Thomson JioTele OS QLED 43-inch TV: Jio’s snappy new OS is responsive but lacks the apps you love

Thomson makes a lot of smart TVs that generally run on Google TV/Android TV OS or Fire OS. But, a while back, they debuted a new QLED TV powered by JioTele OS. This 43-inch TV is priced at ₹18,999, available on Flipkart. 

I have been using one for a few weeks now and here’s how the experience has been:

The TV has a very familiar plastic build with a red LED indicator at the bottom, thin bezels around the display and two plastic stands for the tabletop. At the back, you get 2 USB 2.0 ports, 3 HDMI ports (including one with ARC) and optical out—all side-facing. There’s a bottom-facing ethernet LAN port, antenna and audio-video ports. The remote control is also made of plastic with rubber keys and feels decent in the hand, with responsive keys in place, including some shortcut jets for streaming services like Netflix.

The 43-inch 4K (3840x2160) QLED display (VA panel) offers decent value for the price tag. It has 450 peak brightness, good viewing angles, doesn’t cut down on details when watching something in 4K resolution, and handles colours well. 

The display supports HDR, which isn’t exactly its strength as you can see it struggles to output contrast and shadows when playing HDR content, and that isn’t surprising for a TV at this price point. 

However, for SDR content, there’s not much wrong when watching TV shows, movies, or live sports at 50FPS on it.

The 40-watt box speakers are quite loud and have sufficient depth for the size here that you can fill a 15x15 room with a couple of people watching it. Dialogue delivery is decent for sports commentary but not too great for watching movies or TV series, depending on the source. 

It does struggle with distortion at higher volume levels, and I didn’t keep volumes above halfway during my usage. You also get Dolby Atmos support, which does help in some scenarios for music delivery and background tracks in movies—but it does not do much to lift the audio experience.

The TV runs on JioTele OS 2.0 with 8GB of internal storage (about 3.2GB available) and 2GB of RAM. The OS is generally snappy in terms of navigating through menus and app launcher, as well as switching from one app to another, which is nice to see. The default Homescreen has several tabs at the top—Home, Movies, Shows, Sports and TV Channels. 

Now, the buyer gets JioHotstar for 3 months (full HD plan, not 4K), plus over 300 live TV channels, but these don’t really include the most popular entertainment channels you might want. 

You can download more apps from the app store, though it is fairly limited in terms of the number of apps, and doesn’t have a huge catalogue such as Google TV, as expected. So, things like a third-party IPTV player or media player are missing at this point. 

Switching between input sources is also smooth, and you can choose to automatically switch to the last selected input source after switching on the TV, if you want. Attaching an external hard disk, the TV was able to play full HD and 4K HDR10 videos, as well as view high-resolution photos without much trouble.

All in all, Thomson’s first attempt at a JioTele OS at a budget price point does deliver on most counts—with a nice display that can handle non-HDR content well, decent but not great speakers and a responsive OS for watching movies and TV shows with added subscription bundles, if you aren’t going to do much more with your smart TV, this seems like a solid option for a smart TV under 20k as of now.

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