It's still November, and so this is a quicker and lazier post than I'd normally write.
OSNews has published a quick review round-up of Microsoft Lumia 950 reviews and previews. As with the iPad Pro and Surfaces Pro4 and Book, I plan on deep diving several of these reviews after NaNoWrimo. A pretty quick skim of them shows that the Lumia 950 has reasonably nice hardware, Continuum is well liked, even though the feature is weird and not finished, and the camera is pretty good.
The general impression is that the Lumia 950 (and the expectation is that the 950XL will be the same) is a perfectly acceptable smartphone. The problem is that "perfectly acceptable" simply isn't when you're spending $600 on a device, and then in modern Microsoft fashion, you're asked to spend $100 (probably) on the accessory that is the secret sauce to the whole experience.
Part of the problem for Microsoft is that they're needlessly going for premium. A device like the Acer Jade Primo is said to have basically the same specs as the Lumia 950, it also includes the dock, and sells for hundreds of dollars less than the Lumia 950. The question is what that phone will be like. Traditionally, too, the Windows Phone Faithful prefer Lumia hardware, at least when they can get it.
The other problem for Windows Phone Faithful is that over the past several years, Microsoft has constantly shown that they're capable of making and updating a full stack of really compelling applications on Android and iOS, but that they're essentially unwilling or unable to do the same on their own phone OS.
The Lumia 950 is really interesting, but I think that Microsoft's efforts on continuum are, as Thom Holwerda of OSNews writes, too little, too late, and focused on the wrong direction.
Satya Nadella has said several times that he thinks Continuum on Windows Phone devices is important for markets in developing countries and other low income situations where people can't afford both a phone and a tablet or a bigger PC, and where they often don't have the infrastructure to support a PC. The problem is that so far, from Microsoft, the upcoming budget model of the Lumia, the Lumia 550, doesn't support Continuum either. At $700 (before the cost of a keyboard/mouse/monitor) for a Lumia that can also run a desktop experience setup, you're going to have some problems encouraging budget-conscious markets to choose that platform.
And, for people who can afford $700 on phone hardware, and then dedicate a desktop work space to it, their need to use a tool like continuum is decreased, because that market typically has dedicated TV boxes, a dedicated desktop computer, or a much better laptop, and so on.
Perhaps the opportunity for continuum is in something like a better version of the Motorola Atrix and its laptop dock.
If you consider Paul Miller's recent post saying that the laptop is the basic unit of productivity, then the idea of the continuum interface adapted to a laptop-like "dock" for Windows Phone 10 devices becomes pretty compelling. How much will that cost though? How much will you spend on a flagship-level Lumia and accessories for it if you can get the same (or better, because you can run Cross-Stitch Maker '97 Pro on a Surface 3 and synchronize relevant data (stuff from cross-platform apps) using OneDrive, enabling the best and most relevant experiences on each type of device.
The App Gap is very much still a real thing, but it appears to be closing, perhaps even rapidly. Windows Phone has most of the core group of apps that people expect of a modern smartphone. The problem is that for a flagship type of device, there's still a lot missing. The advantage of continuum doesn't make sense for most high end users, unless you're one of the "need a laptop with 20 hours of battery life that weighs nothing" users.
The problem with that is, of course, that that accessory doesn't exist. Building one solves a few different problems, but raises the potential cost and creates a few different questions about what types of computing horsepower people need and want.
One suggestion is that Microsoft is essentially biding their time until it's practical to build a Windows Phone device with an x86 CPU, at which point it may be possible to add Win32 into a Surface Phone or a high end Lumia, and the selling point for Windows Phone becomes that you can run Cross Stitch Maker '97 Pro on your phone, even if you need a desktop, TV, or laptop accessory adapter to use it. This type of functionality could shift the balance from getting a Surface 3 and a cheap Lumia or Android smartphone, to getting a flagship Windows Phone smartphone, and using accessories with it to use it in different settings.
This is perhaps not critical or even related to the success of Windows Phone, but I think it would be great if Microsoft started building more of its own software for Windows 10. Selling the Lumia 950 on its photography credentials (such as the fact that it can shoot DNG RAW files, for example) may be examining.
A digital media management program, for example, that ran with unique interfaces on desktop and mobile devices with both ARM and x86 CPUs could really help. The camera on the Lumia 950 is said to be pretty good, and it makes sense to have something to keep track of photo and video files, do simple edits, and so on. Microsoft has a lot of really good experience synchronizing photos and other media to OneDrive, and including this type of functionality on the Lumia 950 would be a good way to showcase continuum being used to provide different interfaces that are task appropriate, as well as the universal environment being used to build an intense application that requires a lot of computing power.
I like the idea of the Lumia 950 and 950XL, but I worry that we're just about to see Microsoft's phone business end. It has been a good run for Windows Phone, but it appears to be a money sink where good ideas go to die and be replaced with more standard ideas, ganked from other platforms, in an effort to appease users who would rather be somewhere else, or rather not adopt a new type of interface.
As always, it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years with Windows 10. I very much like the idea that Windows Phone as a platform can bounce back. I suspect it might require a lot of work that Microsoft either wont' bother to do, or just can't do. I'm interested in trying Windows Phone 10, but I am concerned that its most interesting features are going to be locked up in the most expensive phones for the foreseeable future, and I'm not quite ready to give up my iPhone.