Reliance Jio to Launch Android Powered 4K Set Top Boxes (STB) with Jio Apps

On September 1st, Reliance officially announced the Jio 4G services in India. The trail services which began from early 2016 will be offered for free until the year end. Along with Jio, the company brought up the LYF brand for selling their own hardware. LYF had good sales when the Jio Preview Offer is only exclusive for their smartphones. Apart from smartphones, now the company also sells Smart TVs and is also rumored to soon bring the Android powered Tablets. Interestingly, the Mi-Fi devices came with Jio branding and are available in the market as JioFi.

In the near future, Jio will also launch the set-up boxes powered by Android. With the JioFiber’s 1GBPS connection, the users can get seamless experience though the JioFiber is said to available only for enterprises at least in the beginning. A few months back, the company has imported 15,00o units of set-top boxes at a price of Rs. 5,500 per unit. This set-top box (STB) is manufactured by Foxconn in Vietnam and comes with the model number MCM3100. But there will be two more models by the time of official launch.

While one of the new high-end STB’s come powered Broadcom chipset, the other comes with Marvell processor. As per our source, both of them supports 4K UHD by default and runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box. However, the user needs to have a 4K TV to watch the 4K content. With these STBs, the normal LCD/LED TV can become a Smart TV running on Android. The device comes with PlayStore pre-installed along with native Android apps and also the Jio Suite apps like Jio TV and Jio On Demand. The Broadcom powered by STB comes with dual core Brahma CPU and OGLES 3.1 GPU.

Instead of the regular IR remote controller, they come with Bluetooth remote controllers and can be also controlled with smartphones using the app. The remote controller also has a mic for voice search. As far as the connectivity options are considered, there will be LAN, USB, and HDMI ports along with built-in Wi-Fi support. Earlier this month, Xiaomi has debuted the U.S market by launching the Mi Box powered by Android. It costs just $69 and supports 4K and HDR. In India, we have the Amkette’s latest EvoTV 2 that costs Rs. 6,999.

It runs on years old Android 4.4 Kitkat and only supports a maximum of Full HD resolution. Compared to EvoTV 2, the upcoming Jio set top boxes will feature better specifications and additionally also has the Jio suite apps which are exclusive to just Jio users. Stay tuned on Phone Radar for more details like pricing and launch date.

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