On Thursday, during an event in New York City, Nokia unveiled the Lumia 1020. This new Windows Phone offers a 41-megapixel camera and such a focus on photography that one could almost forget to use it as a phone for a moment.

After some boasting about what Nokia has done to advance camera technology in smartphones — did you know the company holds over 450 imaging patents? — the "next chapter in smartphone photography" was shown off. This smartphone will "change how you shoot, how you create, and how you share" photos forever, the folks at Nokia kept emphasizing.

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The idea behind the Lumia 1020 is that it could quite literally allow you to find a needle in a photo of a haystack (as demonstrated during the event). This detail drives in the "zoom reinvented" tagline Nokia's pushing. By oversampling when images are captured, the Lumia 1020 is able to offer you the ability to zoom into images without loss of detail, Nokia says. You'll get blur-free, crisp, bright images — no matter how good or bad the light situation is. A feature called "dual capture" means that the Lumia 1020 simultaneously takes 38-megapixel and 5-megapixel photos. This means that you'll have both a high-resolution version of photos as well as a lower resolution one that you can share more quickly to a social media network of your choice.

The Lumia 1020 will be available in yellow, black, and white through AT&T. It has a 4.5-inch display, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage (plus an additional 7GB of free SkyDrive cloud storage). Its PureView camera has a Xenon flash and an F/2.2 lens. In the front, there's a 1.2-megapixel wide-angle camera.

Nokia's latest gadget will be available through AT&T starting July 26. It'll set you back $299.99 (with a 2-year service agreement). Pre-orders begin on July 16.

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