Introduction
The Microsoft's Lumia 950 XL is the face of the new Windows series
and a reboot of the company's smartphone business. Microsoft may have
been slow in adopting new tendencies and features, but it made sure
everything is done right with the Windows 10 Mobile premiere.
Key specifications
-
5.7"1440x2560 pixels
-
20MP
2160p
-
2GHz
Snapdragon 810
-
3GB RAM
32GB memory
-
3300mAhLi-Ion
And indeed the Lumia 950 XL lives up to all the promises and then
some. The Lumia 950 XL is the most powerful Windows phone to date.
Design and build quality
The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL offers great build-quality and clean
simplistic design, but the polycarbonate back doesn't feel as premium as
the phone's price tag would suggest.
The Lumia 950 XL may be big, but it's not monstrously big. It can
easily fit in most pockets because of its slim profile and rather
lightweight construction. The build is excellent - the rear cover fits
perfectly around the chassis and there are no squeaks or creaks.
Handling a phone made of matte plastic is always a pleasure and this
choice of materials pretty much guarantees an excellent grip. Operating
the Lumia 950 XL with just one hand, or taking pictures, is rather easy
and you don't feel the phone will slip any moment now - a rarity these
days.
The Lumia 950 XL back panel is removable and what's more, the battery
bellow it is removable as well, which allows you to carry a spare if a
single battery charge is not enough.
Speaking of removable stuff, the Lumia 950 XL is among the few
high-end phones to actually offer a microSD slot, so you can expand the
built-in storage cheaply and easily.
The Lumia 950 XL has a USB Type-C connector - it's the new reversible
connector for USB that builds on top of USB 3.1. If you like to use USB
OTG or USB Host, you should either get the Microsoft's Display Dock or
other compatible accessory or adapter. If none of those matter to you,
it's enough to know that the port provides speedier transfer speeds but
none of your existing chargers will fit. In fact, we couldn't get the
Lumia 950 XL to work with any other USB Type-C cable or charger we had
around, so we could guess they have some sort of a proprietary
implementation. Not good, Microsoft, not good!
Design and build quality score
2.5
Display
The 5.7-inch display on the Lumia 950 XL has Quad HD resolution,
which equals 1440 x 2560 pixels. The pixel number sits somewhere in the
middle between 1080p and 4K and in 2015 it established itself as the
flagship smartphone resolution to go by.
The screen makes use of an AMOLED panel but it is also enhanced by
ClearBlack technology, which is an extra layer of polarizing filter,
which is supposed to reduce glare. We're not quite sure how much it
improves things, but the end result is stellar performance outdoors in
the bright sunlight but we're already used to seeing that from AMOLED
screens.
Colors and contrast on AMOLED displays are usually gorgeous to look at and this screen makes no exception.
The Lumia 950XL has only average maximum brightness (335nits) if you
have the brightness control set to manual, but as soon as you switch to
Auto, the phone will push the brightness all the way up to 705nits given
the environment is bright enough.
Color rendering is amazingly accurate. With an average color
deviation of only 1.6, it's among the best we've seen on a mobile phone.
You have got to remember that anything below 3 is considered
calibration-level color accuracy so we're really happy with the fact
that Microsoft provides that out of the box.
Battery life
The Lumia 950 XL comes with a beefy 3,300mAh battery. The phone
supports fast charging and can recharge up to 50% of the battery
capacity in just 30 minutes. Wireless charging is available, too.
Through our dedicated tests the Lumia 950 XL ramped up an endurance
rating of 64h, which is an estimation of how long the phone would last
if you use it for an hour each of calling, browsing and video playback a
day.
Such usage pattern may not be relevant to your own usage scenario,
but we've established it so our battery results are comparable across
devices. You can adjust the formula to better match your own usage
pattern, by visiting our dedicated
battery test results page.
The 64h rating on the Lumia 950 XL is above average in the grand
scheme of things, but it's actually less than average if you compare it
to phablets only - phones with bigger screens often come with bigger
batteries.
It's the standby performance that's to blame for the overall
lackluster performance as the individual results in the three tests are
about what you would expect.
