Jio Phone Review

The Jio Phone has been one of the most anticipated product launches in India this year. First announced at Reliance's Annual General Meeting earlier this year, it is a 4G and VoLTE enabled feature phone, but the main reason for the frenzy around it is that it is effectively free - the hardware, at least. Buyers will need to pay Rs. 1,500 as a security deposit, but that's refundable after three years if you return the phone and meet all the terms and conditions. Reliance started accepting pre-bookings for the smartphone in August with deliveries promised to begin in September.
Categorising the Jio Phone isn’t as easy as it might seem. It looks and feels like a basic feature phone but has a few smart capabilities that make it stand out. With Jio’s entire lineup of apps supported, you can play movies and songs on the go. Plus, the tariff plan includes enough free data for people to actually make use of these capabilities. While this all sounds impressive, what is it like to actually live with the Jio Phone? We tell you all about it.
Reliance Jio Phone look and feel The Jio Phone looks and feels like a standard feature phone, with a small screen and a numeric keypad on the front. The whole thing is made of plastic and we must say that it is of a good quality. Weight is manageable and it fits well in the hand. The curved sides and edges mask the size of the phone quite well and it does not feel bulky to hold or carry.
The screen measures 2.4 inches and has a resolution of 240x320 pixels. Vertical viewing angles are bad and colours appear washed out, but that's to be expected keeping the price of this device. There's a recessed earpiece and a VGA front-facing camera above the screen. Below it are two function buttons, a D-pad, call and disconnect buttons, and the number pad. The buttons are well spaced and easy to reach, and offer good feedback when pressed.
The back of the Jio Phone has only the 2-megapixel camera and loudspeaker. The rear cover is removable and so is the 2000mAh battery. This phone has a single Nano-SIM slot and a microSD card slot. There's a Micro-USB port at the bottom along with a 3.5mm headphone socket. At the top, there's an LED torch which can be activated by long-pressing the up button on the D-pad.
In the box you get the Jio Phone and a charger with an attached Micro-USB cable. The phone comes with a Jio SIM pre-installed, and it needs to be activated before it will work. We used an older Jio SIM with this phone and it worked without any issues. Predictably, an Airtel SIM failed to be recognised.
Reliance Jio Phone specifications and software The Jio Phone is a feature phone but the specifications do look relatively impressive. It is powered by a dual-core processor manufactured by either Qualcomm or Spreadtrum, and has 512MB of RAM. There is 4GB of internal storage out of which only about 1GB is available to the user. Jio has reserved 1GB for apps while the rest of the space is for software updates and app caches. Storage isn’t a concern as you can use a microSD card of up to 128GB. You can transfer files to and from a PC using a USB cable after enabling USB mode.
For connectivity, the Jio Phone has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Bluetooth can be used to transfer files to or from other devices, and streaming music to a car head unit also worked. The Jio Phone can connect to Wi-Fi networks to access the Internet without using cellular data. These connectivity options aren't always supported by feature phones, which helps the Jio Phone stand out. There is 4G and VoLTE support and the phone latches onto the Jio network quite quickly. However, there is no hotspot feature so users hoping to make use of their daily free data allowance on other devices will be disappointed.

We have seen a lot of questions regarding the operating system the Jio Phone runs on. To clear them up, the Jio Phone runs on KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS. It looks like a lot of work has gone into improving the software, because the Intex Cloud FX (Review) running on Firefox OS had a few rough edges. The user interface is simple and quite easy to learn. There's a grid-style menu with easily identifiable app names and icons, and you use the D-pad to navigate around it. You can't reorder the icons but you can pin favourites to the top of the list. The Jio phone comes with an app store called JioStore, but it has nothing but Jio apps at the moment.
On the home screen, the four buttons of the D-Pad as well as the function and call buttons double up as app launch shortcuts. These are all predefined, and we couldn’t find any way to remap them to apps of our choosing. Alerts from all apps are clubbed together and can be accessed using the left function button on the home screen. The Settings app is well laid out and options are easy to find. There's a software update feature for over-the-air updates, which is rare in the feature phone segment. This should allow Reliance to introduce new features for the Jio Phone over time.
The feature phone has geolocation which uses GPS, cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi data if available to pinpoint locations. This is used for the SOS emergency function, where a user can long-press the 5 button on the number pad, and the phone will send an SOS message with location coordinates to predefined contacts. The Jio Phone also has NFC for payments but this isn’t currently available and might be enabled via a software upgrade at a later stage.
There are also other nice touches in the software - saved contacts are auto-suggested when you type in a number to dial, there's T9-style predictive text input for typing, there's a quick settings panel that you can get to by hitting the up arrow on the homescreen, you can launch video calls quickly by long-pressing the call button, and there are granular security and privacy controls in the Settings menu. However, navigation is a little slow and you have to forego expectations of smartphone-level functionality. Interestingly, we noticed that when typing or dialing a number, the keypad's slightly delayed beeps made the experience feel laggy even though it wasn't. When the phone was muted, we were able to type quicker.

We have seen a lot of questions regarding the operating system the Jio Phone runs on. To clear them up, the Jio Phone runs on KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS. It looks like a lot of work has gone into improving the software, because the Intex Cloud FX (Review) running on Firefox OS had a few rough edges. The user interface is simple and quite easy to learn. There's a grid-style menu with easily identifiable app names and icons, and you use the D-pad to navigate around it. You can't reorder the icons but you can pin favourites to the top of the list. The Jio phone comes with an app store called JioStore, but it has nothing but Jio apps at the moment.
On the home screen, the four buttons of the D-Pad as well as the function and call buttons double up as app launch shortcuts. These are all predefined, and we couldn’t find any way to remap them to apps of our choosing. Alerts from all apps are clubbed together and can be accessed using the left function button on the home screen. The Settings app is well laid out and options are easy to find. There's a software update feature for over-the-air updates, which is rare in the feature phone segment. This should allow Reliance to introduce new features for the Jio Phone over time.
The feature phone has geolocation which uses GPS, cell tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi data if available to pinpoint locations. This is used for the SOS emergency function, where a user can long-press the 5 button on the number pad, and the phone will send an SOS message with location coordinates to predefined contacts. The Jio Phone also has NFC for payments but this isn’t currently available and might be enabled via a software upgrade at a later stage.
There are also other nice touches in the software - saved contacts are auto-suggested when you type in a number to dial, there's T9-style predictive text input for typing, there's a quick settings panel that you can get to by hitting the up arrow on the homescreen, you can launch video calls quickly by long-pressing the call button, and there are granular security and privacy controls in the Settings menu. However, navigation is a little slow and you have to forego expectations of smartphone-level functionality. Interestingly, we noticed that when typing or dialing a number, the keypad's slightly delayed beeps made the experience feel laggy even though it wasn't. When the phone was muted, we were able to type quicker.