Hasta La Gadget!

You’re looking at the future, friends. Nokia just announced the spectacular Lumia 920, which could very well be the most feature-packed phone ever made. Along with wireless charging, a super display, an S4 SoC, the 920 also features NFC for easy wireless music streaming. Just tap the phone to a compatible speaker dock and the music automagically starts playing on the other device.

Nokia announced two devices that will support this feature right away. Both made by JBL, the speaker dock shown in the photo here along with a set of headphones use NFC to sync up with the Lumia 920/820. The speaker dock also sports a wireless charging pad.

Sony introduced a similar function last week at IFA. The Sony Xperia T uses NFC in a similar way. Sony also outed NFC-enabled speaker dock and headphones, although unlike the JBL version for the Lumia line, the speaker dock lacks wireless charging — mostly because Sony’s Xperia T doesn’t feature wireless charging itself.

It’s been widely rumored that Apple is building NFC into the next iPhone. But it seems Nokia and Sony beat them to the punch.

Nokia has finally put weeks of speculation to rest at its New York press conference today, as the Finnish phone company just pulled back the curtains on its newest flagship handset: the Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 920.

As expected (thanks to plenty of pre-event leaks), the new Lumia sports a 4.5-inch 720p display, a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, a 2,000 mAh battery. Again, not exactly the sort of spec sheet that will set your world on fire — it’s on par with many current high-end Android devices — but Windows Phone has never been the most hardware-intensive mobile OS out there.

That said, there’s plenty to like about the Nokia’s refined take on Windows Phone 8 hardware. It retains the same design language featured in Nokia’s previous high-end Windows Phones (full disclosure: I still love the colorful, angular, polycarbonate chassis Nokia uses), and that said, it would be easy to mistake a 920 for one of its predecessors were it not for the new Windows Phone logo centered along the bottom edge of the screen. The Lumia 920 also supports Qi’s wireless charging standard, so it all takes to charge the thing is to rest it on with a “Fatboy” charging pillow. Yes, really. Fear not though, the 920 still has a bog-standard microUSB port for charging the old-fashioned way. What’s more, the Lumia 920′s screen plays nice with touch input even when a user is wearing gloves — where has this feature been all my life?

Though the device itself doesn’t offer up many hints, a (possibly over-dramatic) introduction video reveals the inclusion of a PureView sensor. Granted, the Lumia 920 only features an 8.7-megapixel sensor compared to the chunky PureView 808′s 41-megapixel behemoth, but Nokia’s Jo Harlow calls the new handset the “best smartphone camera” out there. The Lumia 920′s camera isn’t quite as whiz-bang amazing as the original 808′s was (no zooming without losing image quality, sadly) but additions like Nokia’s “Floating Lens” image stabilization and Carl Zeiss optics help make Harlow’s claims believable.

Given the 920′s focus on capturing top-notch photos and video, Nokia is also playing up the 920′s PureMotion HD+ screen tech, something that Harlow points as providing “better than HD resolution.” Nokia’s favored ClearBlack technology is present and accounted for too, and it’s gotten quite a boost — the device can detect ambient light (say, sunlight for instance) and make adjustments to brightness and color to enhance viewability.

Developing…