When Microsoft announced in July that it was writing down almost the entire cost of its Nokia acquisition and laying off 7,800 employees from its phone division, many took it as a sign that the bell1 had2 finally3 tolled4 for Windows Phone. Despite a promising debut in 2010 and some very compelling offerings since, Microsoft s mobile platform has failed to gain significant traction, peaking at just 3.4% of the global market in 2013 before plummeting to its current low of 1.7%. Microsoft s restructuring, along with its move to port its Office productivity suite to iOS and Android, was seen by some as a tacit admission that it had lost the smartphone war and mediocre hardware offerings like the Lumia 8305 did little to change that perception. The October launch of the Lumia 950 (and its larger sibling, the 950 XL) opened a new chapter in Microsoft s mobile history. The Lumia 950 is a bundle of contradictions: a halo smartphone in a ho-hum chassis; a cutting-edge operating system with a still-nascent ecosystem; a product built not necessarily to sell in volume, says Microsoft, but as a kind of concession to the long-suffering Windows Phone loyalists. In other words, the Lumia 950 is unlike any smartphone that s come before. While it probably doesn t represent the future of Windows on phones, it s one of the only two flagships available on the platform today. So is it worth the £600 Microsoft wants for it? Only if you re a fan.
Lumia 950 Review Video
Index6
Specs & Hardware
Out of the box, the Lumia 950 is an almost totally unremarkable smartphone. Its matte-finish polycarbonate evokes memories of older, prouder Lumias like the 10207 and 9308, but it lacks the reassuring heft of the former and the classy metallic trim of the latter. Also absent is any of the whimsy of earlier Lumia designs, the old neon colors replaced by staid black and white options, the storied Nokia logo erased in favor of Microsoft s minimalist branding. At 8.2mm thick and 150g in mass, even the Lumia 950 s size is middle-of-the-road. (Fortunately there s an easy way to gussy up the device: accessory manufacturer Mozo has crafted some excellent leather backs9 for the 950 which give it an entirely different look and feel. We ve spent most of our review period with the brown leather edition, and we wouldn t go back.)
Get past the uninspired aesthetics and there s plenty to like here, starting with the screen. The 5.2-inch display bears a ClearBlack polarization filter for better daylight visibility, and it brings with it the inky blacks and heavy saturation common to OLED screens. While the display brightness toggle in the Action Center only allows for four levels of brightness control, Windows 10 provides for more granular adjustment in the settings menu, and the Extras section contains options to tune the display profile for more or less vivid colors. Also, from the moment the little Microsoft logo pops up on the boot screen you know you re looking at a Quad HD display: the 564ppi sharpness is especially notable on Live Tiles with a lot of text, and on the downsized notification symbols in the new Windows 10 status bar.
Normally we find spec listings pretty banal, but Windows Phone fans have been waiting nearly two years for a proper flagship, so some high points deserve calling out. There s a 20MP PureView camera here with optical stabilization and a new triple-LED flash, tied to the dedicated camera key we wish more manufacturers would include. The phone comes packing 32GB of storage (29 of which are available out of the box) and also offers a MicroSD slot for up to 200GB of additional space. That slot sits under a removable back cover alongside a 3,000 mAh battery which is also removable a rarity these days. The battery is rechargeable via a USB Type-C connector on the bottom of the phone or via Qi/PMA wireless charging. Further down in the guts of the 950 sits a Snapdragon 808 processor backed up by 3GB of RAM.
If that s not enough to bamboozle you, there s one more trick hiding beneath the Gorilla Glass 3 faceplate, and it s a doozy. Hit the phone s unlock button and the Windows Hello interface lights up, an animated eyeball prompting you to look directly at the screen while the phone s infra-red sensor matches your iris with the unique hash stored in memory. It takes a bit of training and it s not 100% effective (Windows Hello is still in Beta) but it s surprisingly speedy when it does work, and it s absolutely the coolest means of signing into a smartphone you ll see this year.
