Reliance announces "the most affordable smartphone" in collaboration with Google, exclusive to India

[VirusDumb]

Summary

 So at the time of writing this topic the Reliance's AGM (annual grand meeting) is still live but we already have the most interesting thing announced the JioPhone next, by far the most affordable smartphone  exclusive to the Indian market, to be available for purchase on 10th September.

 

And there haven't been any article published yet so the quotes and everything I know is from the live meeting which is still in progress, I'll put a clip in the source of I find one.

 

Quotes

Quote

"In India there are about 300 million users who are unable to escape the inefficient and exhausted 2g services, because even a basic 4g smartphone remain unaffordable for them. Therefore an highly affordable smartphone is essential to make India 2g mukt. Today I'm announcing that the teams of Google and Jio have made a break through smart phone we call the JioPhone next a fully featured smartphone supporting the whole suite of apps from Google and Jio as well as the the playstore where the users will be able to access the whole universe of android apps. JioPhone next is powered by an extremely optimised version of the Android operating system, jointly developed by Jio and Google. While being truly affordable, the JioPhone next is packed with cutting edge features like voice assistant, automatic read aloud of on screen text, language translation, and much more. This is a testimony to a global technology giant and a national  technology champion.

And as I have promised the JioPhone next will by far be the most affordable smartphone not only in India but globally." 

-Mukesh Ambani, Chariman and Managing director of Reliance

 

 

 

Quote

"At a time when everything is moving online, it's important to make technology accessible and useful for everyone, I'm excited that today we can announce the next step in this vision with the affordable Jio smart phone, our teams have worked together to optimise a version of our Android OS especially for this device, it'll support language and translation features, a great camera and support for the latest Android updates, it is made for India and will open new possibilities to millions of people who will experience the internet for the very first time"

-Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google and Alphabet.

 

My thoughts

 So first thing is that I'm confused who the smartphone is for, the JioPhones have been their for quite a while, the first JioPhone was a feature phone which ran Kai OS, it was launched back in 2017 and at some point of my life, in early 2018 to be more precise, I had used the original JioPhone, as amazing it was, it was also terrible, the software wasn't a problem, it could be used to surf the internet, watch YouTube, chat on WhatsApp, surf Facebook, everything an average Indian needed, but it was sort of handicapped without a touch screen and small screen, which voided the whole purpose, it felt weird to control with the keypad and the buttons didn't have any quality, as they used the hardware of a Chinese company named LYF, but as this is a Collab with Google, I think they'll use quality hardware which feels good, (the original JioPhone felt like holding the dryest piece of plastic in the world), one thing tho, they did unveil a lot about the software, fir example a recent Instagram post of Google India just pointed out that the camera will have night mode, we still don't know what hardware specifications it has, neither do we know it's pricing, so I think it's still under work for now and we won't get any idea of the hardware until we get closer to September 10th

Sources

 

 

 

 

 

[thechinchinsong]

Nice to see that Google has a good focus on the budget phones and the emerging markets for smartphones in less than middle class areas. Hopefully this venture turns out well so more modern technology can benefit the less affluent.

[thechinchinsong]

4 minutes ago, Caroline said:

[tinfoil] 

In my country you can get a chinese phone for less than $50, it's not that much when you compare it to let's say a Samsung that costs $250, the cheap phone is really bad quality but it serves its purpose I guess, those turds come with whatsapp preinstalled (kinda like prebuilt PCs come with Chrome) so people get to use it faster, apparently everyone use it for EVERYTHING like it's the only platform available.

I'm out of the loop and observe how everything plays from afar, still have my ol' reliable dumbphone and that's all I need. 

[/tinfoil]

I mean it's better that an Indian company and Google have their data than the CCP, which would probably be the alternative in India due to the presence of really cheap phones from Chinese phone manufacturers. It's not ideal, but it's certainly better than the alternative.

[Vishera]

4 minutes ago, Caroline said:

tinfoil

It's not a tin foil,You are smart and see the reality we live in.

The average person needs to be enlightened.

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

They play nice and offer them "better sevices" and using a ton of social engineering and propaganda try to convince people that indeed the services they promote are, indeed, better.

i don't really understand where the conspiracy is here. Thats just what running a for-profit business is.

[VirusDumb]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

[tinfoil] 

Some may think this is great news because "cheap phone = good" right? well, NO! this is terrible news, they're targeting 300 million people -that's nearly as much as the entire population of the USA- to siphon out all of their data.

They play nice and offer them "better sevices" and using a ton of social engineering and propaganda try to convince people that indeed the services they promote are, indeed, better.

 

Replacing obsolete tech with alll of the lovely features of Google services, Whatsapp and Facebook can only be good! /s

 

We've already past the point where having a smartphone was a exclusive item for the rich, these tech giants hit the jackpot when they realised they can suck any kind of information, not by brute force but by flooding the market with crap devices and IoT bs.

