Hasta La Gadget!

AT&T and T-Mobile have already pulled back the curtains (well, mostly) on their stock of Nokia Lumia Windows Phones, but rival carrier Verizon has remained awfully quiet on the matter. That may soon change though, as a pair of newly leaked images point to the existence of a Lumia 820 variant meant for Verizon’s airwaves.

As you’d expect, the device — which WMPowerUser’s tipster refers to as the Lumia 822 — reportedly packs the same WVGA display and 8-megapixel rear camera that its cousin the 820 does, and there’s a strong chance that internals remain similarly unchanged. That tell-tale stamp on the 822’s butt means the device is also meant to play nice with Verizon’s 4G LTE network as well, though that’s really not much of a surprise.

Nokia has clearly taken some liberties with regard to industrial design here, as the 822 appears to be a much rounder affair and the other 800 series Windows Phones the Finnish company has signed off on. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem quite as thick as the downright brick-like Lumia 810 that T-Mobile recently laid claim to. It’s also worth noting that the model number attached to the device seems like a peculiar choice for a Lumia, but it’s not like Nokia doesn’t throw the occasional numerical curveball.

Perhaps naturally, this is isn’t the first time Verizon’s Lumia has been spotted. This whole sordid turn of events began earlier this week, when the notorious leaker(s) behind the @evleaks Twitter account distributed a render of the Verizon-bound Windows Phone (codenamed “Atlas”) for all to see, and it just so happens these new leaked photos match up quite nicely. Of course, a render can only tell you so much. Hell, even with these new images to consider, a number of the Lumia 822’s particulars still can’t be discern with any real degree of certainty. For now we’ll just have to wait until Verizon comes clean on this little guy’s existence — or for some new leaks to blow everything wide open.

If you were pretty impressed by what Nokia managed to do with Windows Phone 8 with the recent release of their Lumia smartphones, then you might want to cozy up to T-Mobile, as the mobile carrier in the US has just announced that they will be making available a variant of the Lumia 820 – calling it the Nokia Lumia 810 instead, sporting T-Mobile livery, no less. It does beg the question, how come there does not seem to be any variants of the higher end Nokia Lumia 920 instead? Having said that, let us take a closer look at what the Nokia Lumia 810 brings to the table.

The Nokia Lumia 810 is definitely a thing of beauty, there are no two ways about it for sure. It sports a minimalistic design and industry-leading navigation services, and will come packed with a sharp and gorgeous 4.3-inch OLED screen which boasts of a ClearBlack display. What is ClearBlack all about? Translated to English, it means that your colors will come in an eye-popping array, while blacks remain just as that – deep and dark. It also makes perfect sense if you are a fashionista and want to get the most out of the Lumia 810, as it comes with interchangeable charging shells which will arrive in black and, allowing you to juice up your device without having to mess around with the tangled web of modern day man known as wires.

Not only that, the Lumia 810 comes with an 8-megapixel camera that is accompanied by a Carl Zeiss lens. Should you want to perform video calls, fret not, as the Nokia Lumia 810 alone comes with a front-facing camera which enables you to hold video chats in crystal clear HD resolution. Of course, the smoothness of the video call depends on your network, so don’t blame the Lumia 810 for choppy video!

Preloaded software include Nokia Music, where you are able to enjoy free music that is streamed from a collection of more than 17 million tracks, meaning even the most picky person will still be able to find something that he or she likes. There is no word on pricing as at press time, but we will just wait for the end of the month, hoping that T-Mobile would have more concrete information by then.

Press Release
[ T-Mobile announces Nokia Lumia 810 in the US copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

T-Mobile recently announced it would be offering the Nokia Lumia 810 Windows Phone 8 device sometime in the coming weeks, and it had the handset at the Pepcom’s MobileFocus event at MobileCon today. But the hardware wasn’t really the hardware as such – it was a dummy unit with nothing on the inside. But it still showed off some of what the phone will offer users.

The Lumia 810 from T-Mobile comes in both black and cyan variants, and will have a 4.3-inch OLEG WVGA screen that could be very good-looking in practice, one might imagine. There’s also Windows Phone 8, an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front shooter for Skype and other communication apps, which could take very nice pictures, it’s reasonable to assume.

What we do know about the 810 is that it feels quite substantial compared to most contemporary smartphones, like in a way that actually isn’t altogether a good thing. The Lumia 810 could easily use a diet, in fact, and there’s a lot of space taken up around the not-yet-active screen devoted to bezel. It’s a bold, aggressive design choice, and one that could result in a chunky chic appeal, but it could also backfire. In a world where thin and light are the name of the game, this is a phone that stands apart, as you can see by the side-by-side shots with it and the iPhone 5.

Microsoft clearly doesn’t want anyone touching the Windows 8 software before it unveils it later this month. We’ll see what the 810 and its bigger brother the 920 deliver when Windows 8 finally ships.

Update: This device apparently has internals that could theoretically work, according to T-Mo, but in the end it might as well not, since no one who touched it could actually interact with its software or view it running.

When T-Mobile announced it would carry the LG Optimus L9 earlier today, I bemoaned the carrier’s lack of compelling exclusive devices. As it turns out, that may have been a bit hasty of me — Nokia has just let slip that its new Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 810 will hit T-Mobile’s shelves in the coming weeks.

As the name implies, the Lumia 810 is a mildly-tweaked version of the Lumia 820 that rival carrier AT&T will carry later this year. Most of the device’s basics remain the same — it still sports a 4.3-inch OLED Clear Black display (running at WVGA, for better or worse), Nokia’s slew of software additions, and an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera — but the 810 is obviously tuned to play nice with T-Mobile’s 4G network. What’s more, the 810′s Skype HD certified 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera is just a hair more robust than the VGA shooter used on the 820.

The Lumia 820 (and by extension, the 810) was positioned by Nokia as more of a mid-range device in comparison to the flagship Lumia 920, but T-Mobile’s Windows Phone fans are probably used to getting stuck with the mid-range treatment. After all, the last Nokia Windows Phone to hit that carrier’s magenta-tinged airwaves was the relatively dull Lumia 710 — not a bad phone by any stretch, but it came to look chintzy and unrefined compared to Nokia’s preferred Lumia 900.

Just as you’d expect, T-Mobile isn’t ready to talk price points just yet but I wouldn’t expect to pay much at all. Considering the 710′s low starting price tag (and the fact that plenty of retailers ended up selling for free), the shiny new 810 it shouldn’t ding your wallet too much with a two-year contract.

Microsoft is sending out invites for a Windows Phone 8 launch event on October 29, to be held at 10 AM PST. The  phone platform was shown off on stage during a joint event with Nokia, and also during another with HTC in September, but Microsoft is saying we’ll see more at its own show.

This could be when the company tells consumers when exactly they’ll get their hands on Redmond’s next mobile OS, and it comes just a few days after the official launch of the Windows 8 desktop and tablet platform. AT&T announced today that it would begin selling the Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia 820 and 920 in November, so maybe we’ll see these get a specific shelf date at this event.

Microsoft has been doing a lot to encourage developers to come on board for Windows Phone, with 100,000 apps as of June and likely quite a few more now. The OS also has a number of devices from both Nokia and HTC aimed at various budgets to help it gain some early traction. But it’s still going to have a hard time catching up to the number 1 and 2 mobile operating system’s, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

Maybe the best part of a Microsoft event? The possibility of yet another Ballmer meme.