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.
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!
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.
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