Ahead of 4G launch, Reliance slashes price of LYF smartphone

Reliance Retail has dropped price of its 4G smartphones by 25 per cent to ₹2,999 in a bid to bring cheaper devices for users ahead of the commercial launch by the group’s telecom business.

“This makes LYF India’s most affordable VoLTE (Voice over LTE) smartphone and opens the doors to a digital life for millions of consumers, a move which resonates with the Prime Minister’s vision of a digitally-connected India,” said a press statement.

VoLTE technology There are 4G phones priced under ₹4,000 from other brands, but they do not support VoLTE – technology that allows users to get high definition quality while making voice calls.

This category of calls is limited as of now to Internet-based chat applications like Skype.

With VoLTE, telecom operators will be able to offer digital quality for voice calls; a shift from the poor quality services on 2G networks. But to access the service, users need a phone that supports VoLTE, which are currently supported only in select high-end phones.

“It is perhaps for the first time in the history of the Indian smartphone industry that such advanced communication features have moved within the reach of the common feature phone user, who has been using the phone for simple voice-based communication,” the company said.

Reliance sells smartphones under the LYF brand. The price cut has been affected on four of its Flame models – Flame 3, Flame 4, Flame 5 and Flame 6. Market watchers said this will help Reliance sell more devices in a market with a plethora of brands.

A recent IDC report had stated that LYF had become the fifth largest phone brand in India, but this data relates only to phones shipped into the country; not actual sales. According to industry experts, the price cuts could help LYF push the sales numbers too.

Like all LYF devices, the Flame series too offers smartphones equipped with VoLTE, which enables the device to provide advanced features like faster call setup, high-definition (HD) voice and video calling, seamless switching between voice and video calls, and multi-party conferencing on a 4G LTE network. All four models run on a Quad core 1.5GHz processor, have dual SIM capabilities and has an interfaces have been customised to operate on 10 different Indian languages.