Nokia announce new Lumia 920 and 820 Windows Phone 8

Nokia just announced their new flagship Windows Phone. The Lumia 920 runs Windows Phone 8 and has wireless charging, PureView camera, Puremotion HD display.

Also included new location services like offline maps that are not based on cached data and includes turn by turn navigations. Nokia CityLens is a augmented reality app that gives you an over lay on the screen of local points of interest.

Nokia PureMotion HD Plus is “better than HD resolution” with a high flicker free refresh rate that is obviously a competitor Apple’s Retina display and includes a responsive screen for out door use.

There is a 2000ma battery to power the 4.5 inch screened phone, Snapdragon S4 processor plus there is built in wireless charging. The 920 comes in yellow, red, gray, white, black.

All this is running on Windows Phone 8 which Microsoft demoed some of features at the event with Joe Belfiore saying that they were saving some features for a future event.  Joe showed off the new start screen with the smaller start tiles and notification counts on them.  Also shown off was the ability to customise the buttons in IE, so you could change the refresh button on the IE toolbar to the Tabs button. At last there is a screen capture feature in Windows Phone and there seem to be lots of features added to the camera app include hardware image stabilisation.

The phone also has NFC and demonstrated at the event was a JBL speaker system that uses NFC to switch music playback from the phone to the JBL speakers.

Also announced was the Lumia 820 an evolution of the 800 with interchangeable back covers and a smaller package than the 920.  I think my favourite quote of the day has to be from Steve Ballmer “The Windows Phone is unlike any other phone on the market.”  which I am sure is a dig at Android and “this is the year of Windows”

So after watching the press conference the Lumia 920 looks a very nice smartphone especially the camera features but is it enough to get users to switch from other platforms? I really think there should have been pricing and availability as by the time the new iPhone launches the media will have forgotten about the phones.