Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my review of the Microsoft Lumia 950 and the 950 XL so I've had both these phones for about a month the XL a little bit longer and in the beginning I had some pretty lukewarm thoughts about these phones but I've been using the XL as my daily driver since I've gotten it here's my review now both of them come in simple cardboard boxes that kind of look like surface devices you slide them open and you get the phones pamphlets use bc chargers and USB type a to type C cable both of them are polycarbonate phones and they have very similar builds they remind me of the Nexus 5x so they're really good for a plastic phone but it's still a plastic phone and the material flexes and creaks a little bit when you squeeze it but they both feel durable and the texture is nice I actually like polycarbonate phones because they often have removable backs and they're usually less expensive but the Lumias are not cheap the 950 costs $550 and the 950 XL comes in at $650 so even though the build quality is good they're priced a little bit higher than your average polycarbonate phone the design is simple and clean and I really like the windows logo on the back but I think a lot of people will find it a little bit boring something to note I've put the white 950 XL in the pocket of my jeans almost every day for the past month and there's no blue stains so that's good now going around the phone there's a USB C port at the bottom volume rocker power switch and the camera button on the right and headphone jack up top so the back cover on the 950 juts out a little bit but the back cover on the 950 XL is flush right against the screen and it's actually a very noticeable difference in feel when you're holding the two so that ledge and the smaller size of the 950 make it a lot easier to hold so the covers of both of them come off pretty easily and on the inside you have a removable battery a microSD slot and two SIM card slots one of the sim card slots is hidden behind the battery the back cover also has the sticker things for wireless charging and NFC so the mics on these phones are very impressive they use something called H AAC rich audio and they record audio really your voice calls sound really good but despite having these really great mics the speakers on the back of these phones are pretty bad they get loud but they're tinny and they're not stereo and worst of all they project away from you so when you're watching stuff on your phone it's not a great experience the earpiece upfront is also really clear it's got noticeable better call quality than my iPhone 6s and my 6p so call quality is a thing that you kind of take for granted but both of these Lumia phones really nail it they both have an AMOLED quad HD display so that's 2560 by 1440 the 950 has a 5.2 inch screen with Gorilla Glass 3 and the 950 XL has a 5.7 inch screen with Gorilla Glass 4 they're both incredibly high resolution and really sharp but on the same display settings colors on the 950 look a little dull in comparison but at the same time warmer they're both really good screens though they are AMOLED panels so the black levels are really nice and deep viewing angles are good contrast is also really good and the screens can get very bright but there is a weird issue so the screen needs to be on automatic brightness to get really bright and if you have it on manual even at max setting it's not easy to see in sunlight but when you have it on automatic and in sunlight the screen gets super bright so I think this is something that they should fix with the software update on the top of the display is an iris scanner that it uses for a Microsoft hello so the idea of iris recognition sounds really badass but it doesn't work well it drains batteries quickly and it fails a lot like maybe thirty percent of the time it wouldn't work now it's a feature that's technically in beta and I know it will improve over time but it'll always be slow because no matter how fast your camera is or how fast the processing is you have to bring it up to your face to make it work right and a fingerprint sensor can unlock the instant that you hold it so I don't think this tech gives any benefit over a fingerprint sensor they're both running Windows 10 mobile and on the surface it actually looks a little similar to Windows 8.1 mobile but there's way more customizability than before everything from tell transparency color temperatures to linking tiles like there's lots of cool features that 8.1 didn't have and Cortana runs really well on the devices but man this thing has a lot of bugs so I've had to system updates since I've been using the 950xl and it gets noticeably better each time but it still crashes in apps and crashes in voice calls it'll smoothen out over time but it's weird to me that a device like this of this calibre launched out of the door with software like this there's also that ever-present app cap that everyone's aware of lots of popular and important apps still aren't available on Windows Phone it's frustrating and even crippling for some users but I think this is something that will change pretty soon because Microsoft's been developing software that would essentially let I Oh s and Android developers convert their existing projects into visual studio projects we'll have to see both of these phones can use a feature called continuum and in my opinion this is the most unique feature of these phones the idea is that you can