Hands On With the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820

Standing on line for the Nokia and Microsoft event. It was pretty packed. Thankfully, they set up an awning so that we didn't get soaked in the rain.

Here's how the event looked from my seat in the audience. I was pretty far on the right side about halfway up.

Nokia had plenty of video backdrops for the event. Flashy, but they weren't particularly exciting. The phones were more exciting.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop talked up phone cameras pretty heavily, saying "Nokia photography and optics are changing the way people capture the world around them."

Microsoft Windows Phone Program manager Joe Belfiore gave some real-world usage examples, although he also spent a lot of time on the Lumia 920's camera, as well as "Lens Apps," which let developers augment the camera's built-in abilities.

Joe Belfiore showing off one of the Lumia 920's many photo filtering capabilities.

In a surprise appearance, Steve Ballmer took the stage for a few minutes to talk up enthusiasm for Windows Phone 8, specifically Microsoft's efforts to court third-party developers, and the opportunities that 400 million Windows-compatible devices per year brings to the developer community.

Here's the Lumia 920 in person, looking colorful and dynamic. It looks a lot like the Lumia 900 hardware-wise, but packs a powerhouse camera, a dual-core CPU, wireless charging, and 1080p video recording—all features that the Windows Phone 7.5-powered Lumia 900 lacked.

The back of the phone has no hump, like the PureView 808 did—the Lumia 920 is a consumer-ready product and not just an engineering exercise like the PureView 808 was. A red Lumia 820 sits right behind it.

Upstairs, we saw plenty of Lumia 920s and 820s in action. Here, a Nokia camera phone engineer demonstrates the 820's internal object image stabilization. He shook the phone pretty hard—much harder than an unsteady hand would do on its own—and yet the image remained more or less consistent and stable.

Here's another shot of the Lumia 820, showing off the kind of photo the phone should have no problem snapping without apparent motion blur.

Here's the JBL Power Up, the new wireless speaker that works with the Lumia 820 and 920's wireless charging and NFC pairing, in a very Nokia-like blue.

A Microsoft representative demonstrates the Lumia 920's wireless NFC pairing. He paired and unpaired the phone a bunch of times over the Power Up's NFC sensor in front of me.

Here's how the Lumia 920 looks when it's charging atop the Power Up. It's just sitting there—no port or connector needed.

Here's another Lumia 920 in slate gray from the back—note that this one has a matte finish instead of gloss.

I really like the Windows Phone 8 home screen; you can do much more with the live tiles now than you could before, and I always thought the tiles were a good idea.

Here are more useful tiles; note that one of them has "Search WP8" on Twitter as a custom tile. The Microsoft representative can tap that at any time to see what the Twitterverse is saying about Windows Phone 8.

The oversized CNN tile displays a top story front and center, while a shortcut takes you right to watching The Dark Knight.

Here the Lumia 920 is displaying transit directions to JFK, including color icons showing what subway line to take, and little walking icons to show the parts of the trip that involve… walking.

I really liked this map, which shows actual NYC subway routes (though not all of them, it seems). The Microsoft rep didn't have additional info on this, but I'm hoping this map works like this in real life, because it means you can get instant access to NYC subway transit times at any moment.

Here's an example of tapping on something on the map (in this case, the Statue of Liberty) and seeing information, its address, and the ability to get directions.

Here's a bus schedule that appeared live on the phone; it corresponded exactly to what was coming next on West 23rd street, given the current time (which was just before 12:30pm).