Index10
Windows 10 Mobile
Once you get past the Hello gatekeeper, you re dropped straight onto the Start screen, and for all that s changed in the jump from Windows Phone to Windows 10, we re glad to see the Start screen is much the same as ever. Sure, you have a wider range of accent colors and wallpaper options now it s nice to be able to choose whether your background image is painted directly on the tiles or draped behind them and little things like animations have been tweaked, but by and large this is the same old Start screen, with options galore for minimalists and info-hounds alike. We re in the latter category, so our Start screen is packed with data. At the moment, our Money tile reports that America s biggest gas field is finally succumbing to a downturn, while the Cortana tile is showing us a tech news headline about the Surface Pro 4. The Outlook tile is cycling between the subject lines of our three most recent emails, while the Blue Skies weather app is telling us that it s 47 degrees in Somerville (and that we shouldn t forget our umbrella). Other, smaller tiles bear simpler notification counts: Facebook 7, Tweetium 6, Slack 6, Instagram 79. Meanwhile, our Photos app serenely cycles between pictures we ve taken, the Xbox tile occasionally flipping over to reveal our gamertag, the Outlook Calendar app reminding us it s someone s birthday. Some of our tiles represent not just apps but particular documents within apps: our Lumia 950 reviewers memo sits alongside a smattering of local points of interest at the bottom of the screen, all of them just a tap away. All this is instantly visible the moment we unlock the phone, and that kind of immediacy remains one of the principal benefits of using a Windows-powered smartphone. Yes, you can accomplish similar information density on an Android device, but not with the cohesive look and feel that Windows offers.
That uniqueness falls off the farther you get from the Start screen. Notifications are holed up in the Action Center above the screen, accessible via a cumbersome swipe-down just like on iOS and Android (while the leftmost homescreen panel, the perfect place for a notification hub11, sits frustratingly vacant). Where older Windows Phones used elegant and easy-to-control sliding panels to access different corners of apps, Windows 10 Mobile has embraced the less-imaginative hamburger menu, generally placed far out of the way in the upper-left corner of the screen, aping one of iOS s worst design precedents. By far the most egregious example of iPhone inspiration, though, can be found by holding down the Start key: do it and watch the UI slide halfway down the screen in a perfect imitation of Reachability12. Meanwhile, longtime Lumia staples like double-tap-to-wake are notably absent from the 950, even as old favorites like Glance Screen remain. The result is a confusing mishmash of holdover features and absentee ones, with the occasional WTF peppered in: we took one look at the new People hub, with its ludicrously out-of-place circular avatars, and banished it from our Start screen faster than you can say un-pin. Still, moving into the Lumia 950 after a long sabbatical from Windows Phone feels a lot like coming home. We love hearing the woodpecker clack of the excellent virtual keyboard again (now with a handy cursor mouse). Managing email and calendar appointments through the new Outlook apps is a distinctly beautiful experience thanks to their slick UI design. The Cortana virtual assistant is really good at context-sensitive notifications; when we travel to a new town, she ll frequently pop up some bit of news specific to the local area, and a simple call of Hey Cortana is enough to wake the phone if you can t spare a hand. Not all of this works flawlessly (see Performance, below) but when it does, the result is a mobile experience unlike any other.
We d be remiss not to mention the pervasive app gap, the shortage of third-party apps in the Windows Store compared to iOS and Android equivalents. Sadly, Windows Phone s most enduring challenge is only getting worse: developers are actively discontinuing support for their Windows apps. Big American banks led the retreat earlier this year, with Chase and then Bank of America pulling support for their Windows Phone portals. On the heels of those shutdowns came others: Intuit Mint, NBC and American Airlines all turned out the lights on their apps in 2015, with Hotel Tonight the latest major name to fall. Microsoft even discontinued a slew of its own titles for the platform (the entire MSN suite is gone) and some of its own apps, like Skype, offer a much better experience on Android. Meanwhile, titles like Instagram (still in Beta) haven t seen a meaningful update in over a year, and stopgaps like the Microsoft-made Facebook app are slow and riddled with bugs.
Fortunately for the ever-patient fans, there s good news on the horizon. Facebook has announced that it will be building all-new Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger apps for Windows 10, and because these will be Universal Apps, they ll work on every form factor from the desktop to the handheld. That s part of Microsoft s new Windows 10 strategy: with 110 million Windows 10 devices currently on the market and a framework that lets developers build one app to run on every screen size, the company hopes to attract developers through sheer scale. And we ve run into a few pleasant surprises during our time with the Lumia 950, too: apps that we didn t expect to find, from Fallout 4 s Pip Boy companion app to the obscure LiveATC air-traffic control scanner, were actually present in the Store and ran well. Microsoft s new integrated Maps application does a nice job of providing directions for driving, walking, and public transit, with turn-by-turn voice guidance that s pretty accurate (if not always entirely prompt). And Microsoft s tongue-in-cheek MS-DOS emulator contains a few marvelous Easter eggs for hardcore nerds who long for the days of Windows 3.1.
If this were an older Windows Phone, the discussion would stop there. But the Lumia 950 is a Windows 10 device. And that means it s designed to get around the app gap using a whole new method: by transforming into a Windows PC.
