For Just Rs 500, You Can Book Reliance’s Jio 4G Feature Phone Now

For just Rs 500, one can book Reliance's Jio 4G feature phone on Thursday at 5.30 pm. The pre-booking of Reliance Jio 4G VoLTE-enabled feature phone opened for the customers. The company has launched a massive rollout exercise for the Jio Phone with plans to deliver a lakh handsets every day to retailers and a target of selling around 4-5 million phones a week.

The VoLTE-enabled feature phone was made available for beta testing from August 15 to August 23 before throwing open the pre-booking. “Reliance Jio has started reaching out to retailers about the handset and has begun educating them about the delivery process. The company’s target is to deliver a lakh handsets per day, which will be done though Reliance Digital outlets and Jio Centers as well as other touch points,” a Reliance employee said.

Jio Phone will be marketed under RIL’s Lyf brand and will be sold through Reliance Digital stores as well as Jio Centers. Reliance Digital operates a chain of consumer electronics stores through a network of 1,996 outlets across 700 cities besides 1,072 Jio Centers. Besides, it will reach out to around 10 lakh retailers for sale of the devices. “The company will be delivering 5 million handsets every week and expects that it will be able to sell easily anywhere between 4-5 million in the first 5-6 months,” the official said.

Each dealer will be given 40 Jio Phones through Jio vouchers and this will be on a first come first served basis. The dealer can purchase up to 40 phones in first instance by paying Rs20,000, which means Rs500 per voucher per phone. This condition has been set to ensure that the handset distribution is evenly spread. The money will be reimbursed to the retailer once he sells the phone. The buyer will be making a 3-year locked-in security deposit of Rs 1,500. Of this, the retailer will get back his payment of Rs500 and will transfer the remaining Rs1,000 to the company.

The pre-booking process can be done using the BHIM app. For this Reliance rolled out a Jio point of sale (PoS) version pre-embedded with the pre-booking voucher functionality. A retailer needs to download this for making payment on the vouchers in order to book the phone. To make the deliveries, Reliance has launched a massive exercise by roping in logistics companies as well as its own workforce. It plans to deliver a lakh handsets every day to meet the expected rush.

The phones are being imported from Taiwan and will land at various location such as Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Kolkata this week. From here the devices will be sent to Jio Centers and Reliance Digital stores from where they will be directly sent to the dealers.

The Jio Phone comes with a 2 megapixel rear camera and a front VGA camera. It will have a 512 MB RAM and 4 GB internal storage with the option of expanding it to 128 GB using an SD card. The handset will come with a 2,000 mAh battery and will have a 2.4 inch screen.