Microsoft Lumia 950 XL review
theverge.com
theverge.com
Sooner or later PC's are going to get so small they fit in your pocket. I just hope windows phone keeps going until then. Im not sure how apple and android will cope with that future.
In the meantime, I think the Lumias are just fine. They makes calls, they takes pictures, they gets you on the internet. What else is there? I haven't noticed any apps I cant get either. Then again you don't miss what you never knew.
Not until we find a UI that rules all categories. Touch apps are typically bad desktop apps, desktop apps are typically bad touch apps. As respectively shown by Windows 8 on desktops and Microsoft Office on the original Surface RT. WIMP is probably still the best paradigm for desktops.
I do agree that platform fragmentation is bad. Apple has traditionally been pretty good at this (at least it's the same language and largely the same or comparable Frameworks).
That's not going to happen, sorry. Windows and OSX for the desktop and Android and iOS for mobile devices is how it's going to stay for a quite some time.
For Desktops and Phones the winners have already been chosen.
Whether it is or not (I don't think so) that's not really what Microsoft is doing. You can't just download Windows 10 software and run it on Windows 10 Mobile.
Nor should you be able to. Phone software should be written for a phone. I don't want to run a Windows desktop app on my phone any more than I want to run a phone app on my desktop PC. They are fundamentally different platforms, with different interfaces, different screen sizes and different needs.
That's exactly what you can do, given that the app is written against UWP.
We already universal apps between phones and tablets and we use webapps everywhere. Different screen sizes, different usage scenarios, different input methods – those are all things you can adjust your interface for.
I mean the laptop / phone divide is not all that wide in terms of Ram or Gflops. So, why not just run windows on everything?
UWP is hardly a new standard. It's the continuation of the Windows Phone/Windows 8 APIs and WPF, which dates back to 2006.
I think the biggest issue is that on Win32 both code and developers are much, much more powerful. You can't make Steam for UWP, or an IDE, or something like AutoCad with its plugin support. Other than mobile support, there is little reason to use UWP over Win32 (perhaps with WPF).
A shame, because we really need to move on from Win32.
This is not the same thing as being able to run any Windows Desktop App.
Also it's not established whether this makes for good Desktop and/or Phone software as a result.
Yet, the review actually says:
"What’s not encouraging is the state of apps for the Lumia 950 XL. I wanted to switch back to using this as my daily device over the past two weeks, but I simply couldn’t hack it. It stayed in my pocket while I used my iPhone 6S Plus, simply because so many apps are still missing or inadequate on Windows Phone. I’ve been to a lot of events recently and need Periscope to stream from the Verge account, or to use Snapchat. I simply can’t do this with the Lumia 950 XL, and I can’t even access our Trello work app. If I can’t get my work done on the move, it’s really difficult to switch back to a Windows phone.
Microsoft’s original plan was to support Android apps on Windows 10 Mobile, but that seems very unlikely now. Most of the third-party apps are just poor ports from iOS and Android, and lack key new features. The Twitter and Instagram apps are still depressing examples of the state of Windows, and I don’t feel like much has changed over the past year. Microsoft’s mobile store needs some serious love, but it’s running out of time."
Seems like the "ecosystem" score should actually have been a "2" or "3".
Followup clarification to the replies: For those who think a score of 2 or 3 is wrong, The Verge's own explanation for the scoring [1] says...
...
2: Slightly better than garbage, but still incredibly bad.
3: Not a complete disaster, but not something we’d recommend.
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6: Good. There are issues, but also redeeming qualities.
...
6 out of 10 is not above average. If you got 6 answers right out of 10 on a test, you'd call that "barely more than half right". This is how American review scores work: they're based on school grades where anything below 8 is pretty much unacceptable.
Perhaps start at 5 and go to 15.
And on top of that, they can't give a 2 or 3 to Microsoft's new flagship phone because they want to receive a review unit of the Surface Pro 4 next spring and they won't get one if they take that big of a dump on the Lumia 950 XL.
For years the main strike against alternative platforms to Windows was the lack of software. Even ten years ago it was almost impossible to buy Mac software in the shops, back when software came in boxes.