Windows Continuum
Windows Continuum is one of those features that makes reviewing technology such a joy. It s easy to see why Microsoft thinks it can be a key differentiator, because using it feels like magic. But it s also such a niche feature, and so early in its development at this point, that we ve got real questions about just who will find it worth using. Using Continuum requires a few pieces of hardware in addition to your Lumia 950. You need to have access to a monitor, a keyboard, and Microsoft s £99 Display Dock. (A mouse is optional, since the phone itself can stand in as a trackpad.) We tested the feature using both wireless and cabled keyboards a Microsoft Bluetooth Folding Keyboard and a Filco Majestouch Ninja and a Surface Arc Mouse, with a 25 HP 25vx monitor. We wanted a beefier sound than the Lumia 950 s speaker could produce, so we also linked in a JBL PowerUp Bluetooth speaker. Setup is pretty simple: you connect your monitor/keyboard/mouse cables to the Display Dock and pair your Bluetooth accessories directly to the phone, then plug the phone into the Display Dock using a USB Type C cable. The monitor flickers to life, and suddenly you re looking at Windows. Not just a blown-up version of your phone interface, but real live, honest-to-God Windows 10.
Of course that s significantly overstating the case, but the illusion is remarkably complete. Click the Start button in the corner and you get a replication of your phone s Start screen; click any available app and its full version will open on the monitor. In the case of Outlook email, that means the screen will fill with a three-pane program with email accounts on the left, a message list in the middle, and the currently-selected email on the right just like the full version of the app. Outlook s Calendar app spreads out just as well, a month of dates and appointments taking up every pixel of screen space. Photos gives you instant access to your picture and video library, and the entire Office suite is available for building everything from a Word document to a Power Point presentation (in fact, almost every script for the videos embedded in this review was written using OneNote inside Continuum). Fire up Microsoft Edge and you ve got a full-screen web browser, capable of handling everything from a text-only message board to a full-on Netflix session in a pinch. And shuffling between running programs will be second nature if you ve ever used a Windows PC: the Alt+F4 keyboard shortcut closes a running app, while Alt+Tab switches to the last-used program and the Start Key opens the Start menu. Clipboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl-X) also function as they should. If you re using a mouse, right-click usually works the way you expect it to. If you get a notification in the middle of your browsing session, you need only to click the little message icon in the lower right to pop out the Action Center, with all of its waiting messages and system toggles intact. Or if you re, say, watching a movie on the big screen and don t want to pause it just to answer an SMS message, that s no problem: the phone operates completely independent of whatever s happening on the monitor, so you can text your heart out while letting Netflix play on the big screen. For all its wonders, we quickly discovered that the key to enjoying Continuum lies in understanding its limitations. As convincing as it is on the big screen, the fact remains that the Lumia 950 is still just a smartphone. That means it lacks the power to run full apps side-by-side, and due to the way Continuum is designed, you can t even run programs in individual windows: it s full-screen or nothing. At this stage, not many Windows 10 apps are designed to run in Continuum either, so be prepared to be shunted back to the phone in order to run many titles. You re also in for a big disappointment if you succumb to the temptation to try to download full Windows programs, most of which are built for x86 processors. The Snapdragon 808 in the Lumia 950 is ARM-based, so it can only run a smaller subset of apps designed for that architecture. You can forget your dreams of downloading and running Steam, for example; it just won t work.
The same lack of desktop-class hardware means that Continuum, while giving the impression of boundless possibility, is actually pretty laggy on the 950. Just loading Gmail.com in Microsoft Edge was enough to crash Spotify, which we d been using to play music in the background. Thereafter, Edge hung in for exactly one Google Hangouts message exchange before the browser ground to a halt, presumably starved for memory. Annoyances like pop-up ads, which would be mere speed bumps on a proper PC, are major impediments on Continuum as the 950 struggles to keep up. Using the Ctrl+I keyboard shortcut in OneNote to italicize text results in a ten-second freezeout before the system recovers. And clicking between open tabs in the browser is an exercise in frustration, as the browser needs to reload each page almost every time. It s possible the Lumia 950XL, with its beefier Snapdragon 810, might edge out the 950 in a few of these metrics, but we doubt we ll see much difference. So rather than an escape from the limitations of the smartphone, Continuum is best enjoyed for what it is: a larger canvas for your smartphone for occasional email and office work, or for making presentations via Miracast. Microsoft s vision for the future of Continuum is compelling: in addition to the simple case of the business traveler using it to stream a movie to a hotel TV, the company sees Continuum as a good fit for shared office spaces like Workbar13, which could provide monitor/keyboard/Display Dock workstations in lieu of computers. Future smartphones running Windows 10 may also be powered by x86 processors that could take full advantage of the larger screen space by running real Windows programs. The possibilities are nearly limitless. Until those developments come to pass, though, Continuum will remain more curiosity than compelling feature for most.
