Nokia Lumia 1020 Back In Stock and Ready for Orders at AT&T

After it was offered for pre-order, Nokia’s 41-megapixel packed Lumia 1020 quickly sold out on AT&T. The phone will officially be available today, and AT&T will have inventory in retail stores and its website is now listing the Lumia 1020 as being in stock. The phone retails for $299.99 with a two-year service agreement and $659 for month-to-month users who do not want to sign a contract.

Another channel that the Lumia 1020 will be sold through will be through the Microsoft Store. I’ve confirmed with several retail locations across the country and all have said that they had received shipment of the Lumia 1020 as of Thursday evening, but the devices won’t be available for retail sale and purchase until Friday. Microsoft’s website is a little bit more ambiguous on availability language, still noting the “preorder” language at the time of this writing late Thursday evening and that preorders will ship when inventores arrive.

Microsoft also has a promotion where purchases also include a free camera grip with a two-year contract.

READ: Nokia Lumia 1020 Review

The Lumia 1020 has been a highly praised smartphone for both Nokia and Microsoft. The device, which runs on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 ecosystem, packs a whopping 41-megapixel camera for what Nokia dubs as “lossless zoom,” allowing photographers to crop into the photo, giving the effect of zoom, without significant degradation to image quality. If you do the same thing, for instance, with an 8-megapixel camera, you’ll end up with a cropped photo with just a few megapixels of clarity. And not only does the phone pack in a large number of pixels, but it also has a large sensor area, allowing for better light capture as well as for good subject matter isolation, like shallow depth of field.

The device also packs in a 6-element Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, LED autofocus and video light, and oversampling technology to help reduce noise. It comes with optical image stabilization to allow for better low light photography and shake-free video recording.

Barring a significant release from a rival later this year, I think that Nokia may have created the best smartphone of 2013 given the innovations that the Lumia 1020 packs in.