Unfortunately, once you pop a second SIM card inside, the overall
endurance rating plummets to a total of 47h as the second radio modem
would take its toll.
Audio
The speaker on the Lumia 950 XL scored Excellent in terms of speaker
loudness and it's one of the loudest phone we've had lately. The speaker
sound quality is very good, but not impressive, as the sound is
somewhat tinny.
Besides testing the loudness of the built-in speaker, we also measure the quality of the audio output through the audio jack.
When connected to an active external amplifier the smartphone's
volume levels were nicely high and its clarity readings were splendid.
Plugging in a pair of headphones harmed the stereo crosstalk
moderately and it also introduced some intermodulation distortion and
frequency response fluctuations. It's still a very good performance
overall, but not quite among the best out there.
Photo camera
The Lumia 950 XL camera has uses a 1/2.4" BSI sensor with 20MP
resolution. In comes with ZEISS-certified optics, an optical
stabilization system and a triple-LED RGB flash.
The ZEISS lens has a really wide 26mm equivalent field of view wide, as well as a really bright F/1.9 aperture.
Camera quality is really top-notch - the detail levels are high,
there is little noise, colors are accurate and contrast is great. Our
photo samples all have excellent dynamic range and the rendition of
foliage is lovely. You also get up to 2x lossless zoom, when shooting
8MP images.
With night time photos the optical image stabilization lends its
helping hand in snapping sharp night time photos. The image quality is
great, there is lots of detail and the noise levels are kept amazingly
low for such conditions.
The Lumia 950 XL offers an excellent 5MP front snapper and the images
are among the best we've seen from a selfie camera. There is enough
detail, little noise, high dynamic range and accurate colors.
Microsoft Lumia 950XL camera samples
A unique feature is that if you take flash photos with Rich Capture
mode turned on, the camera would take a few photos at different flash
settings and it would allow you to adjust the flash strength on the
resulting image after-the-fact in the photo gallery.
The camera can also be set to shoot 3-second videos along with your
shots. Called Live Images, those really help bring to life the photos in
your gallery.
The only bad thing about the camera is that sometimes it's slow to
focus properly on your subject, especially when it gets darker. It also
takes its sweet time to save some of the images shot in Rich Capture
mode.
Video camera
The Lumia 950 XL is capable of recording videos in up to 4K
resolution at 30 frames per second, which makes for smooth videos. Video
recording also makes use of Optical Image Stabilization system and
videos come out nice and steady even when handheld.
In videos, just like with photos, resolved detail is very good, the
colors and white balance are spot on, while the dynamic range is really
impressive. And again, from time to time, we experienced minor, but
nagging autofocusing issues.
Still, we deem the Lumia 950 XL 4K video fit for a flagship.
The Lumia 950 XL has a total of four mics (two at the front, two on
the back) and the sound in front of the camera is recorded clearer than
the rest, potentially dealing with unwanted noises in your video and
enhancing a subject's voice.
With the company's proprietary Rich Audio Recording, the phone is
also able to offer distortion-free sound recording in loud environments
such as live performances at concerts or clubs.
Software
Windows 10 Mobile has some tricks up its sleeve that no other mobile
OS has. But we found those to be better on paper than in real life.
First off, there's the Continuum functionality, where it allows you
to hook up the phone to a bigger screen via the proprietary dock and
enjoy a PC-like experience with a mouse and keyboard. The dock however
does not come cheap ($99, €109), unless you get it as a freebie along
with the purchase of your Lumia.
In Continuum we found the web browser, Word, Excel and One Note to
run smoothly and they looked a lot like their Desktop counterparts.
However Continuum will never be able to replace a proper PC, not even
one with basic specs.
Aside from the fact that here is no actual desktop to put app
shortcuts and files on, Continuum doesn't allow any sort of app
multi-tasking. You can't position two app windows side by side, so you
are still faced with the same one-app-at-a-time mobile paradigm. As soon
as you open a new app, the previous one gest automatically minimized
and suspended.
And while most of the default system apps are Continuum-enabled, the
majority of the Store apps aren't. They need to be updated by their devs
to work in Continuum mode and it's unclear they would gain extra
functionality on the bigger screen.