Index14
Camera
The Lumia name carries with it a legacy of excellent cameras, which have long been some of the best available on smartphones. The Lumia 1020 s camera was so good it ended up returning to our daily-driver mix several15 times16 over two years, and the software improvements introduced with the Lumia Denim update made even the dated Lumia 930 feel new again when we took it for another spin17 at CES 2015. As mentioned above, the Lumia 950 s camera is a 20MP sensor with a six-element lens and fifth-generation optical image stabilization; the f/1.9 aperture matches that of Samsung s Galaxy S618, while its triple-LED flash is subtle enough to avoid blowing out subjects. The whole arrangement is rounded out by a new 4K camcorder mode (complete with 4-microphone audio recording) and a 5MP front-facing shooter with a wide-angle lens.
Shooting with the Lumia 950 is a lot of fun. Launching the camera is as simple as pressing the shutter button, and the software s Automatic mode is very simple. There s a detent halfway through the action of the shutter key for those who favor focusing with a button, and tap-to-focus is also supported for precision adjustments. Long-pressing the button can fire off a burst of photos or immediately start a video, depending on your preference. By default, the 950 will shoot in Automatic mode, which includes Rich Capture enhancements that optimize color and contrast immediately after the photo is taken. In some cases as when correcting for the harsh yellows of street lighting at night that optimization leads to a dramatically better photo, well worth the added four or five seconds of processing time. That s especially true in the case of the flash: using the spotlight in concert with Rich Capture means you can adjust the flash level after you take the photo. (This feature has been around since Lumia Denim first rolled out, but it s no less impressive today.) Longtime Windows Phone fans will be happy to hear that the software Lenses remain, allowing you to add specific functions like document scanners, barcode readers, or fun Doom-inspired filters on a shot-by-shot basis.
And if you don t want an algorithm or Lens messing with your photo quality, Microsoft has preserved the full suite of manual controls Nokia introduced back in 2013: ISO can be set to a maximum of 3200, exposure time goes all the way up to 4 seconds and focus can be adjusted on the fly. If you re an experienced photographer accustomed to working with manual settings, you ll feel right at home on the Lumia 950 and you ll churn out some amazing photos with this very capable camera photos which you can save in either JPG or DNG format. If you re more in the market for a fire-and-forget point-and-shoot, though, there are better choices out there. Despite the advanced optical stabilization, photos taken during our review period often featured a fair amount of motion blur (especially in low light). We may not have the steadiest hands around, but even stabilizing the phone against a tree or telephone pole didn t always save us from a blurry shot. And while photos appear rich and vibrant on the Lumia s OLED screen, they sometimes seem a bit lacking in saturation when viewed on other screens. As we re now starting to stray into subjective interpretations, we ll encourage you to draw your own conclusions from the gallery below.
Index19
Performance
You may notice a pronounced lack of camcorder samples in the section above, and there s good reason for that: our Lumia 950 really doesn t like shooting 4K video. To put it another way, the Lumia 950 is buggy. So much so that we requested a replacement demo device halfway through our 14-day review process, and while the new unit was much better, it didn t fix all of the problems we ran into with Windows 10. The video bug is a particularly bad one when trying to record video in 4K/30fps, we often get an error message that looks like this:
According to the lone result20 we found by Googling that error code, this would seem to be a camera driver error. We encountered it on both our Lumia 950 units when trying to record to local storage, so we re pretty confident this is a Windows 10 error and not one specific to our devices or memory cards. Leaving aside the awful user experience of having to manually transcribe and search for a 20-digit code to diagnose a problem, let s run down some of the Lumia 950 s most prevalent bugs. The camera button will sometimes launch the viewfinder and sometimes it won t. Outlook will often take more than a minute to load simple images from an email, and will sometimes time out while sending email even over a speedy connection. Windows Store downloads will frequently error out, requiring a restart to fix. The People Hub won t always reliably sync with a Google Apps account, leading to address book problems. Live tiles for built-in apps like News will occasionally become stuck on the same image regardless of new updates. Windows Hello sometimes takes a vacation, skipping you directly to the PIN code without first looking for your eyes, for no apparent reason. And boy howdy, does this phone love to reboot. If you re a fan of listening to the Podcasts app while also taking the occasional photo, get ready to see a lot of the boot screen. Sometimes it doesn t even take multitasking to trigger it: we ve seen this phone spontaneously restart when doing something as innocuous as checking Twitter mentions. Now, Windows 10 Mobile is brand-new and thus deserves a little slack but it s not a beta product; it s in stores right now. And coming from the rock-solid Windows Phone 821, we d be lying if we said those stability issues didn t disappoint us.
