Nokia Lumia Icon for Verizon is finally announced

We've heard the rumors, we've seen the leaks, and now it is time for us to finally welcome the newest member of the Lumia family – the long-anticipated Nokia Lumia Icon for Verizon. Yup, in case you're wondering, that is the same handset that has been popping up from here and there over the past few months under the presumably scrapped Lumia 929 moniker, and the rumor mill did a great job at spoiling the surprise for us. But nevertheless, perhaps the wait for the Lumia Icon was worth it. 

One of the peculiar things about the Nokia Lumia Icon is that it sports a premium, metal-made chassis, unlike most other Lumias and most other high-end smartphones, for that matter. The back of the device, however, is made of polycarbonate, which is a lot more common among Nokia's smartphones. At 166 grams, the Icon is one weighty handset, and with a thickness of 0.39 inches (9.9 mm) it is far from the slimmest phone around. The power and volume keys are positioned on the Icon's right side in a typical Lumia fashion, along with the mandatory camera shutter.

The 5-inch OLED display on the Nokia Lumia Icon is one of the phone's several selling points. It offers a resolution of 1080 by 1920 pixels, resulting in a typical for a high-end handset PPI figure of 441 pixels per inch. That the touchscreen has super-sensitive properties doesn't come as a surprise – in other words, you'll be able to operate it with a pen, a fingernail, or even through a glove. Nokia's ClearBlack tech has been implemented for improved outdoor visibility. A protective layer of curved Gorilla Glass 3 covers the handset's front.

Processing power is delivered by a 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 SoC, which means that we should be expecting the Nokia Lumia Icon to be a flawless performer, especially when it is backed by 2GB of RAM. Up to 32GB of storage space (actual capacity will be less) are available on the Icon for all your music, documents, photos, and videos.

And speaking of photos and videos, one of the highlights of the Nokia Lumia Icon is its 20MP PureView camera with optical image stabilization, ZEISS optics, double LED flash, and plenty of manual controls offered by the pre-loaded Nokia Camera app. The snapper is, presumably, identical to the one found on the Lumia 1520, which is great news for the latter takes awesome pictures. The Nokia Lumia Icon can be set to save two files for each shot – a full-res 19MP image for cropping or editing and a scaled down 5MP image of size that is ideal for sharing online. Photography aces would be glad to know that the smartphone can also save in RAW (DNG) format for further post-processing. 

Videos taken with the Nokia Lumia Icon should look and sound outstanding as well. Thanks to its four built-in microphones, the smartphone can capture high-quality audio even at very high volume levels. Nokia's software takes advantage of the sensor's large size by enabling pixelation-free zoom of up to 3x while recording videos. 

Further specs for the Nokia Lumia Icon include a non-swappable 2420mAh battery, built-in wireless charging, and FM radio. You get NFC as well thanks to the secure element embedded in the phone's Nano SIM card. 

On the software side of things, the Nokia Lumia Icon will ship with Windows Phone 8 GDR 3, and the Lumia Black update will be pre-loaded. These bring extra space for even more live tiles on the home screen, a smoother multitasking experience, screen orientation lock, driving mode, and more. 

Naturally, there's a whole bunch of goodies thrown on the Lumia Icon by Nokia itself, from the splendid Nokia Here app with free turn-by-turn navigation and offline maps to the Nokia Mix streaming radio service that lets you store up to 12 hours of sweet tunes on your smartphone. Furthermore, there's Nokia Cinemagraph for making animated GIFs and Nokia Beamer for sharing your phone's screen through a web browser.  

The Nokia Lumia Icon will be available in the US via Verizon for $199.99 on a 2-year contract. It is scheduled to launch on February 20 and you can already pre-order one at a retail Microsoft store. If you grab one from Microsoft by March 16, you'll also get a free Nokia Wireless charger.

source: Nokia, Windows Phone Blog