India's $25 JioPhone is powered by the Qualcomm 205 Mobile Platform

India's $25 JioPhone is powered by the Qualcomm 205 Mobile Platform

JioPhone lowers the barrier to entry for 4G connectivity.

When Qualcomm announced the 205 Mobile Platform earlier this year, it listed India's Jio as one of its launch partners. Jio rolled out its first 4G-enabled feature phone — the ₹1,499 ($25) JioPhone — last week, and the device is one of the first to be powered by Qualcomm's 205 platform.

Glad to partner with @reliancejio on the new #JioPhone, powered by our #205 mobile platform.

— Qualcomm India (@qualcomm_in) July 22, 2017

The chipset features an X5 Category 4 LTE modem with a download speed of 150Mbps, VoLTE and VoWIFI, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, and a dual-core CPU clocked at 1.1GHz along with an Adreno 304 GPU.

The brief for the 205 Mobile Platform is to lower the barrier to entry for 4G connectivity by delivering sub-$50 phones, and that's exactly what Jio delivered with the JioPhone. The feature phone has a 2.4-inch QVGA (240 x 160) screen, and offers access to Jio's burgeoning digital content library along with Facebook and a basic web browser. It also has NFC, and support for 22 local languages.

The JioPhone will go up for sale in the month of September, with a limited beta kicking off on August 15.