A brand new and out of the box idea
Most of us tech geeks agree that 2015 is the year of Microsoft. From Windows 10 to HoloLens, Microsoft has proved that they are no longer afraid to step into the unknown. They showed the world that they can be innovative too. This brings us to another new product of Microsoft for the year 2015, which of course couldn’t appear without anything innovative in its core build. I’m talking of course about the new Lumia 950 and its’ futuristic continuum feature. A brand new and out of the box idea of course, but is this concept good enough to put Lumia 950 among the best smartphones of 2015? Let’s find out.
1. Cheap Build and Uninspiring Design
Although Microsoft is trying to put this smartphone among the best it just doesn’t seem to fit in. All the front-liner competitors of the Lumia 950 have abandoned plastic and moved to metal builds, but Microsoft persisted on creating their new smartphone entirely from plastic. This has led to a cheap feel of the phone. The design of the Lumia 950 isn’t good either. It is plain and awkward. It feels the same with just any other lower priced smartphone of Microsoft. It is simply uninspiring.
2. App Gap
Surprise, Surprise…One of the greatest problems of Lumia 950 is, as expected, the lack of applications and basic features. Not only this problem still exists but it appears to be getting worse from year to year. There are not enough apps to satisfy the needs of the majority of the users. This is a huge deal breaker for many consumers. The Lumia 950 lacks basic features like a payment system or the very useful for many people, Google maps. Instead of Google Maps they use Bing Maps which is, to put it politely, ‘Apple Maps bad’, no offense apple 😉
3. Continuum
Continuum might be this phone’s key characteristic but it is also its’ Achilles’ heel. For starters, a feature like this doesn’t mean much for the average user, not for now at least. Other than that, the Continuum feature is buggy and a bit slow. It requires separate hardware to use and it doesn’t offer that much either. The Continuum feels more like a beta test to me than an actual feature. The idea is great but the feature itself isn’t there just yet.
4. Windows Hello Under-performs
The Windows Hello log in is literally eye-catching, but it’s too slow compared to a fingerprint sensor. It is not very effective either. Users have reported that sometimes they have difficulty logging in to their handset because Windows Hello fails to recognize them. The obvious solution is to move back to the classic pin lock. If you have to choose between the finger print scanner feature and the Windows Hello feature I would recommend the fingerprint scanner, at least for now.
5. Too Expensive
Microsoft’s Lumia 950 is a great phone but for the price you could easily find an android smartphone that offers more functionality. Keeping in mind also that the main feature of Lumia 950 requires you to pay more to use it, it is more than clear that Microsoft should have valued this smartphone for much less.