Unsure if JioPhone Next will drive featurephone to smartphone migration

Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel, isn’t sure about the JioPhone Next offer from Reliance Jio. In the recent earnings call, Vittal indirectly said that the new 4G phone offer might not attract feature phone users in India.

According to a report, the Airtel CEO didn’t directly name the device, but the device he was talking about was the JioPhone Next for sure.

This is because of the price that Reliance Jio has decided to launch the device for. For the unaware, the JioPhone Next has launched for a price of Rs 6,499 in India. It will be available for users from the festive season of Diwali.

Vittal said that Airtel’s 4G smartphone offer is seeing high interest from the users. Airtel is offering a Rs 6,000 cashback to the users when they purchase a device for up to Rs 12,000. If you want more details about the cashback offer, please click here.

Analysts have called JioPhone Next price not disruptive
Analysts have said that the JioPhone Next pricing is not disruptive. There might be a reason why the JioPhone Next is priced too high. The price of the display panels and the chipsets have risen quite a bit due to snags in the supply chain.

Regardless of the reasons, the JioPhone Next isn’t going to attract many feature phone users in the country. Users might just go for another entry-level smartphone from a Chinese company. One thing that Reliance Jio will be counting on is to make the Android experience seamless for the users. If the software experience isn’t good, it would mean that Jio has failed to do what it was trying to do.

The device is yet to make it to the market, and even we haven’t reviewed it yet. So it is still too early to say whether the device is not worth the money. It might end up being one of the best entry-level smartphones from an Indian company. TelecomTalk