The Microsoft Lumia 950 is a beautiful device. It is elegant, well-balanced, and robust. It is also designed for flexibility and ease of use. The camera button works flawless, the camera is truly magnificent. The first couple of hours have been very enjoyable. Instantly, my old profile could be grabbed (thanks to cloud-backup) and used. The setup (if there was any) did not take long. Everything's awesome?!
Unfortunately, nope. While the hardware seems to be adequate for 600 €, the software is not. Windows Phone 8 was much better. This makes me very sad. The battery is empty after 2 days without much usage (my old Samsung had a weaker battery, but here I could get up to 4 days, sometimes even 5 days without recharging). Using the phone results in an empty battery after 20 hours. Some day I started listening to music (over my ear plugs), but this also drained the battery much faster than I expected. If I have to go back to my iPod I will be very disappointed. Listening to music (no screen usage or anything) should require only slightly more power than the idle mode. However, with Microsoft's Windows 10 Mobile and its Groove application it surely requires a lot more.
Furthermore, I don't understand why the mail client is so bad. Didn't you guys at Microsoft just buy some company for that? Calling your app "Outlook" is a joke. I don't buy a Trabbi (aka Trabant) and call it "Porsche". Even worse is the fact that some apps suddenly don't start anymore. I have to look at a black screen for a while (~30 seconds) until I am back at the start screen. Only after a complete restart the apps work again. This happened several times already with different apps (Mail, Groove, ...).
I did mention the battery consumption already. What I also don't get is why charging the phone sometimes does not seem to do anything (either the consumption is higher than the charging rate (which is remarkable, as I am not doing anything), or something is really not working out well) - at least sometimes.
Not everything is bad of course. I like the new calendar and I also think that Windows Hello is truly amazing. Good job there. But this reminds me: Why is Cortana not working / installed?! I use the US settings with UK as region. My location is set to Germany. It was the same with my Samsung Ativ S, where I had Windows Phone 8 installed. Even if Cortana is not available with these settings, why isn't it? Apple rolled out Siri (internationally) in a couple of weeks. You guys are requiring years for your product. If you loose customers - this is the reason.
There are too many subtle small issues. Swiping is not working as good as before, the software buttons (Back, Windows, Search) suck (hey, if you supply them in software, then at least make them better than their hardware siblings), and the static screen (clock, notifications) suddenly disappears or reappears with no apparent reason. All in all a very unpleasant experience.
Would I buy the Lumia again? No, at least not in this shape. But this is nothing against the Lumia 950 in particular, but against the OS: Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft, if you release something, you better make sure it fulfills at least the primitive use-cases. Its incredible that you guys still haven't figured out how to make a proper e-mail client or provide an OS that does not restart out of nowhere. Shame!