JioPhone pre-booking begins: Here is your chance to get it at Rs 500, no word on delivery date yet

Reliance Jio on Thursday officially kicked off the pre-booking process for its ‘free’ 4G feature phone, JioPhone, at 5.30 PM and customers can reserve the device both online and offline. Online bookings are available on both MyJio app and Jio.com website.

The ‘free phone’ is, however, not effectively free as customers will have to pay Rs 1,500 as security fee refundable after three years. "The security deposit is necessary to avoid any potential misuse of data," Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani had said regarding the Rs. 1,500 security deposit at the company’s AGM.

Much like its entry into the telecom market, Reliance Jio is set for another wave of disruption with its new 4G feature phone. With the launch, Reliance eyes removing the barrier of low availability of 4G-capable phones in the Indian market.

Reliance Jio expects the launch of the 4G feature phone to help it regain momentum in terms of bringing in more subscribers into its fold. The Mukesh Ambani-led company had until April 2017, registered over 112 million subscribers.

While its entry sparked a euphoria in the telecom market, the lack of availability of 4G-capable phones at prices that masses can afford has slowed down its growth in subscribers. All that and more could change now.

With its new launch, Jio will hope to disrupt the feature phone market as well. The availability of 4G phone at as low as Rs 1,500 is sure to spark a faster migration of people to the 4G network, something which will give the company a major boost in terms of subscribers.

The 4G feature phone will go on sale in a few days from now and the company will officially start receiving pre-bookings from today.

Ahead of the booking, Reliance Jio launched a massive rollout exercise for the 4G feature phone with plans to deliver at least 1 lakh handsets every day to retailers and a target of selling around 4-5 million phones a week.

Here are the highlights of the Jio Phone pre-booking:

# The confirmation SMS of the booking says that the users will receive another SMS giving details of the nearby store from where the JioPhone can be collected. 

# Crowds throng Jio stores across the country as website and app are running slow. 

# The Jio website and app server now seem to be working fine. Though they are a bit slow, but the bookings are are nor going through safely. 

# It has been over half an hour since the pre-boking for the JioPhone started but the Jio website and app are still running slow and crashing frequently. Most of the users are unable to find the booking option on the homepage of the website. 

# Jio says only pay Rs 500 to pre-book Reliance 4G mobile today, the remaining Rs 1,000 cwill have to be paid at the time of delivery

# Jio website is back but response is very slow. At times getting error message but one can proceed to registration now.

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# Jio's official website server goes down from the very first minute, complain users. 

Here is how the Reliance JioPhone can be booked:

Offline booking

Customers can visit authorised Reliance Jio retailer outlets such as Reliance Digital stores. Once the customer has furnished the Aadhaar details, he will be assigned a token number, which is necessary at the time of delivery of the phone.

Jio Phone Online booking

Those who wish to pre-book the phone online will have to log on to the Reliance Jio official website jio.com. As soon as the registration process begins on August 24, customers will see an image or button displayed on the homepage.

Customer will then have to select the Jio Free Mobile Phone Registration/ Pre-booking option. Fill in the required details such as address, contact details, shipping address. Security deposit of Rs 1,500 can be paid through debit/card or net banking.

Checklist for Jio Phone Online Booking

JioPhone delivery dates

As of now, there is nothing from Jio as far as the delivery dates of the phone are concerned. But, at the launch event, the company had said that the delivery would happen during the first week of September. The company had said that the phone would be available on first-come-first-serve basis.

The confirmation SMS you get about the booking on the registered mobile number says that the customer will receive another SMS with the store details from where the Jio Phone can be collected. 

Specifications

The JioPhone is a 4G feature phone with smart features like 2MP rear camera, VGA front camera, voice calling, 4G VoLTE support, Jio Assistant, GPS and more. The phone will come with 4GB internal memory that's expandable up to 125GB using microSD card.

In terms of technical specifications, the phone, available in black colour, sports a screen size of 6.09cm (2.4 inches) and packs a QVGA resolution of 320 x 240. The phone will run on the KAI Operating System and have a single Nano SIM slot.

While there is no confirmation on whether the feature phone will support WhatsApp or not, a browser and Facebook were spotted at the launch of the device.

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