When the phone s working properly, performance is usually solid. Each of our test units is an AT&T-branded, single-SIM model which we ve used in the Greater Boston area over two weeks; while about 200MB of AT&T bloatware came preinstalled, all of it was easily deleted (kudos, Microsoft!). Voice calls are straightforward and plenty loud via the built-in earpiece, and callers had no complaints about our audio quality. Aside from a few dropped frames here and there, the graphically demanding Asphalt 8 runs well, as did less-intensive titles like Six Guns, Smash Hit Collision and Angry Birds Star Wars. The only game that gave the phone pause was Modern Combat 5, but even that remained mostly playable. Audio quality over the rear-firing speaker was on the tinny side but quite loud, and there s a dedicated equalizer featuring many custom options and virtual surround sound for headphone listening. Adjusting those settings makes a big enough impact for even non-audiophiles to tell the difference, and we were happy to have it. Battery life was one of our biggest concerns with our initial review device, but we re happy to report that the problem corrected itself with our replacement unit. The Lumia 950 is unlikely to last more than a day without recharging, but it makes up for that average endurance with a variety of charging options. The included USB Type C charger is pretty zippy, and if you don t have one of those on-hand the embedded Qi/PMA charger ensures you ll be able to top up on either your own wireless charging plate or at your local Starbucks. And if all else fails, you ll be able to buy additional batteries (3000 mAh / 11.6Wh / model BV-T5E) to swap in on the fly though at press time those batteries have yet to hit store shelves.
Index22
Pros
+ Fresh software design
+ Capable camera with excellent manual controls
+ Continuum is unlike anything we ve used before
+ Removable storage, expandable memory
Cons
Uninspired industrial design
Buggy software
Ecosystem challenges remain
Too pricey
Index23
Pricing and Availability
In the United States, the Lumia 950 is currently available directly from Microsoft24 and its launch partner AT&T. The phone s full retail price tops out at £598.98, but a two-year contract with AT&T drops that price to £149.99. Additionally, the device is available via AT&T s Next installment program for 30 monthly payments of £19.97.
Index25
Conclusion
The headline of this review isn t meant to be pejorative. In an interview shortly after we received our Lumia 950 review device, Microsoft told us it built the phone first and foremost for the Windows Phone fan. We wanted to provide this audience with something that went toe-to-toe with the competition for specs, said the company s Lucas Westcott, something they were proud to take from their pockets. That s savvy positioning on the part of Microsoft, because those fans are the only people to whom we can truly recommend the Lumia 950. That s not to say that these buyers are getting a bad deal: Windows 10 Mobile does an awful lot of cool stuff, and does it with a sense of style that its iOS and Android competitors lack. Speaking as longtime Windows Phone fans, we re pretty excited by the potential the Lumia 950 and Continuum showcase and some of us26 are seriously considering buying one. Outside that context, though, the Lumia 950 does very little to earn its £600 price tag. It bears some of the least aspirational industrial design we ve seen this year, and it struggles with the very fundamentals of the smartphone experience, like shooting video and checking email (email!). When you realize you can get a Nexus 6P or last year s iPhone for less, those shortcomings really start to stand out. As the Windows 10 ecosystem grows, we may eventually see a day where a Windows-powered smartphone has a place in pockets other than Microsoft s devoted following. But today is not that day. The Lumia 950 is a smartphone for the fans. All others for now need not apply.
Index27
Interested in going even further in-depth with our thoughts on the Lumia 950? Check out the three most28 recent29 episodes30 of the Pocketnow Weekly podcast for (literally) hours of analysis, Q&As, and off-the-cuff observations then stay tuned for our Lumia 950XL review, coming soon!
References
^ bell (www.theverge.com)
^ had (betanews.com)
^ finally (www.thurrott.com)
^ tolled (www.computerworld.com)
^ Lumia 830 (pocketnow.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ 1020 (pocketnow.com)
^ 930 (pocketnow.com)
^ excellent leather backs (pocketnow.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ the perfect place for a notification hub (pocketnow.com)
^ Reachability (pocketnow.com)
^ Workbar (workbar.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ several (pocketnow.com)
^ times (pocketnow.com)
^ took it for another spin (pocketnow.com)
^ Galaxy S6 (pocketnow.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ lone result (www.monwindowsphone.com)
^ Windows Phone 8 (pocketnow.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ directly from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ some of us (pocketnow.com)
^ Index (pocketnow.com)
^ most (pocketnow.com)
^ recent (pocketnow.com)
^ episodes (pocketnow.com)