Reliance Jio 4G VoLTE enabled feature phone has been the talk of the town recently. The telecom company has been planning the launch its 4G feature phone for quite some time now. It is now expected that the rollout will come sometime later this month or by August 2017. New reports have suggested that the network service will introduce its new mobile tariff rates. While reports and rumours have been doing the rounds regarding the price of the 4G VoLTE feature phone, a new report in The Economic Times had suggested that it will come with a price tag of just Rs 500. Meanwhile, the launch of 4G feature phones would be in phased manner and it is expected that in the first phase, around 10-11 lakh phones would come to the market. The company might go with a similar strategy that it had applied with the introduction of its Lyf brand of 4G smartphones. Here is a list of 5 things, including expected features and launch date, to expect from the Reliance Jio 4G VoLTE feature phone.

1. The announcement about the launch of 4G feature phones might be done at the Reliance Industries’ Annual General Meeting. The AGM this year, has been scheduled on July 21 in Mumbai. The handset will be marketed under Lyf brand of phones and will be sold through the Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail stores. The company has already tested the 4G feature phone at its facilities in Chennai and some other centres.

2. While the price may seem too good to be true, earlier reports had suggested that the device could be in the range of Rs 1,800, but Jio might subsidise the price to bring it within the range of Rs 1,300-1,500.



3. The Jio 4G feature phone is expected to come with 512 MB RAM and will have an internal storage of 4 GB and also include an SD card slot for expanding storage. The phone is expected to sport a 2-megapixel camera. The devices are expected to be WiFi enabled and come with near field communications (NFC) technology, which will help the user to make digital transactions too.

4. The 4G VoLTE enabled feature phone, if priced around the range that is expected, will massively disrupt the dynamics of the Indian mobile market, as Jio’s network is entirely on 4G VoLTE, and thus it left out the huge majority of feature phone audience in India. Reliance Jio, which already has, over 100 million subscribers in India, has seen growth slow down.

5. Companies like Lava and Micromax had recently launched feature phones with 4G capabilities. But, these devices are priced at the Rs 3,000 and above range. It should be remembered that a 4G VoLTE feature phone will come with limited features. It will not be able to offer a better experience for the consumer as there is only so much you can do on a feature phone, especially a Rs 500 one. At the end of the day, the idea with 4G data is that a user consumes it to watch content, and we’ve seen video consumption grow in India with improved mobile data connectivity.