Jio Phone made a huge impact on the feature phone and entry level smartphone market in India. The phone had massive amount of pre orders that the company had to stop accepting the orders. It was thought that the pre orders will go back live once again after Diwali. But, it does not look like it will be live again soon.
According to the source Jio has halted the production of the Jio Phones and are in talks with Google to introduce an Android smartphone. This might be due to the tough competition from Airtel and Vodafone as they offer better Android smartphones for a bit more asking price. Whereas Jio Phone runs on KaiOS which does not have much applications when compared to the millions of applications available on Android. Though Jio Phone comes with the company’s Jio portfolio of applications, they are still working with Google and Facebook to bring their apps. Anyhow, it is not clear whether Jio would bring an Android based smartphone soon enough.
Recently, Airtel partnered with Karbonn to launch A40 Indian, an Android smartphone priced effectively at Rs. 1,399 .This smartphone features a 4 inch WVGA display and is powered by 1.3 GHz Quad Core SoC coupled with 1GB of RAM. It comes with 8GB of internal storage which can be further expanded upto 32GB via microSD card. For optics, it has a 2 MP primary camera and a 0.3 MP secondary camera. The phone is backed by a 1400mAh battery. The phone will cost you Rs. 2,899 but after recharging for Rs. 6,000 in three years, you will get a cashback of Rs. 1,500 to your Airtel Payments Bank account.
On the other hand, Vodafone might also announce an Android smartphone manufactured either by Karbonn or Lava. Even, Nokia Nokia might bring a 4G 3310 to India as hinted by HMD Global’s Indian head. Only time will tell how cheap smartphones will be in near future.
