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Nokia Lumia 822 hands-on: Greater storage, fewer bucks

Verizon's take on Nokia's Lumia 820 offers its own design and double the gigabytes.

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After a long hiatus, Verizon and Nokia are friends again. This holiday season, Verizon will offer the Nokia Lumia 822 for $99 with a new two-year contract. I got a chance to get my hands on the variant of the Nokia Lumia 820 at Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 launch event in San Francisco.

Nokia Lumia 822 is Verizon's Nokia gamble (pictures)

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The Lumia 822 looks significantly different from the 820, partly to help it stand out on Verizon, no doubt. It's taller, rounder, and frankly more bulbous-looking than the more square 820. It also only comes in white and black, with a gray option that will likely land later down the road.

On the 820, the entire back cover pops off so you can change colors and swap in or out a back panel capable of wireless charging. On the 822, only the back panel lifts away. This makes it easier to trade out, but it also leaves the phone's original color around the rim.

Nokia Lumia 822
Verizon's version of the Nokia Lumia 820, called the 822, has 16GB of internal storage. Josh Miller/CNET

Apart from the design, the Lumia 822's most differentiating feature is the 16GB of onboard memory versus the 8GB of internal memory on the 820. For $99, that's a huge value jump compared with AT&T's 820 and T-Mobile's Lumia 810 ($149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate).

Apart from those variances, the device stays largely the same. There's 4G LTE support, an 8-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics (Nokia's favored branding,) a front-facing camera, 1080p video support, and Qualcomm's speedy 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor.

Nokia will start selling the Lumia 822 this holiday season.