Microsoft Lumia 950 review

Microsoft Lumia 950 is a smartphone developed by Microsoft, officially revealed on October 6, 2015^[1] alongside the larger Lumia 950 XL. The phone was first released on AT&T in the US on November 17, 2015,^[2][3] and subsequently made available on the Microsoft Store^[4] as well as in other countries

The Lumia 950 is the successor to the 2014 Nokia Lumia 930 and is among the first phones to natively run Windows 10 Mobile. The phone is primarily aimed at users desiring a flagship device, in contrast to Microsoft's previously dominant strategy of targeting developing markets with low-end hardware.

Microsoft's numbering convention designates the Lumia 950 as a 5th-generation device in the high-end 900 series.

Hardware

The Lumia 950 has a polycarbonate frame with a removable back shell, allowing access to the battery as well as SIM and microSD card slots. The phone is available in two colors, black and white, although third-party replacement shells are available in different colors and materials.^[6][7]

Internals

The Lumia 950 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 MSM8992 SoC which combines two 1.82 GHz Cortex-A57 and four 1.44 GHzCortex-A53 cores in a big.LITTLE architecture, allowing more computationally intensive workloads to run on the faster "big" cores while threads with less priority run on the slower "LITTLE" cores. The SoC also includes an Adreno 418 GPU and is paired with 3 GB of LPDDR3 RAM. The phone has 32 GB of internal storage which can be expanded with microSD cards up to 200 GB in size.

Display

The Lumia 950 has a 5.2 in (130 mm) AMOLED display with a resolution of 2560x1440 (WQHD) and a 16:9 aspect ratio. Pixel density is 564 ppi. The display is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 and features ClearBlack technology for improved sunlight visibility, but unlike earlier Lumia flagships it does not support some features like double tap to wake^[8] or Super Sensitive touch.^[9]

Camera

The Lumia 950 has a 20 MP PureView-branded rear-facing camera, containing a 1/2.4 in BSI sensor with 1.12 μm pixels and phase-detection autofocus, a 6-element Carl Zeiss lens with a f/1.9 aperture and 5th-gen optical image stabilization, and a triple-LED RGB flash that can adjust to match the color of ambient light.^[10][11] Maximum image resolution is 4992x3744 pixels (18.7 MP) in 4:3 aspect ratio and 5344x3008 pixels (16.1 MP) in 16:9 aspect ratio. The camera can also capture oversampled 8 MP images, optionally with a full-resolution DNG file that enables more post-processing possibilities.^[12] The camera supports video capture at up to 4K(3840x2160) resolution, as well as slow-motion video at 120 fps, albeit at a reduced resolution of 720p.

The front-facing camera has a 5 MP sensor and a wide-angle f/2.4 lens, supporting video capture at up to 1080p resolution. The camera also supports Windows Hello through iris recognition with the help of an infrared LED.