Its been barely three months since Verizon launched the Nokia Lumia 822 for $99.99 on a two-year contract, and now the U.S. carrier has decided to offer the smartphone for free.

Earlier in Dec, 2012, Verizon decided to drop the price of the Lumia 822 to just $49.99 in a bid to match the Best Buy offer. Now, with the carrier offering the smartphone for free, the deal can't get any better, especially considering that a no-contract handset will set you back by $450. Those in the U.S. who are looking to snag a WP8-powered Nokia handset, hop over to your nearest Verizon store and sign-up for a two-year contract with the carrier.

The mid-range Lumia 822 is a good alternative for the hard to procure Lumia 920. The smartphone sports a 4.3-inch ClearBlack touchscreen display with 800 x 480 pixels resolution. A dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor clocked at 1.5GHz powers the device.

The Lumia 822 measures 5.03 x 2.69 x 0.44 inches and weighs 4.97oz. The Lumia 822 also packs in an 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss autofocus primary camera with dual-LED flash, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing snapper, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of on-board memory with the option to expand via microSD card, and an 1800mAh battery. The smartphone runs on Windows Phone 8 OS.

Verizon offers the phone in three hues - white, black, and gray. If you've been wanting to own a WP8 handset for a while now, what are you waiting for? Grab the Verizon Lumia 822 deal ASAP!