Lumia 950 (credit: Peter Bright)

The wait for a flagship Windows Telephone has been a extended and rather unhappy a single. Numerous mobile operators try to encourage people to get new phones every single year (which strikes me as astonishingly wasteful), but for most of us two years in between phones is about correct. That a lot wear and tear is enough to make most phones look a small tatty, and two years of technological progress usually yields upgrades that we can really feel.

The very first generation of Windows Phone eight devices, nevertheless, was released 3 years ago in November 2012. Initially, the AT&ampT-exclusive Lumia 920 was the flagship Windows Phone 8 device, and its siblings for other networks came a little later. The Lumia 925, on T-Mobile, was released in June 2013, and the Lumia 928 for Verizon came in May 2013. Any person who bought a member of that 92x generation is extended overdue an upgrade.

Issue is, there hasn’t been a Windows Phone for them to upgrade to. The most direct successor to the Lumia 92x generation was the Lumia 930, released in February 2014. But its American version, the Icon, was Verizon exclusive and as a result useless to most. On best of that exclusivity, the telephone was poorly supported by Verizon with very slow firmware updates. It fundamentally came at the incorrect time to boot: too soon for owners of year-old Lumia 928s.