Microsoft Lumia 950 XL review

It might have been Microsoft’s first Windows 10 phone, but the Lumia 950 was a bit of a disappointment. Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 ran like liquid butter on even the most underpowered smartphone, but a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 couldn’t save the Lumia 950 from slow and jerky performance.

The Lumia 950 isn’t the only Windows 10 handset, though; it’s accompanied by its big brother, the 5.7in Lumia 950 XL. This comes equipped with the more powerful octa-core, 2.0GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset, providing another two cores to help deal with Windows 10’s extra flab. Paired with 3GB of RAM, this kind of specification wouldn’t look out of place on one of this year’s top-end Android phones, but sadly even this isn’t quite enough to run Windows 10 smoothly.

Performance

It’s certainly faster than the Lumia 950, with smoother menu animations and slightly quicker app loading times, but the Lumia 950 XL remains a disappointingly sluggish device that repeatedly wigs out when scrolling down the Start screen, throwing you unceremoniously into the main app list, and still takes around a second to open a single Settings option. As with the Lumia 950, it’s difficult to compare its exact raw processing power to the Android competition without a Windows-friendly version of our Geekbench 3 tests, but you don’t have to spend much time with the Lumia 950 XL to see its everyday performance is decidedly lacking.

Playing games was also a bit of a trial. Despite scoring 1,316 frames (around 21.2fps) in the GFX Bench DX offscreen Manhattan test, even games like Threes were almost unplayable. We managed a few games of Beach Buggy Racing without too much trouble, but it’s nowhere near as slick or smooth as you’d expect from this kind of specification.

^ The layout of Windows 10 is a vast improvement over Windows Phone 8.1, but it doesn’t run nearly as smoothly

One thing Microsoft has got right, though, is web browsing performance. A Peacekeeper browser benchmark score of 813 might not be particularly outstanding, but in practice the Lumia 950 XL can tackle complex web pages as well as any Android phone. The Edge browser is so smooth, in fact, that you almost forget how bloated the rest of the operating system feels – but that feeling quickly dissipates as soon as you return to the Start screen.

Display

This is a real shame, as the rest of the phone has everything you’d expect from a top-end flagship. The 2,560×1,440 resolution display provides plenty of definition across 5.7in, and the AMOLED panel produces stunning colours, covering a near-perfect 99.4% of the sRGB colour gamut. It’s admittedly not the best AMOLED display I’ve seen in terms of overall accuracy, but colours still had a pleasing punch to them and they weren’t overly saturated.

Likewise, with ultra-deep 0.00cd/m2 black levels and a contrast ratio of infinity:1, images had plenty of depth and detail, and viewing angles are superb. However, like the Lumia 950, the XL’s max brightness is rather low for an AMOLED, topping out at just 305.32cd/m2 when set to 100%. This is just about bright enough to see clearly in bright lighting conditions, even with the sunlight readability feature enabled, but you may struggle come summer time.

Camera

The Lumia 950 XL’s 20-megapixel camera is superb. The f/1.9 aperture allows plenty of light into the Pureview Zeiss lens, and every single image I took looked fantastic, no matter what lighting conditions I was shooting in. Outdoors, shots had an astonishing level of detail right across the frame, and colours looked crisp and accurate despite the overcast weather conditions. There was hardly any noise present, either, so even the tiniest details weren’t lost at full resolution.

Indoors, the Lumia 950 XL was equally brilliant, producing clear, accurate photos both with and without our external lamp switched on. Noise started to creep in slightly in lower lighting conditions, but it didn’t make photos appear too grainy and our still life arrangement still looked perfectly sharp and defined. However, I’d recommend switching on the flash in these cases, as this brought a welcome punch to the image and allows you to pick out the fine details much more easily. It doesn’t adversely affect the image’s colour temperature either, as whites remained clean and pure.

^ The camera is easily one of the Lumia 950 XL’s best features, producing beautifully exposed shots even in overcast weather

^ Indoors, photos were even more impressive, particularly when there was a lot of light present

^ Noise started to appear when we switched off our external lamp, but images still had plenty of detail present

Battery Life

The Lumia 950 XL has a lot more stamina than its little brother as well, as its larger 3,340mAh battery lasted a full 13h 02m in our continuous video playback test with the brightness set to 170cd/m2. This is much better than the ten hours we got from the Lumia 950, and it puts it roughly on par with other phablets such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ and the Nexus 6P.

Windows 10 Continuum

It’s such a shame the Lumia 950 XL’s overall performance isn’t better, as this would be a great phone to use every day if it was just a little bit faster, particularly when it can essentially double up as a portable PC thanks to Windows 10’s Continuum feature. You can read more about Windows 10 and Continuum in my Lumia 950 review, but it essentially lets you plug your phone into a monitor via Microsoft’s optional £80 Display Dock connector and run fullscreen Windows apps such as Office, Outlook and Edge straight from your phone without the need for a PC. You can even use your phone to answer calls and send texts while it’s plugged in, too, giving you the best of both worlds. This works absolutely fine in practice, but it’s the phone’s everyday performance which lets it down.

Conclusion

As a result, the Lumia 950 XL is definitely the best Windows 10 phone available right now, but it’s still not quite good enough to be a viable alternative to its Android competition. Continuum is a really attractive feature and the Lumia’s camera is easily one of the best I’ve seen all year, but it has too many minor annoyances day-to-day holding it back to make it good value.