Last month, when I came back to Delhi from the United States of America, I was appalled with the crunch in the connectivity quality here. It seemed like it was going to take a while to get used to the quality and speed.
But luckily, Reliance LYF Flame 8 with Jio 4G Preview Offer came to my rescue.
But what is this Jio Preview offer and why is the nation going crazy to avail it?
Jio Preview Offer is an exclusive preview of Jio 4G services. As a part of the Offer you will get unlimited HD Voice & Video calling, unlimited SMS, unlimited High-Speed Data. All you have to do is buy a Reliance LYF handset and you get a Jio sim with it to avail the Jio Preview offer.
And that’s not all! If free unlimited HD Voice & Video calling, unlimited SMS, unlimited High-Speed Data weren’t enough. Users also get hosts of Jio Premium apps like JioPlay, JioOnDemand, JioBeats, JioMags, JioXpressNews, JioDrive JioSecurity and JioMoney.
Being a tech journalist, I couldn’t wait for the Reliance Jio offer to launch and instead bought the LYF Flame 8 handset with the Jio Preview offer. Believe it or not, it took me less than 10 mins to get the handset and the sim and another 4 hours to get the service activated. All I had to do was to visit the Reliance Digital store in my neighbourhood give my Aadhar card, a passport size photo and the money for LYF Flame handset. I’ve bought smartphones and new connections around the world and have never experienced such seamless experience. Be it T-Mobile in the US, Orange in the UK or CMC in China, all should take a lesson from how Reliance is serving the customers. I won’t even talk about the lousy Indian telecom providers here.
In 2002, Reliance changed the landscape of mobile telephony in India by launching its CDMA service. It’s was aptly named the ‘Freedom Offer’ which liberated the subscribers from the shackles of other exorbitantly charging service providers. The offer was simple, you pay a certain amount and get a CDMA handset with unlimited calling, messages and data. I still candidly remember the tagline of the offer ‘Karlo Duniya Muthi Main’ which means ‘Get the power of the universe in your palm’.
Almost 15 years later, Reliance is yet again changing the landscape of mobile telephony by bringing affordable 4G connectivity to consumers. This time again, it has a similar offer on the table. A user has to buy a Reliance LYF handset and with that he gets a Jio sim for free. Now that free sim is not like what other service providers give, the Jio sim comes with free unlimited calls, SMS and the internet. Yes, you read it correctly! You get unlimited calls and SMS to any number across India + unlimited 4G internet connectivity anywhere in the country.
Moving on to the experience of using the LYF handset and Jio services. Honestly, my primary phone is the iPhone 6s and I keep switching my secondary device to whichever device I have for review. At the moment, I am testing the OnePlus 3, LG G5, Huawei P9, HTC One 10 and a few more. All of these devices have one thing in common apart from being powered by Android, and that is they are useless. Useless? Yes, no matter how high the specs are or how premium these devices are, they all lack good connectivity! They are like the most exotic sports cars without an engine to power them. In simpler words, the LYF Flame 8 handset is 1/10 their cost but is much more useful to me as I can do 10 times more than the other handsets.
There is no second thought that the services or the software (apps) are more important than the hardware or the physical aspects of a product. We have seen in the past how Apple’s iPhone rose to success thanks to the App Store killing juggernauts like Blackberry and Nokia. Now the apps/services are in fact a much larger proposition thanks to services and aggregators like Uber, AirBnB, tinder etc. Moving forward IoT, AR/VR and wearables will all depend on services and thus the shift of all hardware makers towards software and services.
Reliance being a pioneer of almost everything they put their foot into having got it right from day 1 with the Jio services. Currently, as a Jio preview user, I have access to following apps/services-
- MyJio
- JioChat
- JioPlay
- JioOnDemand
- JioBeats
- JioMags
- JioXpressNews
- JioDrive
- JioJoin
- JioDrive
- JioMoney
- JioSecurity
- JioNews
Can you expect your current service provider to give you even a few services compared to what Jio is offering? And these services are absolutely free unlike what others offer. The plethora of services covers everything from latest movies, music, news, magazines, security, finance, cloud storage etc.
Out of all these services, I’m addicted to 3 Jio services:
1. JioBeats for unlimited music downloads – Thanks to JioBeats, I have freed up several gigabytes of space from my smartphone by deleting all the music stored on my device.
2. Jio OnDemand as my one-stop platform for movies, TV shows, music videos and trailers.
3. JioPlay for a wide range of TV channels across languages and genres. I get 300+ TV channels at my fingertips, including 30+ HD channels. Beware, you would most probably end up disconnecting your DTH connection and getting a chromecast for your TV to stream your fav channel from JioPlay.
It’s not that such services aren’t already available in the market. There are a lot of them but none of them is free. And even for experiencing free content one would need fast and seamless internet. And that my friend only Jio is able to offer, have a look at the speed test screenshot below. Is any other service provider able to offer you 40+ Mbps of Upload & Download speed?
Need any more reasons to get yourself a Reliance Jio handset? Go grab the LYF Flame 8 from Flipkart right now!
