The effectively free JioPhone is one of the cheapest smartphones that are available in India. In fact, if you recharge the mobile with the specific price point, the smartphone will become absolutely free. However, due to high-demand, the smartphone was produced in China. Now due to a production glitch in China, it looks like the Indian business tycoon Ambani has planned to manufacture the phone in India and thanks to a glitch in the Chinese production line.
The company has already brought a vendor in Chennai to start the manufacturing action. The first 6 million phones were manufactured in China and the next 10 million phones will be manufactured by a Chennai based phone manufacturing unit.
The company made the claims that, it will sell 200 million phones by the end of December 2018 and there will be a stock of 5 million phones per week. However, due to a glitch in the production line, the second phase of pre-booking haven’t started and we will inform the same as soon as the port for the pre-booking reopens.
If we look at the tech specifications of the JioPhone, the phone comes with the coloured non-touch display with 2.4-inch screen real estate. The phone is powered by a quad-core processor with 512 MB RAM and 8 GB onboard flash storage with a dedicated micro SD card slot (up to 128 GB).
The phone runs on custom Kai OS, which offers features complete set of JioApps (Jio Music, Jio Cinema, My Jio, and Jio Mag). So, you can enjoy the features of Live TV, music and other services. The company has also promised to add many more features in via future software updates. One has to note that, the phone comes with a locked SIM feature, so, one can only use Jio SIM and the phone does not support other SIM cards what so ever.
One has to recharge once in every month with at least ₹152, which includes 512 MB 4G data with free voice and video calls for 28 days. One can also choose the data plans like the ₹309, which offers double the data compared to the ₹152 package.
After launching JioPhone, network providers like Airtel and Vodafone has partnered with Indian smartphone manufacturer to offer entry-level smartphones at a much lower price tag. However, this phone will cost you a lot more than ₹1,500, in fact, one has to pay an upfront cost to get the same.
Recent leaks also suggested that the company might launch a new version of JioPhone based on an Android operating system with more than 2.4 billion apps.