Upcoming Lumia 950 and 950XL outted on Microsoft Store website

It appears the proverbial cat is out of the bag when it comes to the new Lumia handsets Microsoft is expected to announce next week at their big hardware event in New York City.

Specs and renders of the Lumia 950 (Talkman) and the 950XL (Cityman) have been leaked for some time. While they were considered to be pretty accurate based on the sources, this supposedly inadvertent publication of product listings for the handsets on the UK version of the Microsoft Store website solidify some of what we can expect next week.

The page with these listings are no longer available but as you can see below the two devices were listed alongside of other Windows Phone handsets:

Although you could not click through to individual product pages for the 950 and 950 XL you can see that each will have 20MP cameras with Zeiss optics, 32GB of storage with an option to expand up to 2TB via a microSD card and WQHD displays with the 950 XL measuring 5.7 inches and the 950 at 5.2 inches.

The other interesting indicator with these listings is that the phones are labeled as unlocked. Since this was the UK site it could be that they will only be available in Europe unlocked however, can you imagine the opportunity for building market share if they are also offered in the US unlocked and not tied to a carrier?

AT&T has always been the premier carrier for Microsoft's mobile offerings. Of course it is possible they will offer the device tied to their service but with their recent focus on un-subsidizing phones under their AT&T Next program it is likely they may offer this new generation of hardware unlocked for that program and use on other carriers.

Carrier restrictions have historically been a hindrance to the wider adoption of Windows Phone since the platform debuted in late 2010 so this possibility has to be encouraging to many users.

If these phones were sold unlocked would that make a difference to your decision to use Windows 10 Mobile?

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