Reliance’s JioPhone line has always offered some of the cheapest phones in India and recently rumours were circulating that the company was working with Google to launch a new JioPhone running Android. Reliance has finally announced this partnership as well as the JioPhone Next.
The JioPhone Next has a candy bar-style design with a full touchscreen and a single rear and front facing camera. Reliance says that the new phone offers the Google play Store. Screenshots also show apps such as Google Maps, Chrome and YouTube.
“Our teams have optimized a version of our Android OS especially for this device. It’ll offer language and translation features, a great camera, and support for the latest Android updates,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted in a pre-recorded segment during the Reliance stream.
They have also promised the latest Android updates and a subsequent press release also noted that the device will get “feature drops”. A slide in the keynote also showed off certain smart features, including the Google Assistant, screen reading, language translation and augmented reality filters in the camera app. The press release also confirmed that the camera app would offer HDR and night mode functionality, which suggests that it might be the Google Camera Go app.
Reliance also confirmed that the JioPhone Next would launch on September 10th but there is no official pricing as of yet. The firm does say that the new phone will be “by far the most affordable smartphone not just in India, but globally.” That’s an incredibly bold claim, so we’ll be eagerly waiting for official pricing.