Most importantly, Windows on mobile still trails behind Android and
iOS when it comes to the variety of the available apps and games. The
platform simply doesn't attract as much creativity and participation
from devs as much as iOS or Android. A notable omission is an official,
native YouTube app. Today, years after the introduction of the mobile
OS, you still have to resort to watching YouTube videos in your mobile
browser.
Windows Hello is a biometric security feature, which allows the
smartphone to scan your eyes and unlock the device once it scans your
iris using a dedicated specialty camera sensor on top of the display.
We found iris recognition to work great even in poor light.
Regardless of the available light however, the recognition takes a few
second so with time it starts to feel like a drag, especially if you are
in a hurry. It also requires you to hold it quite close to you face -
closer that most of us are used to using their phones.
Benchmark performance
The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL runs on the top of the infamous Snapdragon
810 chipset, which has created a controversy because of its overheating
issues. In the current implementation the phone still gets warm, but
it's manageable and it only gets worse if you are charging it while
using it.
Bundled with 3GB RAM, the Snapdragon 810 is an octa-core chipset, but
only four of those cores are high-performance ones. The other four are
fast enough for more mundane tasks and they also draw a lot less power,
so the phone's software constantly balances the utilization of the
high-performance set and the power-efficient set, so that it strikes a
balance between good performance and good battery life.
In real life the Lumia 950 XL is clearly powerful enough to handle
Windows 10 Mobile and whatever you install on it. And it's the speediest
Windows smartphone to date.
Still, we've noticed nagging delays here and there, especially when
you start going through the numerous submenus in Settings. We've also
experienced delays when we went trigger happy on the camera. Since the
hardware on tap is quite powerful, we'd say the delay is caused by
either poor optimization or it's how the OS was intended to be
experienced (and neither of these options makes us happy).
Benchmark performance
4.0
Wrap-up
There was a time the Lumia 1520 was among the few big phones, but
that's not the case anymore. A year or so ago, Android smartphones had
the segment all for their own, but Apple came up with a phablet-sized
iPhone of their own, so there is now plenty of competition.
The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL gets pretty much everything right, but it
needs to do even better than that. To make a real splash, Microsoft
needs a flagship smartphone to wow consumers with either spectacular new
capabilities, or with low pricing. Well, as things stand right now, the
Lumia 950 XL can't offer either.
|
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL
|
| Pros |
Cons |
- Excellent photo and video quality
- Triple LED flash with unique after-the-fact flash power adjustment
|
- Windows doesn't feel super snappy even on a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 810 chipest
- Average battery life
- Doesn't work with third-party USB Type-C cables
|
Also consider
-
The Galaxy Note5 offers premium glass design with a curved glass
back, the same resolution AMOLED display and one of the fastest
chipsets on the market. Surprisingly, the 16MP snapper Samsung used is
almost as capable and versatile as the 20MP PureView camera on the Lumia
950 XL, but the front snapper is noticeably better on the Lumia
smartphone.
-
The LG V10 has a similar LCD screen, a secondary status
screen, a duo of two front snappers and an amazingly good main camera.
Not to mention the increased sturdiness - certified military grade drop
resistance.
We couldn't ask for more with the new Lumia 950 series and the 950 XL
model in particular. Microsoft has outdone itself in every way,
delivered on every promise, and even succeed to surprise us. The Lumia
950 XL may not be the perfect flagship, and Windows 10 Mobile may not be
the perfect operating system, yet the leap from the previous generation
is tremendous.
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The bezels of the Retina screen are thick and not flagship worthy,
but since Apple usually recycles the last year's design for the S
series, this wasn't such a surprise. Fingers crossed for the iPhone 7 to
finally improve on those.
The Apple iPhone 6s display offers deeper blacks than the iPhone 6
but, unfortunately, it's not as bright at its maximum setting. The
maximum brightness level achieved by the screen when displaying white is
536nits, which while not award winning is plenty to go by. The offered
contrast ratio, is excellent - 1481:1, beating the iPhone 6 on this one.
The 6s demonstrated a solid performance in our sunlight legibility,
which means hassle-free operations outdoors even in the brightest of
days.
