Rating:
Typical Price:
£420.00
Pros:
Continuum; Camera
Cons:
Battery; Performance In General; Native App Selection
Verdict:
The Lumia 950 has a superb camera and Windows 10 Continuum is a revelation, but it's crippled by sluggish performance and a mediocre battery
Windows 10 Mobile has been a long time coming. It's been almost six months since Microsoft launched Windows 10 for PCs and laptops, but now we finally have the last piece of the puzzle: the Lumia 950, and its big brother the Lumia 950 XL. The Lumia 950, reviewed here, is Microsoft's very first flagship smartphone to run the full version of Windows 10, bringing with it a whole host of new features which it hopes will revolutionise the way we use our smartphones and how they connect to our PC.
Thanks to Windows 10's universal apps, everything on your phone, from Edge, Office, Maps and Cortana right down to the layout of your Start screen, now looks virtually identical to what's on your desktop, delivering the same kind of user experience regardless of which platform you happen to be using. Edge's Reading List will sync across your various devices, for example, so you can start reading an article on your phone and finish it when you get home on your laptop, and Cortana will pick up reminders and calendar appointments you set on your desktop when you're out and about.
Then there's Continuum, Microsoft's revolutionary new feature which effectively lets you use your smartphone as a portable PC. You'll need to shell out around £80 for Microsoft's special Display Dock to use it, but this lets you connect your phone via its USB Type-C port to any external monitor as well as a keyboard and mouse. You can run complete full-screen apps such as Office and Outlook, play 1080p video, and take calls and reply to texts at the same time without halting your progress and unplugging your phone, making it one of the most tempting features of the entire operating system.
It works brilliantly, and if you find yourself short of a mouse, you can always use the phone's touchscreen instead. Naturally, it involves a bit of initial setup, but its potential is huge, particularly for mobile workers who have to hot-desk around their office, as it effectively eliminates the need to carry round a laptop all day.
It's a shame, then that the phone itself just isn't as pleasant or as snappy to use as its Windows Phone 8-based predecessors. Despite having a hexa-core 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 chip and 3GB of RAM, the Lumia 950 is surprisingly sluggish in day to day use. Unfortunately, our Geekbench 3 benchmarks aren't available on Windows 10, so we weren't able to run our usual multitasking tests, but it was clear right from the off that Windows 10 isn't nearly as streamlined or efficient as Microsoft's previous mobile OS.
Opening apps and swiping between the Start screen and general app list is particularly time-consuming, for instance, and even opening different menus in Settings is nowhere near as quick or responsive as you'd hope for a £420 smartphone, often taking a second or more to fully load. That might not sound like a long time, but in the context of a mobile operating system, it's enough to make you question whether you even tapped the screen correctly, which just isn't good enough when you're spending this amount of money.
Its graphics performance was equally disappointing, as it only managed 763 frames (around 12fps) in GFX Bench DX's offscreen Manhattan test. Other Snapdragon 808 phones I've tested have usually scored around 900 points or 15fps, and you could see the difference in real-world gaming apps. It could just about manage simple 3D games like Beach Buggy Racing, but controls weren't particularly responsive and I even experienced frame rate drops in 2D games like Jetpack Joyride. Trying to play a game of Threes! was even worse, as this was so jerky that it was practically unplayable.
Fortunately, the Lumia 950's web browsing performance is much more befitting of its flagship status. While its Peacekeeper score of 750 isn't particularly promising on paper, web pages loaded quickly and it didn't stutter over images or embedded videos either.
Battery life, however, was a little underwhelming, as its 3,000mAh battery lasted just 10h 01m in our continuous video playback test with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2. I would normally expect a battery of this size to last a little longer in this test, as even the Nexus 5X's 2,700mAh battery managed to last 10h 14m. It's still enough to last a full day, but you'll more than likely need to charge it every night if you're a heavy user.
