How you have managed your finances and expenses and how you have grown up while doing that in your teens has a lasting effect throughout your life. I have always stuck to the Indian middle-class mentality of "Buy the cheaper option" because for then you are spending less money, but getting what you want. I bought the Fire-boltt Pheonix Pro because it seemed to be a good brand, made in India and had the things I was looking for.
I have always struggled with this tug of war between, splurging for the brand and getting a dupe, and honestly, more often than not recently I have seen this decision has almost always be a miss rather than a hit. This post captures the experience where this decision has been a miss.
Fitness watches are available aplenty in the market and naturally, there are good ones and cheaper ones. I went with a cheap option which promised all kinds of delights but turned out to be a huge disappointment.
I usually do not write about my extreme misses on the blog but this one deserved a detailed post.
I bought the Fire-Boltt Pheonix Pro with Bluetooth calling from Amazon online and read the mixed reviews. I decided that the bad ones were not as bad, so I took the plunge.
I received the watch on time and was excited to set it up.
The initial impact wasn't much, be it the packaging or the app interface, nothing was above average and I was okay because I wasn't expecting anything to Wow me.
I set the watch up, with all my details in the app and was good to go.
Then started having an issue from day 7 or 8 or wearing this. Where the watch was acting on its own opening up the various apps on it at random and I chucked it as a weird behaviour for some OTA update.
But by the 10th day when it didn't stop it started getting to me and suddenly it started turning on and off in a loop continuously. As soon as that started happening, I put this in charge and tried to raise a request on their website.
The phone number was not reachable and was dropping every time I called.
The issue was raised with all details, I received an email after a week where I had already given up on the watch because the same on-and-off loop continued still after getting completely discharged and after a recharge.
The email asked me to open the ticket as there was an update, which was something not possible for me. Without a link to the ticket or an interface that leads me to a raised ticket on their page. With no possible way to connect to their customer service team, this decision left me feeling extremely disappointed with the purchase from Fireboltt.
The issue here is with the way they did not reach out when it was mentioned that they would. Their comments were not reachable for me as a customer. This is why after-sales service is very important for a brand, where I think they failed miserably. A product having issues is okay as long as it gets resolved.
It is not that I had huge expectations from the watch but I expected it to work with the basic functionalities atleast.
The watch still doesn't work, and I haven't heard back from the brand and I used it for less than a week. Absolutely will not recommend you to buy anything from Fireboltt. AVOID!