At the 41st Reliance annual general meeting (AGM) held last month, the company’s Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani announced the JioPhone 2, successor to the immensely popular JioPhone from last year. The “smart” feature phone will be available for booking starting tomorrow, i.e. August 15th. Consumers will also be able to purchase the phone…
At the 41 st Reliance annual general meeting (AGM) held last month, the company’s Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani announced the JioPhone 2, successor to the immensely popular JioPhone from last year. The “smart” feature phone will be available for booking starting tomorrow, i.e. August 15 th. Consumers will also be able to purchase the phone online in a flash sale to be held on Thursday.
The first JioPhone 2 flash sale will begin exactly at 12 PM on the official Jio website. Like other flash sales, you can expect the JioPhone 2 to go out of stock soon after the sale kicks off. So if you want to get your hands on the JioPhone 2 before others, you will need to be quick and be ready to order the phone as soon as the flash sale starts on Thursday.
The Reliance JioPhone 2 has been priced at Rs.2,999, making it significantly more expensive than the first-generation JioPhone, which can be purchased for just Rs.501 as part of the ongoing Monsoon Hungama exchange offer. No such exchange offer has been announced for the JioPhone 2 yet.
JioPhone 2 vs JioPhone: What’s New?
The Reliance JioPhone 2 is very similar to the JioPhone when it comes to hardware specifications, except for a few major differences. Perhaps the most notable difference is the design. Instead of the original JioPhone’s candybar design, the JioPhone 2 features a BlackBerry-like design with a QWERTY keypad that also includes a 4-way navigation key. Even though the design is quite different, the JioPhone 2 sports an identical 2.4-inch display with QVGA resolution. Jio has not yet revealed which processor it is using on the JioPhone 2, although it is being speculated that the feature phone might be powered by either a Qualcomm Snapdragon 205 or a Spreadtrum 9820 dual-core chipset clocked at up to 1.2 GHz. In the memory department, JioPhone 2 comes with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory, just like its predecessor. If you would like to add more storage to your JioPhone 2, you can do so by adding a microSD card.
Moving on to the cameras, Reliance JioPhone 2 sports a 2MP camera at the rear and a VGA resolution camera at the front. Again, the camera specifications are identical to the JioPhone. In terms of connectivity, the JioPhone 2 comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy, GPS, NFC, FM radio, 4G VoLTE, and VoWiFi. The phone also includes dual SIM card slots as opposed to just one on the JioPhone. In terms of battery life, the JioPhone 2 should be able to deliver impressive battery life, thanks to a 2000mAh capacity battery. Even though 2000mAh may not sound very impressive, you should keep in mind that the JioPhone 2 is not a smartphone. When compared to most other feature phones available on the market, the JioPhone 2 actually packs a larger battery.
Now let us talk about the software on the JioPhone 2. Like its predecessor, the JioPhone 2 runs on the KaiOS operating system, which is currently the second most popular mobile operating system in India. KaiOS does not offer a rich selection of apps when compared to platforms like Android or iOS but you do get all the popular apps like Facebook, YouTube, and even Google Assistant. JioPhone owners will also be able to download these apps on their devices starting tomorrow, i.e. August 15 th. Jio had promised to bring WhatsApp to the JioPhone platform on Independence Day but the company has now confirmed that users will need to wait slightly longer.
