On July 21, Mukesh Ambani, chairman Reliance Industries limited had said at company’s 40th AGM, “ The JioPhone will be available for user testing in beta from 15th August and for pre-booking from 24th August. And JioPhone will be physically available to those who have pre-booked, on a first come first serve basis, September onwards.”
But, in all likelihood “September onwards” deadline for the delivery of JioPhone is going to be missed and September End may be the new availability date. Again that is not confirmed. Also, the date when pre-booking will again commence is not known at the moment. Even the Jio officials don’t have an update.
On 24th August, The Mobile Indian had visited a Reliance Digital Xpress store ( Noida), and the executive over there had assured us that if we book the JioPhone now, we will get the phone by the first week of September. So at the face of it, looks like either Reliance Digital Store executive was sharing wrong information with the customers or Jio is not ready with the shipments.
Either way, the onus is on Jio to share the facts and clear mystery about the availability of JioPhone and when will pre booking again start. Here the question arises when the back end infrastructure and logistics were not ready why did Jio go ahead with the announcement of JioPhone and raised the expectations of the consumers? At the AGM Ambani had said, “We are targeting to have 5 million JioPhones available every week.” At this pace how will Jio’s sales team meet the target set by their chairman? Frankly speaking, even we don’t have the answers because Jio has not been forthcoming with sharing updates related to the developments that are taking place. Most of the updates what we are getting are through unverified sources or from off the record conversations which have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
JioPhone has been projected as a 4G-enabled feature phone that will cost consumers Rs Zero by Jio. However, one has to pay Rs 1,500 as a security deposit, which will be 100 percent refundable after three years. The company is providing free voice calls, unlimited data and Jio apps for Rs 153 per month with Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan plans to JioPhone customers. Further, there are two sachets, one with Rs 24 for two days and Rs 54 plan for a week. Users will enjoy the same benefits as the monthly recharge of Rs 153.
Coming to the specifications, the JioPhone features a 2.4-inch QVGA display with a screen resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The phone will be powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Processor which will either Spreadtrum SPRD 9820A or QC8905 along with Mali 400 GPU. The phone is backed by a 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, which is expandable up to 128GB via microSD card.
On the camera front, the device comes loaded with a 2-megapixel rear camera and a 0.3-megapixel front camera. It is juiced up by a 2000mAh battery, which the company claims to give a Talk time of 12 hours and Standby time of 15 days. On the connectivity front, it supports 4G VoLTE, Bluetooth 4.1 with BLE, GPS, NFC and Micro USB 2.0. It supports 22 Indian languages and the device will also come with TV-Cable that will allow users to connect their JioPhone with TV ( not only Smart TVs but also CRT TVs) to watch live TV. The company has priced the TV pack for Rs 309 per month.