 

In my country you can get a chinese phone for less than $50, it's not that much when you compare it to let's say a Samsung that costs $250, the cheap phone is really bad quality but it serves its purpose I guess, those turds come with whatsapp preinstalled (kinda like prebuilt PCs come with Chrome) so people get to use it faster, apparently everyone use it for EVERYTHING like it's the only platform available.

I'm out of the loop and observe how everything plays from afar, still have my ol' reliable dumbphone and that's all I need. 

 

Don't get me wrong, having better tech is great, the problem is that better tech is in hands of a bunch of shady companies that do as they like with your data and use it for God knows what.

[/tinfoil]

Well if you're coming up with this theory now, you're almost 5 years late my paranoid dear mate (I'm doomed with the curse of rhyming, with horrific and scary timing). In 2016 they targeted the entire population of India by providing free 4g internet for 6 fucking months with a free 4g SIM which you could just go to a store and buy for free with a ID proof. And within the first fuckin week they gave away 426 million, SIM cards and by the end of the 6 month almost everyone had a Jio SIM card, these cards not only came with free internet of 1 GB per day but also came with it the suite of Jio apps such as Jio music (now Jio savn), Jio live TV, Jio movies, Jio news, Jio games, Jio this, Jio that, Jio mama, and also subscription to some premium Indian streaming services like hotstar (now renamed to Disney+ hotstar), and then when the 6 months ended it had become the largest mobile operator in India, but that didn't stop em, since almost everyone had Jio, it was easy for them to earn more than enough profit with cheaper prices than any other company, and that's what they did, making India the country where the internet is cheapest, and they didn't stop they keep improving their suites and released new services, my favourite being the Jio fiber which is ₹  999 monthly, comes with 150mbps internet, live TV channels, and free Disney+ and Amazon prime video, and I'm using that internet to view this site and uploading this article while watching the 3rd episode of Loki on the free Disney+ which came with it.

 

So are we happy? Yes.

 

Is this a conspiracy? No, just profit business, making the richest man in India richer. Good old sugar coated capitalism

 

Does Google has anything fishy? No, Sundar Pichai has been wanting everyone in the world to acces the internet, ever since 1993 when he first used it (not telling that cuz I've met or talked to him)

 

 

 

 

Talking about shady companies Jio has Government's support, and government uses some of its services, if they really could, they could've fuck up them by now

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

15 hours ago, SeAsOn3 said:

Summary

 So at the time of writing this topic the Reliance's AGM (annual grand meeting) is still live but we already have the most interesting thing announced the JioPhone next, by far the most affordable smartphone  exclusive to the Indian market, to be available for purchase on 10th September.

 

And there haven't been any article published yet so the quotes and everything I know is from the live meeting which is still in progress, I'll put a clip in the source of I find one.

 

Quotes

 

 

 

My thoughts

 So first thing is that I'm confused who the smartphone is for, the JioPhones have been their for quite a while, the first JioPhone was a feature phone which ran Kai OS, it was launched back in 2017 and at some point of my life, in early 2018 to be more precise, I had used the original JioPhone, as amazing it was, it was also terrible, the software wasn't a problem, it could be used to surf the internet, watch YouTube, chat on WhatsApp, surf Facebook, everything an average Indian needed, but it was sort of handicapped without a touch screen and small screen, which voided the whole purpose, it felt weird to control with the keypad and the buttons didn't have any quality, as they used the hardware of a Chinese company named LYF, but as this is a Collab with Google, I think they'll use quality hardware which feels good, (the original JioPhone felt like holding the dryest piece of plastic in the world), one thing tho, they did unveil a lot about the software, fir example a recent Instagram post of Google India just pointed out that the camera will have night mode, we still don't know what hardware specifications it has, neither do we know it's pricing, so I think it's still under work for now and we won't get any idea of the hardware until we get closer to September 10th

Sources

 

 

 

 

 

If you think that Reliance would put quality hardware on this, then you are delusional

[VirusDumb]

19 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

If you think that Reliance would put quality hardware on this, then you are delusional

I meant better than the previous Jio Phones

[WolframaticAlpha]

9 minutes ago, SeAsOn3 said:

I meant better than the previous Jio Phones

Previous jiophone quality wasn't that bad. It wasn't on Nokia's level, but for 600 rupees, it was good enough(you really can't ask for much more than that)

[RejZoR]

How much it'll cost then? 20€ ? I've seen smartphones for 60€. They are basic, but it can run and do stuff. And that's in EU where such stuff isn't particularly or exceptionally cheaper than elsewhere. So, I wonder what's the deal here. Probably like someone suggested above, Google is in it for the data and will give few cents to Jio to offset the costs a bit.

[VirusDumb]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

How much it'll cost then? 20€ ? I've seen smartphones for 60€. They are basic, but it can run and do stuff. And that's in EU where such stuff isn't particularly or exceptionally cheaper than elsewhere. So, I wonder what's the deal here. Probably like someone suggested above, Google is in it for the data and will give few cents to Jio to offset the costs a bit.