Luckily, the Lumia 950 supports fast charging if you do find yourself running short on power, but it does come with a few caveats. Firstly, the Lumia 950 only has a USB Type-C port, so unless you happen to have your charger with you, it's unlikely you'll be able to grab a quick top up at the office or a friend's house. Unlike the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, though, it does come with a USB Type-C to Type-A cable in the box, so you can still use it with a traditional USB plug and connect it to your PC or laptop without any problem. It also supports wireless charging, and is compatible with regular Qi charge mats.
The phone's design is also lacking in imagination. Weighing 150g and measuring 8.2mm thick, the Lumia 950 is reasonably chunky for its size, but its smooth plastic rear does sit well in your hand. It's a shame Microsoft isn't releasing it in multiple funky colours like its previous Lumia phones, as this was easily one of the Lumia range's most attractive features. It certainly doesn't catch the eye like the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, for instance, but given its compatibility with Windows 10 Continuum, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was trying to keep it looking as professional and business-like as possible so it blends in with your office.
Thankfully, Microsoft makes up for its somewhat bland design with its 5.2in, 2,560x1,440 AMOLED display. This really makes the refreshed Live Tile interface of Windows 10 jump out of the screen, delivering pitch perfect 0.00cd/m2 blacks in the notification bar and individual settings options. Colour accuracy is also very high, covering 99.6% of the sRGB colour gamut, and its infinity:1 contrast ratio means that images look absolutely stunning.
The only downside of the Lumia 950's display is its low peak brightness level of just 297.21cd/m2. AMOLED screens are often dimmer than LCD displays, but even this is pretty poor compared to other AMOLED panels I've tested. This is just about enough to see the screen clearly outside, but overhead lights or bright sunshine play havoc with its visibility, even when brightness is set to max.
All this doesn't sound particularly promising, but the Lumia 950 does have one redeeming feature: its rear 20-megapixel camera. It's so good that it's almost worth the price of admission alone. With its PureView Zeiss lens, f/1.9 aperture and optical image stabilisation, the Lumia 950 produced excellent shots regardless of lighting conditions. Both inside and out, detail levels were high across the entire frame and exposure levels were superb. Contrast levels were easily as high as the iPhone 6s, but with the same, pleasing neutral colour palette of the Nexus 5X.
Likewise, low light photography is excellent. Regardless of whether I had our external lamp turned on or off, the Lumia 950 produced stunning photos, showing plenty of detail, rich, vibrant colours and hardly any noise to speak of. Its triple LED flash also produces beautifully clean images, maintaining an accurate colour balance without making lighter objects appear green or blue. Even better, the Lumia 950's camera roll app will let you manually choose the best lighting conditions for each photo you take with a flash, letting you pick from a wide range of exposures via an onscreen slider. You probably won't need to use it that often when the flash is so good in the first place, but it's still a brilliant tool to have if you're not particularly pleased with the end result.
The front 5-megapixel camera can also capture short 'live photos'. These seconds-long video clips are very similar to Apple's Live Photos on the iPhone 6s, but don't capture any sound. However, they're arguably more flexible than those on the iPhone 6s, as you can select and save any frame you like rather than relying on the software to select the best ones for you.
As a whole, though, Microsoft's Lumia 950 is a very mixed bagged. Its camera and Windows 10 Continuum are fantastic, but its day-to-day performance, battery life and low screen brightness just aren't quite good enough to warrant a whole-hearted recommendation.
This is a real shame, as there's clearly a lot of potential here, but when it costs £420 SIM-free or £32-per-month on a contract, you're paying a lot for something that doesn't feel nearly as slick as its Android rivals.
Still, the potential of Windows 10 inside mobile is huge. I love the way it looks and how it functions. There are some truly brilliant ideas at plat here, ideas that will help to propel Windows 10 to the masses.
Cortana is superb. Ditto Continuum. The idea of universal apps is also very attractive, especially if you’re running a Windows 10 machine. This handset isn’t as sharp as it could be right now, but with software updates things could be improved dramatically.
I think it’s high time Microsoft released a Surface phone.
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