After teasing the phone with the 41 Million Reasons campaign over the past few weeks, Nokia has officially taken the wraps off of the successor to the Symbian-powered Nokia 808 PureView in the Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 1020 PureView smartphone.
The smartphone features the second generation of the 808’s innovative 38 megapixel camera sensor with additions such as backside illumination, a faster f/2.2 aperture lens assembly with Carl Zeiss six-lens optics, improved xenon flash assembly taken from the Verizon-exclusive Lumia 928 and optical image stabilization with improvements such as a floating ball-bearing assembly for the optical image stabilization that is active for both images and video as well as an improved camera app in the Nokia Camera Pro app, featuring full manual control over ISO settings, shutter speeds, white balance and the requisite control needed to take the best images, including complete manual focus for images if desired. The rest of the imaging-centric features include a dedicated two-stage camera shutter button and a manual shutter for the camera assembly as well as 6x lossless digital zoom in 720p video capture mode and 4x lossless digital zoom when capturing in 1080p.
Outside of the imaging features, the 1020 features a 4.5 inch AMOLED touch display at 1280×768 with a 15:9 aspect ratio, Gorilla Glass 3 front with additional software enhancements to improve sensitivity when wearing gloves, 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM and 32GB of storage, though the phone will not include an additional microSD slot for adding storage despite the high resolution of the images taken with the PureView camera, something many in the media are already counting as a strike against the latest Nokia flagship. The phone will be available for pre-order by AT&T on July 19th ahead of it’s official launch on July 26th, with the phone being offered for $299.99 after a new 2 year agreement with outright non-contract pricing being set at $699.99.
The phone will also feature its own slate of imaging-centered accessories to pair with, such as the Nokia Camera Grip which will be sold separately for an additional $79.99 and feature a much larger molded grip to ease picture and video capture as well as a larger 3000 mAh battery and an integrated standard tripod mount for use with all types of camera mounting assemblies.
