First Look At The ‘Effectively Free’ Reliance Jio Phone

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL). 

(Photo: PTI)

In July, billionaire Mukesh Ambani announced the launch of Jio Phone, a 4G-enabled feature phone with added capabilities of a smartphone, in a bid to expand the subscriber base of India’s youngest telecom operator.

The much-hyped phone that targets a market, which contributes two-thirds of India’s handset sales, is “effectively free”. Effectively, because it is being offered at a Rs 1,500 security deposit to be refunded after three years.

The delivery of the phone is yet to start but BloombergQuint managed to get its hands on one.

Contrary to expectations, the Jio Phone cable, which will allow users to connect their phones to any television set and stream content, was not part of the box.

The phone comes with 4 gigabytes of storage, with an option to expand up to 128 gigabytes through an external SD card. It has a VGA camera on the front and back. It also has a dedicated button for giving voice commands. Actually, most of the buttons on the phone have dual functionalities.

All Jio applications come pre-installed. In the initial test, video streaming on the JioTV worked flawlessly, while video chat was good as well.