Two new Windows Phone 8 smartphones, the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820, were unveiled at a joint Microsoft and Nokia event today. The handsets include built-in wireless inductive charging, PureView cameras, and dual-core processors, a change from the duo's single-core approach in the first round of Lumias.

The screen on the phones measure 4.5 inches diagonally, and the 920 will have five body color options: white, gray, black, yellow, and red. The Lumia 820 has a wider range of color options, including purple and blue. The Lumia 920 will have 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, and a 2000mAh battery.

The 820 differs in the body design, though it uses the same polycarbonate material, and has a 1650mAh battery. The 820's back cover snaps off to provide access to an SD card slot.

The PureView camera inside the phones is not the 41-megapixel monster found inside the Nokia 808 PureView phone, but is instead 8 megapixels. The camera is also able to record 1080p video, and both the lens and assembly are mounted on tiny springs to help keep it stable even if a jittery person is holding it.

Nokia has also refined its suite of location apps for Windows Phone 8. The phones will include Nokia Drive—just as the first-generation Lumias did—which will feature turn-by-turn and voice directions. Nokia Transport has been updated with departure times for public transportation. Nokia Maps now includes maps of indoor areas, and allows users to overlay venue information over the street view of an area as seen by the phone's camera, using augmented reality in a feature called City Lens.

To charge wirelessly, the phone uses a FatBoy charging pillow with Qi inductive charging technology.

Windows Phone 8 has also received some tweaks. On the Lumia phones, users can now make smaller-size tiles to arrange on the home screen, which helps with the low-ish information density that we noted in our Nokia Lumia 900 review.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft, noted that all Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 apps still work with Windows Phone 8 and scale to the new Lumia's larger screen. Windows Phone 8 also now allows users to take screenshots.

In the camera app, Microsoft has replaced the zoom bar with the ability to pinch-zoom. A new feature called Cinemagraph allows users to create a composite picture of an intended target from several photos, in order to eliminate people or objects that get between the subject and the camera. Using several photos, users can identify and remove interlopers to get a complete photo of the subject. Photo synchronization has also been more tightly integrated between Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and SkyDrive, such that Lumia 920 owners can take a photo on their phone and sync it automatically to their Windows 8 tablet or PC via a SkyDrive folder.

Timing, pricing, and availability will all remain a mystery at this time. Microsoft and Nokia promise these details will be announced in the fourth quarter of this year.