Ahead of its commercial launch, Reliance Jio Infocomm launched 4 4G smartphones of LYF brand. These smartphones are named as Earth 1, Water 1, Water 2, and Water 3. The company will launch its Wind and Fire series phones in the next phase.
The phones are available for Reliance Jio employees and will be introduced in the market for customers by late December.
Currently, the Mukesh-Ambani led company is conducting beta tests of its services, by making them accessible to its employees.
Smartphones from Reliance Jio
The new Reliance Jio smartphones, introduced in the market, are all powered by Octa-Core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processors. LYF Water 3 has a capacitive 10 point multi-touch screen, while the other three phones have capacitive 5 point multi-touch. The phones support Graphic Processor Unit (GPU) Adreno405 @ 550 MHz.
The memory of all the smartphones is 32 GB, which may be expanded to 64 GB. The dual SIM smartphones support LCD screens. For efficient picture quality, the phones have a rear camera of 15 megapixels and a front camera of 5 megapixels. The LYF smartphones have features like High-Definition (HD) Voice, HD Video Calling, Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and VoWi-Fi.
All of the LYF phones support a number of technologies and bands. The phones support all GSM bands like 850 MHz, 1800 MHz, 900 MHz and 1900 MHz; LTE-TDD Band 40 of 2300 MHz; UMTS WCDMA bands like 2100 MHz and 900 MHz; and LTE-FDD Band 3 of 1800 MHZ or Band 5 of 850 MHz. Additionally, 802.11 b/g/n and BT-V4.0 are also supported on these smartphones.
The LYF phones have a good battery life, as they are equipped with Lithium-ion Polymer batteries (Li-Po) with capacities ranging between 2400 mAh and 3500 mAh. The operating system of all of the phones is Android with different versions of Lollipop. Water 1 and Earth 1 have Lollipop 5.1.1 while Water 2 and Water 3 have Lollipop 5.0.2.
All of these smartphones are priced between INR 15,499 and INR 25,800. Costs of Water 1, Water2, and Water 3 are INR 17,399, INR 15,499, and INR 16,799, respectively. Earth 1 is priced higher than these, at INR 25,800.
Preparations of Reliance Retail
The smartphones will be sold through Reliance Digital stores across the country. Reliance Digital runs1,379 retail outlets, in 225 cities of India. Reliance Retail has recently signed agreements to build its sales and distribution network of 1,200 distributors and 1.5 lakh stores.
This network will provide support to develop the VoLTE and VoWi-Fi device ecosystem. Additionally, the retailer has also entered into partnerships with a number of e-commerce websites to push the sales of its LYF phones.
Under Reliance Retail’s partnerships with phone manufacturers, handsets like Lenovo Vibe Shot, Intex Aqua, LG Spirit LTE, YUPHORIA, LG G4 Stylus, YUNIQUE, and YUREKA Plus, among others, have already been launched in the market. The company is also training 30,000 trade channel partners to support the launch of its 4G services.
