Sunday, August 12, 2018

JIO PHONE 2 & JIO PHONE'S SUCCESS : STRATEGY EXPLAINED

Jio's Strategy and Success of Jio Phone 

Not just like any other feature phone launch, which goes unnoticed, the launch of Jio phone created quite a buzz across the globe. This was partly due to fact that it had handful of smart features but mostly due to it's effectively free price tag.


Jio phone plans

Before the launch of Jio phone , there was market base of more than 400 Million 2G subscribers in India. And as you might have guessed they were mostly on old feature handsets. Considering such a huge consumer base who would be happily willing to switch to 4G network, these potential users were let down by two factors -No such 4G enabled feature phone availability and high prices for 4G services which were definitely not affordable for people still on feature phone. 

If Jio would have just lowered down prices of plans for feature phone users, this would have let to a creation of demand for 4G enabled feature phone, only to be absorbed by players like Micromax, Intex and Nokia. It would have created another problem for Jio i.e. Users might have switched to some other telecom service provider like Airtel and Vodafone.

The aim of Jio was to lock down it's potential new users into Jio ecosystem as it will help them start a new stream of revenue. Launching Jio phone not only made Jio realize this goal but also absorb the demand that would have got created, just as previously done by launching Reliance Lyf brand of affordable smartphones at the time of launch of Jio internet services. 

And for those who think INR 1500 deposited in form of what Jio calls as security deposit is refundable after 3 years, there is clear mention that it is gonna happen only if Jio phone users get recharge done each and every month for 3 years. It is highly unlikely that anyone would be living with this hardware for so long.






So with a clear objective of capturing feature phone market share, Jio till now has been quite successful in it. As of July 2018, Jio phone had a market share of around 47% in Indian feature phones market. In the first quarter of 2018, Jio phone had global market share of around 15%. What's even more impressive is the fact that this feat of becoming global leader in feature phone market was achieved by Jio phone in just 10 months.

Jio Phone 2

Second generation Jio phone or as they call it Jio phone 2 can be seen as an iterative version of Jio phone. It comes with a few improvements and more importantly these improvements address some of the biggest problems of first generation Jio phone. 

Jio phone came with a standard T9 keyboard layout, which made providing any input to phone very cumbersome. Jio phone 2 improves on it by having a standard QWERTY layout for keyboard. This makes typing experience much better especially in apps like Whatsapp and Facebook.


Watching YouTube on Jio phone was never a fun experience. Thanks to Jio phone 2, the screen aspect ration has changed and now the screen is much wider making video watching experience much immersive.
Jio is asking you to hold them $43.69 (3000 INR) for a brand new Jio phone 2. 

Though Jio phone 2 provides some functional improvements over it's last model. It will not make much of a difference when it comes to overall experience as they have not improved on the most important aspect of a feature phone like Jio Phone i.e. voice input.

What people don't understand is that adding INR 2000 more can get them a decent Android smartphone like Nokia's Android One phone. I am not saying that it's gonna be lag free experience but still far better than what Jio phone 2 has to offer, especially considering the fact that target audience for Jio phone are feature phone users. 

Friday, August 10, 2018

JIOPHONE : REALLY A SMART FEATURE PHONE ??

By now it's high chance that you would have come across some article on internet or at-least a post on social media taking about Jio phone. For those who are still unfamiliar, it's somewhere between smartphone and a feature phone, you can call it a hybrid because it packs some features of a smartphone in body of a feature phone.

Jio phone

My experience

Keeping it straight and simple, this review comes from someone who gets all possible work done on a smartphone. So, as expected I was really annoyed by the fact there is no good voice input and you have to rely on that crappy keypad in many apps to do so.


Keypad on Jio phone


The keypad experience was worse than I expected. I had to press a key multiple times to register an input. To be sure that it is not a problem with my unit, I got my hands on another unit and still faced the same problem. It is quite unfortunate that Jio phone suffers from this issue cause it spoils the whole experience of navigating and interacting with device, though software was kind of okay. There were even times when I gave upon it's User Interface.





Cameras on this thing are perfect example of you get what you pay for. They are really very bad and what else one can expect from phone at this price point. I honestly think they should have provided a better front camera (for better video calls) at the expense of rear one cause anyway not even 20% of people are gonna use it for taking pics.
Two very strict requirements for decent video calls are that internet speed should be very good at your location (which is still a problem at many places) and you must be in very well lit environment.

Though Jio phone was released around an year ago in August of 2017, it is yet (as of when this post was published) to receive an update for WhatsApp and YouTube. As per company's announcement, it is expected to get these features starting from 15th August 2018. It might also get Google maps after YouTube. Other applications on Jio phone like Facebook and Jio apps work just fine when internet connectivity is good. As of now, voice input is limited to opening apps, making calls, sending messages and Google search on Google assistant.