Jio Phone 2 to Be Available on August 16 via Flash Sale

Jio Phone 2, the successor to the highly popular Jio Phone, will become available for purchase in India starting August 16. The new handset, which sports a QWERTY keyboard, will be up for grabs via a flash sale, which hints at limited stocks. The Jio Phone 2 flash sale will be held only on Jio.com at 12pm. Interestingly, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani had said at the company's 41st AGM that the model will become available for grabs on August 15, but it looks the plans have been pushed to a day later. The Jio Phone platform is also receiving YouTube, while the release of WhatsApp will be in batches. Registrations for Jio GigaFiber, however, are slated for August 15 only, via Jio.com and MyJio app.

Jio Phone 2 price in India, booking details, specifications

As announced at Reliance Industries' 41st Annual General Meeting (AGM), the Jio Phone 2 price in India has been set at Rs. 2,999. The Jio Phone 2 price in India is Rs. 2,999, which users will have to pay while placing the pre-order. The company hasn't revealed any details on the part of its Jio Phone 2 shipments. We can safely speculate some delay in the delivery as there is likely to be a huge demand for the affordable feature phone that sports a QWERTY keyboard and features such as Google Assistant integration and WhatsApp support.

The dual-SIM (Nano) Jio Phone 2 runs KaiOS and features a 2.4-inch QVGA display. Under the hood, there is 512MB of RAM and 4GB of onboard storage that is expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB). The phone has a 2-megapixel rear and a VGA front camera. Also, it supports connectivity options such as 4G VoLTE, VoWi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and FM radio. There is a dedicated button for voice commands that helps you activate Google Assistant while on the go. Besides, the phone packs a 2000mAh battery.

Jio GigaFiber registrations

In addition to Jio Phone 2 bookings, the Mukesh Ambani-led company will take registrations from Jio GigaFiber from August 15. Customers will need to use the MyJio app or visit the Jio.com to register for the broadband service. The rollout of the service will be on basis of the number of registrations. In simpler terms, the company will prioritise the rollout of the Jio GigaFiber service to those localities from where it receives the major amount of registrations.

Different Jio GigaFiber plans haven't been announced yet. However, it is clear that subscribers will need to pay a refundable amount of Rs. 4,500 to get the connection along with the router for the service. The service will notably be free for the first three months and is touted to offer as much as 1Gbps of download speeds.

Apart from giving the broadband service for computing devices and smartphones, Reliance Jio will offer a GigaTV set-top box to provide over 600 TV channels as well as a large number of movies and songs to HDTVs. The Mumbai-based company is also in plans to bring a bunch of smart devices that will work on the Jio GigaFiber network to enable home automation in the country.

Will Jio Phone 2 help WhatsApp, YouTube reach the next billion users in India? We discussed that on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.