Reliance Jio’s mantra for entering any new market has been the same i.e. to offer the best possible service at the lowest possible price. This has worked wonders for it in the telecom space and it is hoping for a repeat in the laptop segment. It launched an affordable laptop JioBook with 4G connectivity in India earlier this year. The company is now working on a cloud laptop with the goal of reducing the cost of ownership significantly.
Jio Cloud Laptop With Monthly Subscription Under Works
In a new ET report that cites a Jio senior official, it has been claimed that Jio is working on releasing a new cloud PC in the Indian market. It says the ownership cost for a laptop is roughly Rs 50,000 but with the Jio cloud laptop, the company is aiming it reduce it significantly.
The Jio cloud laptop will essentially be a “dumb terminal” and will cost under Rs 15,000. All of its storage and processing will take place on the cloud, more specifically JioCloud. These are some of the biggest contributors to the increasing cost of owning a decently specced laptop. The company will instead offer monthly subscriptions to let users pick a plan as per their storage and processing power needs. The pricing for these plans has not been finalized yet.
The report quotes the source, “The cost of a laptop depends on its hardware like memory, processing power, chipset etc. The greater capacity of these hardware increases costs as well as battery power. What we are doing is, we are stripping all this and the whole processing of the laptop will happen at the back end in the Jio cloud.”
Jio is said to be in talks with multiple laptop manufacturers like Acer, Lenovo, and HP for cloud laptop production. The official further added the same laptop can be used by multiple people with personalized services. The best part is buying the new cloud PC will not be the only way to experience it. Jio’s cloud PC software can be installed on any desktop or even a smart TV.
As for th operating system, the Jio cloud laptop is expected to run on different platforms including Windows. A particular release timeline has not been mentioned but it is expected to arrive in the coming months.
The currently-available JioBook 11 is an affordable notebook with 4G connectivity priced at Rs 16,499. It sports an 11.6-inch LED display and is powered by an octa-core MediaTek MT8788 processor. There is 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB onboard storage with microSD card expansion support. The laptop boots the JioOS operating system out of the box.
