As we were all waiting for Jio 5G devices to launch in India, Jio seems to have another ace in its sleeves. Reliance Jio is working on a low-cost laptop called the “JioBook”, according to a report. The new laptop is said to be based on a forked Android build that could be dubbed JioOS. The firmware could come along with Jio apps. The JioBook is also said to have 4G LTE support. A report going back to 2018 had already tipped that this was an area Jio was working on. The laptop could help Jio to go beyond mobile phone users and reach the audience that is looking for budget-friendly computing devices; something that has become particularly important over the last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For the Jio Book, Jio is reportedly partnering with China-based engineering firm Blueback Communication Technology, as per documents reviewed by XDA. Blueback creates mobile devices and develops software for third-parties, and creates products that run KaiOS, a mobile operating system also featured on JioPhones. The company has also posted images of both generations of Reliance’s JioPhone on its website.
In early 2018, Miguel Nunes, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, told The Economic Times that the American chipmaker had held talks with Reliance Jio to launch laptops with cellular connectivity. Nearly three years later, it seems that Jio is finally developing a product based on Qualcomm hardware, but the components and software used have diverged from what was originally discussed.
XDA Developers reports that the current Jio Book prototype is currently using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 665 (sm6125), an 11nm chipset. The chipset features a built-in 4G LTE modem — the Snapdragon X12 — that the JioBook will likely leverage to provide cellular connectivity to Reliance Jio’s expansive 4G network.
Blueback has tested several iterations of the JioBook during development, including a model with 2GB of LPDDR4X RAM paired with 32GB of eMMC storage and later a model with 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB of eMMC 5.1 storage. Blueback and Reliance Jio seem to be sourcing low-cost components from a variety of vendors, most notably Samsung for their combined mobile DRAM and NAND chip as well as Qualcomm for its Snapdragon 665. According to a list of components used for the PCB, the laptop may have a mini HDMI connector for video output, support for WiFi over 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies, Bluetooth, a three-axis accelerometer, and a Qualcomm audio chip.
The report notes that pre-installing Google’s suite of applications requires a license to distribute Google Mobile Services, which increases the price of the product.
When it does launch, we expect it to retail at an incredibly low price. Last year, Jio partnered with Google to work on low-cost Android smartphones. The phones which will be bundled by data packs are speculated to launch in the first quarter of 2021. The move came after Google invested Rs 33,737 crore in Jio Platforms for a 7.7 percent stake, last year. I Hope Jio does the same magic in the Laptop sector that they have been doing so far.
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