The Most Interesting New Phone

    The Nokia Lumia 920 is almost certainly going to be the most interesting phone released this fall that isn't an iPhone.

    It's yellloooowwwww

    Or one of several other colors. But I only see yellow.

    It's curved like a banana

    It's got a cool camera

    View this video on YouTube

    youtube.com

    The entire lens assembly floats, so it optically stabilizes pictures and videos taken with its 8.7-megapixel, 1080p camera — meaning better photos in low light and less shaky videos. (Than if it wasn't, anyway. Don't think it'll be as good the demo above, though — it's staged, and the previous "demo" Nokia passed off was faked entirely.)

    Oh, and Cinemagram is built into the camera, so you can make things like this.

    It's got a cool screen

    Nokia's calling the 4.5-inch, 1280x760 screen a PureMotion HD+ display — which sounds deeply stupid and disingenuous — but it's actually fairly impressive. Made with curved glass, it's the fastest LCD — the refresh rate theoretically means no blurriness if you're scrolling through something quickly — and brightest HD display ever shipped on a smartphone. Plus, Nokia's promising it's actually usable in sunlight. We'll see (or not, har har).

    So cool it works with gloves on

    Your smartphone does not do this.

    It charges without wires

    It's using an industry standard called Qi and they're working to open wireless charging stations in Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf locations — which is kind of a big deal, because it's the first real push for legitimate wireless charging infrastructure. (It uses a combination of Bluetooth and NFC to pair and stream with the JBL Power Up speaker above.)

    It even has a cool charging pillow

    It's called the Fat Boy Charging Pillow.

    It's running Windows Phone 8

    Windows Phone 8 is potentially very cool. It does a lot of cool things.

    View this video on YouTube

    youtube.com

    But — and this is a big but — so was Windows Phone 7. And it never quite lived up to what so many people (like me) wanted it to be. Hoped it would be. It never gained the traction it needed to, so it never built an app ecosystem that anywhere near as rich as the iPhone or Android. Will Windows Phone 8 be different? We won't know until it launches. After it launches, even.

    All that said, it's hard to deny that Lumia 920 is probably the most neatest phone we've seen this year — and with Motorola and Samsung's big releases out of the way, the only thing likely to come close (or beat it) is a Nexus phone from Google.