Reliance JioPhone Next
Charanjeet Singh
First Impressions
The JioPhone Next's goal isn't to launch yet another smartphone, but to create one that's affordable and quick enough for millions of feature phone customers to upgrade to.
The sides of the JioPhone Next have massive bezels. The 5.45-inch 720p HD+ display is covered by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and has an anti-fingerprint coating if that's any comfort.
The phone has a full-plastic body with a perforated back that can be removed. On the rear, there is a Jio logo, as well as a large speaker grille at the bottom. The phone is well-made and comfortably fits in the palm of your hand.
Under the hood, the phone runs on a Snapdragon 215 processor and comes with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. The performance is sluggish, to say the least.
The operating system was created with the intended demographic in mind. To that end, there are a few tools such as Translate Now and Read Aloud that help to simplify the user experience.
Another notable feature of the JioPhone is the camera app. There's the Google Camera Go app, which has all of the same capabilities as the Android Go devices. While we haven't thoroughly tried the camera, our initial thoughts are positive.
The "most affordable smartphone" moniker on the JioPhone Next comes with a number of drawbacks. PragatiOS is the star of the show, and the camera features are too wonderful to pass up.