Well I've seen a phone ₹5000(a few bits less than 60€), from a company named "Samsung" it's called the Galaxy M01 core and it's pretty basic and can do stuff as well and that's nearly 60€ for a phone from a reputed brand and with a year of warranty it comes with a 720p screen,larger storage of 16gb ,and it's actually a competition to another cheaper phone from Nokia called Nokia 1 which is more popular, it costs ₹4.1k and it has smaller storage and smaller screen

[VirusDumb]

10 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Previous jiophone quality wasn't that bad. It wasn't on Nokia's level, but for 600 rupees, it was good enough(you really can't ask for much more than that)

I meant the material and built, of the product, it felt like holding the dryest plastic brick in the world, and the buttons were really hard to press a d annoying, especially the dpad, it was really thin and all connected, if your fingers were thin enough to keep on them properly, then you may not have the strength to push it down.

[WolframaticAlpha]

14 hours ago, RejZoR said:

How much it'll cost then? 20€ ? I've seen smartphones for 60€. They are basic, but it can run and do stuff. And that's in EU where such stuff isn't particularly or exceptionally cheaper than elsewhere. So, I wonder what's the deal here. Probably like someone suggested above, Google is in it for the data and will give few cents to Jio to offset the costs a bit.

Buying phones on a contract isn't allowed in India. All phones have to be unlocked. Jio found a loophole and started selling locked handsets for 49 rupees(<1 dollars), and then it would make the money back on jio data, since without data, the phone was essentially a paperweight. Combine that with the fact that the phone had whatsapp and google assistant and jio's data plans were quite inexpensive and you had a blockbuster phone.

 

The main purpose of the jio phone was to bring people onto 4G at any cost(reliance is a behemoth and could absorb any losses)

[Vidhyut]

On 6/27/2021 at 9:29 AM, WolframaticAlpha said:

Buying phones on a contract isn't allowed in India. All phones have to be unlocked. Jio found a loophole and started selling locked handsets for 49 rupees(<1 dollars), and then it would make the money back on jio data, since without data, the phone was essentially a paperweight. Combine that with the fact that the phone had whatsapp and google assistant and jio's data plans were quite inexpensive and you had a blockbuster phone.

 

The main purpose of the jio phone was to bring people onto 4G at any cost(reliance is a behemoth and could absorb any losses)

I doubt buying phone on contract isn't 'allowed' in India, I might be wrong though. But I do remember contract phone available some years back. If you remember, Reliance and Tata Indicom (CDMA) used to sell phones on contract basis. Later, even companies like Vodafone and Airtel used to offer iPhone and Samsung phones on contract basis, but the cost were high and they didn't had much takers. Probably contract phone strategy didn't worked out in India. 

[xtroria]

People be here talking about "muh privacy"

 

Poor people in 3rd world country just want better life, privacy can shit itself if it means they can have better QoL

 

Same thing why many people in china support CCP, many of them are seeing and feeling the development.

[LAwLz]

I wonder how much work they did together, and what they did to make the special version of Android "extremely optimized". 

[SansVarnic]

-= Cleaned =-

[WolframaticAlpha]

15 hours ago, Vidhyut said:

I doubt buying phone on contract isn't 'allowed' in India, I might be wrong though. But I do remember contract phone available some years back. If you remember, Reliance and Tata Indicom (CDMA) used to sell phones on contract basis. Later, even companies like Vodafone and Airtel used to offer iPhone and Samsung phones on contract basis, but the cost were high and they didn't had much takers. Probably contract phone strategy didn't worked out in India. 

Instead of selling contract phones, they would sell you a phone where the sim would be irreplaceable, and then they would sell it through their own store. The major difference b/w on contract phones and these phones was that they did not have a modified firmware, and you weren't obliged to pay for a plan. You could use your phone as an ipod touch, something very rarely allowed by on-contract vendors. If you could somehow replace the SIM, you could use some other carrier.

 

And all updates could be swappable. Because I remember that I installed the Airtel Blackberry 7 update to my bold 9790, even though I had bought it from vodafone, with locked sim. In UK, you had to do some hacking to get the O2 updates working, since they would provide the best performance and phone would remain cool.

 

They rolled this back, because you could do a lot of stuff on wifi, which was not really prevalent back then. 

[VirusDumb]

On 8/15/2021 at 9:42 AM, xtroria said:

People be here talking about "muh privacy"

 

Poor people in 3rd world country just want better life, privacy can shit itself if it means they can have better QoL

 

Same thing why many people in china support CCP, many of them are seeing and feeling the development.

Well not sure if India still falls under the 3rd world country but privacy is still a concern for the people here. There are privacy policies issued by the government to limit what companies collect about the citizens, but they don't limit the government itself from collecting data of citizens using the internet, but still a majority of people are concerned about their data and privacy here on India