Reliance Jio, India’s #1 telecom operator, will launch a budget laptop priced at $184 (15,000 Indian rupees) with an embedded 4G SIM card, Reuters news report said.
Reliance Jio has partnered with chipset supplier Qualcomm for powering its computing chips based on technology from Arm Ltd. Microsoft, the Windows OS maker, will be providing support for some apps.
Jio is India’s biggest telecom carrier with more than 420 million customers. Jio is also in the process of launching 5G services in select cities.
The low cost laptop will be available to enterprise customers such as schools and government institutes from this month, with a consumer launch anticipated within the next three months.
The JioBook will be produced locally by contract manufacturer Flex with Jio aiming to sell hundreds of thousands of units by March.
Overall PC shipments in India stood at 14.8 million units last year, led by HP, Dell and Lenovo, according to research firm IDC.
The launch of the JioBook will extend the total addressable laptop market segment by at least 15 percent, Counterpoint analyst Tarun Pathak said.
The laptop will run Jio’s own JioOS operating system and apps can be downloaded from the JioStore. Jio is also pitching the laptop as an alternative to tablets for out of the office corporate employees.
Reliance Jio, which raised around $22 billion from investors such as KKR & Co and Silver Lake in 2020, is credited with disrupting the world’s no. 2 mobile market when it launched cheap 4G data plans and free voice services in 2016, and later the 4G smartphone at a cost of $81.
