Can Jio and Nokia Give Feature Phone Sales a Big Boost?

While we talk about the smartphone industry quite a lot on this podcast, we don’t mention feature phones nearly as much. We decided to change that on this episode, as games editor Rishi Alwani and podcast deputy Aditya Shenoy join host Pranay Parab to see why the feature phone industry continues to remain a big part of people’s lives.

We start by talking about the Nokia 105 and Nokia 130, and why these phones are very important for the Indian market. We look at the features these phones offer and why people continue to buy feature phones in India. We also discuss why companies such as Nokia continue to persist with feature phones.

We talk about the ecosystem in feature phones and talk about the fact that lots of software developers actually make a lot of money in this segment. Rishi mentions some big names that have made crores in revenue from feature phones in the past and talks about the feature phones of the future.

We discuss the staggering number of feature phones that are still sold every year across the world, and talk about the reasons why smartphones haven’t been able to replace feature phones entirely just yet. We talk about crucial features and the price bracket, which makes it hard for people to buy smartphones.

The discussion then moves to Reliance Jio’s impending arrival on the feature phone scene. We speculate about the Jio feature phone, its price, and whether it could have 4G enabled by default. We mention the Jio data leak and why this should bother people who might want to buy this phone.

That's all for this week's episode of Orbital, which you can subscribe to it via Apple Podcasts or RSS or just listen to this episode by hitting the play button below.