JioPhone orders halted after ‘millions’ already pre-booked a unit

Reliance Jio is currently not accepting JioPhone orders until further announcement.

Reliance Jio has temporarily stopped accepting JioPhone pre-bookings as “millions” have already placed orders for a unit, the company announced on its website. The company opened pre-bookings at 5:30PM on Thursday, August 24 and was reportedly flooded with orders via both the Jio website and MyJio app. The servers for the two channels even slowed down momentarily due to the huge amount of JioPhone orders.

Going by the company’s word on its website, over a million people pre-booked a JioPhone by paying Rs 500. As of now, the Jio channels do not intimate of next schedule of when JioPhone will open for pre-bookings again.”We will inform you when pre-booking resumes,” is all that the Reliance Jio website reads for the time being.

Although interested customers have to make a payment of Rs 500 payment to book a JioPhone unit, the 4G VoLTE enabled phone is billed ‘effectively free’. Reliance Jio announced the phone at the 40th AGM last month and customers need to pay Rs 1,500 as a security deposit that will be refundable after three years. If you are planning to own one or already place the order, you will need to pay remaining Rs 1,000 at the time when you receive your JioPhone.

In terms of tariff, Reliance Jio has paired the JioPhone with Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan plan priced at Rs 153 per month. As announced by the company, voice calls including local and national outgoing calls will be free for lifetime and customers will also unlimited internet with an upper limit of 500MB per day.

Although the phone is touted as a feature phone by many, the Reliance JioPhone does pack some ‘smart’ specifications to meet modern usage. It has a 2.4-inch QVGA display and will be powered by a dual-core chipset clocked at 1.2GHz. It comes with a 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, that is further expandable via microSD card. A powerful camera performance shall not be expected from the JioPhone but it will feature a 2-megapixel rear camera and a VGA front camera for video calling. It houses a 2,000mAh battery which is said to offer 12 hours of talk time and 15 days of standby. For connectivity, it has Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, Wi-Fi and NFC connectivity to facilitate contactless payment solution.