And now Windows (albeit on mobile) is struggling to get traction due to lack of software.
either its 3 vs 9 or 6 vs 9, in both cases it is still an enormous gap.
To me, it's less about you should have something pretty, and more about why don't you have something pretty? It's not like a case made of silver plastic with a few chrome bits or maybe something in matte black with accents is massively expensive to make.
This is especially true for Windows Phone I think, because it has such a rep already for being dull even by Blackberry standards.
FTR: I had a Lumia Icon for about a year, and dumped it for the same reason as the author: Ecosystem was glitchy, the app market was way out of touch with Android and iOS in terms of quality and diversity, and the iPhone 6+ finally offered an iOS device of a decent size which was my final beef with it. Sold.
I mean it's not gorgeous but it's a hell of improvement, accomplished with just different printing on the outside.
Continuum is the most promising feature of the phone. It actually becomes a "real" computer, even though this is just the start.
I think Microsoft is doing the right thing lately by leveraging its strength, the desktop.
Reviewers are always blaming the ecosystem. But imagine the future when smartphones get more powerful and the Win32 windows app can be distributed through the Windows Store (this will arrive at some point). The phone would naturally gain the ability to run a win32 app when plugged to a screen.
The phone would run both Win10 Universal apps and any old windows app that's been there since the early ages of the PC era. The ecosystem would become suddenly a lot better and the phone more interesting.
I don't think that it does, not like the first few versions of the Ubuntu Phone became a real Gnome desktop. This Windows phone's desktop mode seems like a larger screen with mouse/keyboard support. Can it handle more than one app at a time? Still impressive as hell though and I agree with it being the future of devices.
The Mac app store is not that successful which is not very surprising as it requires devs to invest in a new app with a completely different set of competencies.
iOS and the iPhone are Apple cash cow presently.
That's why Microsoft strategy makes sense to me. They have a chance at least. We'll see.
I sometimes wonder if a Cocoa 2 evolution of the desktop to bring the Cocoa & Cocoa Touch back together, although I believe the Mac App Store is problematic for entirely different reasons.
Can someone explain what this refers to? (I'm actually an OS X user, but still on Mountain Lion.)
Your phone running full Win32 APIs probably isn't the great boon it'd otherwise be. Likewise Windows tablets have not gotten much traction in the past (or present) -- you simply must have a pen and most likely a Bluetooth keyboard to properly use them. I bought a few, tried to use them, gave them to people -- Android devices just blow them away.
The real touch apps --- Metro -- are pretty terrible (slow, even MS's own Metro calc takes seconds to load.) And of course mean rewriting a lot of things.
I fucking hate minimalist UI.
Is it just small market share blocking wider adoption, or is the tooling somehow lacking still?
It's the endless restarts (WM6 -> WP7 -> WP8, and to some extend WM10), lack of Microsoft's engagement (why not launch a Surface Phone and be done with it), the lack of good hardware, and simply the lack of developers.
At this point, I do not see much of a future for Windows Phone/Mobile. It will probably continue to exist as one of their 'hobby projects'. But Satya Nadella realized (correctly) that much more can be gained by serving the market. Now Microsoft's own applications are better on iOS and Android than Windows Mobile.
Still, I think an x86 Surface Phone that goes heavy on the whole-PC-in-your-pocket mantra really is Microsoft's Hail Mary pass for getting Windows Mobile to stick.
This feature almost makes we want to go out and buy this phone, just to support the concept. But then again, Windows Mobile... Arg.
So the review says not enough apps, but not enough apps bundled with the phone or in the store? and what kind of app is missing?
Even now, searching for "Game of Thrones" leads to a scam $5 paid app that doesn't even have a website.
MS actually paid to help create this scenario. They were offering $100 or $200 per app for shovelware.
There seems to be zero QC or curation or any sense of class in the Windows Store. So they get the downsides of a closed platform, with the downsides of just letting people publish crap. Even Google Play is better.
I have a Lumia 930. I love it enough to not notice that there aren't enough apps for it.