Windows Phone 8 Release: Nokia Lumia 620 To Launch In 2013 As Lumia 920T Hits China

Just when you thought you knew everything Nokia has to offer when it comes to Windows Phone 8, the company added another gadget to its lineup. On Wednesday, the company unveiled its lower-end Lumia 620, which is expected to ship in January in select countries.

Nokia’s newly announced device is the cheapest addition to the Lumia family thus far. It will cost around $249 and comes with a 3.8-inch ClearBlack display, a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chip, 8GB of storage and 512 GB of RAM. Like the other devices in Nokia’s Lumia brand, the 620 will boast camera features exclusive to the company such as City Lens.

It will also come equipped with Nokia’s Cinemagraph, Maps and Music apps out of the box. These additions from Nokia help the company to distinguish its own Windows Phone 8 products from other handsets, such as HTC’s Windows Phone8X, running the same operating system.

The lower-priced handset offers a 5-megapixel camera on its rear and a front-facing VGA resolution camera on the front. It also has NFC capabilities, which makes it easier to wirelessly communicate media and information between devices.

Nokia said that the phone would launch in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa starting in January, ZDNet reports. Canada and Europe are expected to follow closely.

Users will have a variety of colors to choose from, including lime green, orange, magenta, yellow, cyan, black and white. However, it is unclear if all of these variants will launch in each region.

The Lumia 620 unveil isn’t the only announcement to come from Nokia on Wednesday. The Finland-based manufacturer revealed on Wednesday that it would launch a specific version of the Lumia 920 for China Mobile. The Lumia 920T will be the first Windows Phone device to run on China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network, CNET reports. The handset is likely to hit the market before 2013 and will sell for 4,599 Yuan, which equates to about $740.

“People around the world are responding positively to the new Lumia devices, and we’re confident that the enthusiasm will extend to China with the Lumia 920T,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement, according to CNET.

Nokia’s line of Lumia products is the company’s primary contender to stake a claim in the saturated smartphone market. The company made the switch to Windows Phone, making Microsoft’s mobile operating system its primary software, back in February 2011.

While Windows Phone doesn’t account for too much of the market share, as statistics from the IDC revealed, the platform is expected to grow tremendously over the next four years. By 2016, the IDC says Windows Phone will grow from claiming 2.6 percent of the mobile market share to 11.4 percent. Nokia has also been ranked as the top manufacturer of Windows Phone devices, according to a study conducted by AdDuplex.