Reliance Jio is expanding its hardware portfolio outside of feature phones. The telecom operator, together with chip maker MediaTek, will be soon introducing an Android-powered smartphone in India. The partnership was made official today at MediaTek’s Curtain-Raiser for 2018 event in New Delhi. Any further details about its availability and pricing are yet to be revealed.

The forthcoming Android phone is expected to arrive in the entry-level segment. Considering what the company had done with the JioPhone, we are also anticipating a series of promotional offers for effectively bringing down the costs further down. It will run on the latest Android Go Oreo edition which is essentially a trimmed down and lightweight version of its beefier counterpart. Moreover, Android Go comes with a specialized set of applications that are specifically designed to work effortlessly on underpowered hardware.

Apart from this, MediaTek also showcased a bunch of smartphone chipsets — MT6739, MT6739, and MT6580, all of which are compatible with Google’s Android Go platform. The company had originally announced its collaboration with the search engine juggernaut a month ago. The first products with these new SoCs are planned for global markets by the first quarter of this year.

“India is growth intensive, a market of immense opportunities with its own set of aspirations and needs. We continue to intensify our technology collaboration in India, even beyond smartphones, and recognize its importance in the global marketplace,” said T L Lee, General Manager, Wireless Communication, MediaTek.

Reliance Jio was recently crowned as the top-selling feature phone brand in Q4 2017 as well. With a market share of 26%, JioPhone singlehandedly managed to trump the existing competition in a time span of merely three months.

Earlier this month, Micromax had announced it will be soon launching the Bharat Go smartphone which will run the new platform out of the box. In addition to that, HMD Global is rumored to introduce an Android Go smartphone as well, Nokia 1 in late February during the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.