Thursday, October 8, 2015

Microsoft Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL With Windows 10 Mobile, 'Liquid Cooling' Launched

The waiting is finally over! Microsoft on Tuesday at its “Windows 10 devices briefing” event unveiled the two flagship smartphones. Both the handsets run Windows 10 Mobile, the mobile edition of the company’s latest operating system.
The two smartphones, platform lead devices for Windows 10 Mobile, were unveiled by Microsoft’s Panos Panay, the new head of engineering of the firm’s premium devices division. The Lumia 950 will start from $549, while the Lumia 950 XL will start at $649 – both will become available in November.As for the specifications, the Microsoft Lumia 950 sports a 5.2-inch QHD display with a pixel density of 564ppi. It is powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 SoC, and 32GB of internal storage.
The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, on the other hand, sports a 5.7-inch QHD display with a pixel density of 518ppi. It is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC. It also comes with 32GB of internal storage.
The biggest surprise with these new devices, arguably, was the inclusion of new "liquid cooling" technology.  Microsoft blew by this bullet point on one of its slides, but it's one that will surely be of interest to PC fans. For high end gaming PCs liquid cooling is a long-standing solution for dissipating heat faster than is possible with a pure air convection solution.  The idea is to flow liquid by some hot component (say your GPU and CPU chips via a metal heatblock.  The evaporated fluid (typically some sort of inert/nonconductive coolant) is then ciruclated to a condenser, where a fan blows air to push out the heat and condense the cooling fluid.   While such systems are common in the gaming space and are even found in some gaming laptops.  Under load, or when using certain functions (e.g. the GPS), modern smartphones can get quite hot, particularly the battery and system-on-a-chip (SoC).  Presumably Microsoft is utilizing some sort of internal capillary system with an inert, evaporative closed cooling loop.  
Both phones are dual SIM enabled and have 4G support. In addition, the phones use UCB Type-C, and support Qi wireless charging and fast charging, to give 50 percent battery in half an hour. Another useful feature is Glance Screen, which lights up only a few pixels on your screen when your phone is in standby mode, so you can see your notifications without turning on the display while also saving battery life. There's also the new Iris Scanner on both phones, nestled next to the front cam, which scans your eye to unlock your phone. And last, but not least of the hardware, there's an all -new liquid cooling system that Microsoft has implemented from their tablets. That would make them the first smartphones with that kind of tech.

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