paid internship at $30+ an hour.

Not saying it's a terrible deal either, just saying that it's not a "you're missing out terribly if you don't do it" opportunity.

If you already happen to want to develop on the Windows Mobile platform, it's a free phone.

Seriously?

  Basic Info

    Location: BTMLayout Bangalore, India 560076

  Contact Info

    Phone: 0000000000

Shouldn't this be at least a little Redmond-related?

This does look a little bizarre...

  Random blog claims free phones for students.

  Links to official rules PDF hosted on some PHP dev site.

  You have to register on Facebook to participate.

No indication of Microsoft being involved, yet you're disqualified if you've previously gotten something else through a Microsoft student promotion. What?

There's a similar contest in India.

http://www.microsoft.com/india/iunlockjoy/

Perhaps it's being managed from India.

There are a number of possibilities. It could be a promotion that is outsourced to an Indian company. Microsoft could be hoping to hook developers in India.

Well now I hate US only stuff even more. No this is not a trolling. I really am sick of the schemes that are limited to certain demographic. I understand there must be some reason behind this, some good reason mind you. But heck, it is not a pleasant experience seeing all this from out side.

OP here. Just to clarify - the contest is ran by the Microsoft student division. Yes, I am aware that it is Facebook only and there is no webpage. I have no control over that, so again - cannot do anything about it. The PDF rules are linked from the same Facebook promotion page, by the way, so if there is any suspicion about that - feel free to read them from the FB page instead of the post.

That blog has some of the weirdest spam comments I think I've ever seen. I can understand posting links to "lowest cost shoes" or whatever the current spam fad is, but I can't recall ever seeing that much lorem ipsum. I didn't check, so maybe there is a hyperlink hiding in the text somewhere.

(Personally) I don't consider troll comment to be a spam comment, but it's annoying all the same.

If you're in the Silicon Valley, the Hacker Dojo has Windows Phone hardware you can do testing on.

There was a similar promotion in Singapore, although it was open to everyone who submitted 3 app ideas. Those who got accepted could pick up a Lumia 800, and if they finished and released the apps within 3 months, they got to keep the phone.

Joy, but i'm not from US

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