Microsoft has announced rather disappointing, though not unexpected prices for its new flagship phones – the Lumia 950 and its XL version.
The Lumia 950 XL has been priced at Rs 49,999 and its 5.2-inch cousin at Rs 43,699. The prices are far higher than what had been predicted by channels like CNN-IBN (Rs 43,000 for XL) and mysmartprice.com (Rs 42,000 for XL).
In a poll conducted by us, most people expected the bigger phone to carry at tag around Rs 40,000.
However, Microsoft’s pricing has not exactly been a surprise. Even a week before launch, industry sources had indicated that the bigger phone will be priced around Rs 50,000.
On a positive note, the a mobile-to-monitor+keyboard connector, known as Windows Continuum, is being offered free along with the phones. The retail price of the Continuum box is Rs 5,999.
Despite the high price, the launch is good news as the company has practically disappeared from consumers’ consciousness over the last six months due to a lack of up-to-date models.
In fact, it doesn’t have even a single 4G-enabled handset in the high-end category.
The Lumia 950 XL comes with a 5.7 inch AMOLED display with 4 mln pixels (QHD), a Snapdragon 810 configuration, a 20 MP high-end camera, 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of internal memory and a 3.34 Ah battery with USB-C fast charging that fills 50% of the capacity with 30 minutes of charging.
“With powerful camera features like Rich Capture, a triple LED natural flash, and a 20 MP sensor that has been engineered to virtually eliminate motion blur, you’ll have the confidence to capture anything,” Microsoft said.
The phones also offer retina authentication, called ‘Windows Hello’. “Simply wake up your device, look directly at the screen, and our infra-red camera technology automatically authenticates you,” according to Microsoft.
One of the biggest attractions of the two phones is that they are also both ‘small PCs’.
You can connect the phones to a small, box-shaped ‘dock’ and connect this dock to a monitor, keyboard and a mouse. The phone transforms into the CPU, and you can use the set up like a normal computer.
Of course, given that the processor is Snapdragon 810, it will not give you the exact same capacity as a regular Intel-PC, as the power of a Snapdragon 810 processor is only around half of that of an entry-level Core i3. Still, it should do well for regular browsing and word-processing.
Moreover, with the next generation Snapdragon 820 platform and other similar offerings from MediaTek, the ‘power gap’ between the phone and the laptop will be further bridged. The new platforms will have around 75% of the power of a Core-i3 and will be able to cater to multiple-tab browsing, excel workloads and so on.
The Lumia 950 also supports continuum and offers largely similar performance to its bigger cousin except for the display size. It has one of the most high-resolution displays in India as the four mln pixels have been squeezed into a 5.2 inch screen, giving a resolution of 564 dots per inch.
Battery is smaller at 3 Ah, while the octa-core Snapdragon 810 has been replaced with the six-core Snapdragon 808, which should not make much of a difference except when using Continuum.
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