connect a Lumia 950 or 950 XL to a large screen to use the phone for light computing tasks so you can connect it wirelessly with an HDMI dongle or if you want to do legite you can pick up this $100 display dock which is connected to a monitor now it doesn't turn your phone into a computer which is kind of how it looks like in promotional materials it basically gives your phone just like a big screen and the ability to connect to peripherals like keyboards and mice there's no split screen there's no real multitasking and the month that I've used it I found it moderately useful because a lot of the apps I need are missing but there are days when I literally come into work and do nothing except for emails Excel and make phone calls for eight hours and on a day like that the 950 XL with continuum could handle it no problem but I really bring a laptop to work and it just takes up less space than all of these little peripherals combined so I'm not sure how useful it is for most people right now now over the course of 2016 as developers put in the time to make more compatible apps it's going to become more useful but as it stands it's kind of a novelty feature now something to notice the phones actually get pretty warm when they're docks for continuum and the performance of continuum is better on the 950 XL over the 950 it's not like a gigantic difference or anything but you'll notice it when you have multiple things open we've seen the processors in these phones a dozen times and they're very strong performers especially the Snapdragon in the 950xl and this time it has liquid cooling to keep temperatures down so you're going to see even less throttling than before games run well on both devices nothing seems particularly laggy in Windows 10 mobile but when you compare it to a nexus 6p and a 5x which run the same processors the Nexus devices feel just a little bit snappier but software updates will probably speed things up for the Windows Phones both of these Lumias have the same f 1.9 20 megapixel camera and it's excellent the thing is a lot of the flagship smartphones right now take incredible photos but I actually think the cameras on the 950 and the 950 XL might be the best it's tough to call a winner but actually think it takes the image quality crown mostly because of how good the low-light shots are so daily photos are excellent but these nighttime shots are surprisingly good and if you're big on manual controls the camera software is really detailed the one downside to this camera though is that it's a little slow so loading up the app taking pictures focusing everything feels a little slow in comparison to like an iPhone 6s or Nexus 6p the videos are also really good but there's no video editing software on the phone and apps once again are very limited the battery life is okay so for the 950 and the 950 XL you can get through a day if you're using it really lightly but I had to charge it up in the afternoon most days I also noticed heavy battery drain when idling so if you sleep for 8 hours you wake up and has dropped like 15 to 20 percent and in comparison my Nexus 6p or an iPhone 6s those will lose like 2 to 3 percent overnight I know it's a software thing and it's going to get fixed but it's still annoying right now alright Lumia 950 and 950 XL both of them have polycarbonate bodies well-built but a little creaky excellent call quality from the earpiece both of them have really nice quad HD AMOLED screens but they need to be on automatic brightness to get really bright they both have iris scanners up front that are kind of slow and unreliable they both have 5 megapixel front facing cameras that are decent on the back they both have the same 20 megapixel camera that takes some of the best images of smartphone cameras right now they also both have rear-facing speakers that are loud but tinny on the inside we have batteries that currently only last about a day of light use they have a Snapdragon 808 or an 810 both of them which have things of RAM and they should be strong performers but they're a little sluggish because of software issues right now and they both have double SIM card slots and 32 gigs of expandable storage ok so aside from that iris scanner and the speakers I would consider the hardware on these phones really solid but because of how expensive these phones are and how limited the apps are but most importantly how buggy Windows 10 mobile is right now is really difficult for me to recommend this phone to anyone if you're an existing Windows Phone user I would probably just use what you're using right now just hold it a little bit longer if you're an iOS or an Android user there's really no compelling reason to switch over to this ecosystem not currently now continuum is super cool I think what Microsoft is trying to do has massive potential and over time as everything kind of matures I think it can actually replace computers for certain users and that's what this whole system needs it needs to mature like the OS needs to mature the app store needs immature and universal apps need to become more readily available and I think they will be by the middle of 2016 and that's also when Microsoft plans on releasing their surface phones those will be better built and the software will kind of be ripened up for that hardware by then I would totally wait for those that's the end of this review hope you guys liked it thumbs if you did subs if you loved it it's been nice and I'll see you guys next time