PitStop Tech: Nokia Lumia 1020 up for pre-order in USA and Germany

The Nokia Lumia 1020 is first coming to the United States on July 26th, and you can start pre-ordering it tomorrow, but now you can also pre-order it fully unlocked with no carrier ties. Online retailer Negri Electronics has added the 41-megapixel camera superphone to its catalog and you can reserve yours now. The price for the Lumia 1020 is set at $735.50 and all three color versions (black, yellow and white) are available. The price is that high because it is not subsidized and in exchange you get to use the phone with no contract and on different compatible carriers. The Nokia Lumia 1020 offers a revolutionary camera that has a large ⅔” sensor, Xenon and LED flash, optical image stabilization and all of that packed into a relatively slim body. Nokia Lumia 1020 was officially unveiled just last week and understandably caused quite a lot of excitement. It's the long awaited 41MP PureView Windows Phone-powered smartphone that had been in the rumorlands since Nokia 808 PureView came around. Nokia Lumia 1020 will hit the USA on July 26 exclusively via AT&T. It will cost $300 with a two-year contract and the carrier's pre-order campaign is going live tomorrow. Lumia 1020 will hit the shelves worldwide before the end of September.

Meanwhile, the retailer Negri Electronics is taking pre-orders for the unlocked version of the cameraphone(or phamera as i like to call it). You can book your unit for $735.50, but there is no specific shipping date. We guess you'll receive it shortly after the official premiere on AT&T. Yesterday, we also saw the Lumia 1020 go on pre-orders in Germany, but users there will have to wait longer to get their units. The European version of the device that is supposed to launch by the end of Q3. Europeans will also need to pay quite a lot more to own the Lumia 1020, with pre-orders going for the hefty €800 (we suspect final price will be a bit lower, though). As for the rest of the world, you will have to wait until the end of September before the Nokia Lumia 1020 arrivesWould you be willing to fork out that kind of dough just to ensure you are one of the early adopters? Last week brought us the launch of Nokia’s Lumia 1020, and the announcement confirmed all the great hardware we had been hearing about in rumors leading up to the handset’s launch. That part of the 1020′s debut was all good news, but the event wasn’t without a few sour notes – like how the 1020 will sell on-contract for $300, making it the most expensive Windows Phone option for a carrier to offer yet. Subsidized is one thing, though; what’s the 1020 actually going to sell for, full price? We get an inkling today – or at least learn what one retailer believes users will pay for the phone. That’s a nice chunk of change, sure, but it’s about in line with what we’d expect to see. After all, Negri sells the Lumia 925 for around $660, and an $80 premium for the 1020′s 41-megapixel camera sounds pretty darn reasonable. We still may see someone come up with a lower price as we near the start of 1020 availability, but at least we now know where to place the bar to start.While in

Germany we have seen pre-orders taking place already. Nokia Lumia 1020 is available for pre-orders before its official date, according to the reports. Nullprozentshop and Notebooksbilliger online shopping stores have started taking pre-orders for the recently launched Windows 8 smartphone in Germany. The smartphone is available at £691 (€ 799 approx). In Nullprozentshop, users who are pre-ordering the smartphone can pay monthly instalments at £57 (€66.58). In Notebooksbilliger, the user will get the smartphone with mobile network carriers such as Vodafone, O2 and T-mobile Company starting from £215 (€ 249 approx). A couple of German retailers have been found to already offer the Nokia Lumia 1020 on pre-order and both places are advertizing the phone for €799 SIM-free. This sort of pricing hardly comes as a surprise since the current generation iPhone, which is traditionally the most expensive smartphone to buy, costs €789 for the 32GB version in Germany. And, as we saw with the announced US pricing ($300 with a 2-year contract with AT&T), this time around Nokia considers it has a true winner on its hands and is ready to price it as a true premium product. The announcement of the Nokia Lumia 1020 made a big splash in the industry this week. Talking about the phone on stage, Nokia's CEO however only touched briefly upon European availability, saying the phone is coming to key European markets this quarter. And that's that. In our Nokia Lumia 1020 preview, published earlier this week, we made a wild guess that the Lumia 1020 will cost around a €700 on the Old Continent and we called it "way more than Nokia can afford to charge for its flagship at the moment." The price of €799 is quite steeper, so we are eagerly awaiting to see the actual price at launch. Unfortunately, the two stores, which have the Lumia 1020 on pre-order, don't have any launch date to suggest, meaning they know as much as we do right now. Leaked documents suggest that Telefonica (O2 and its sister networks) will be launching the phone in September, so that's as accurate launch date as we are going to get right now. The same documents suggest that the Lumia 1020 will be sold in a 64GB version on O2 network, so if O2 is your carrier of choice, you might want to abstain from pre-ordering the device from third-party retailers. If you live in the US on the other hand, and you are thinking of pre-ordering the phone (official pre-orders there start July 16), you would be best getting it from the Microsoft's online store as they would throw in a free camera grip to sweeten the deal.