Fire-Boltt Dream smartwatch review

The growing popularity of smartwatches that cost less than Rs 5,000 have propelled brands like BoAt, Fire-Boltt and Noise to the top of the wearable market over the past few years. Sadly, that hasn’t changed the biggest cons of these watches – the lack of a full-fledged operating system, and its derivates, like third-party app support, and the ability to reply to notifications.

Fire-Boltt has set out to change that with the Fire-Boltt Dream, a smartwatch that not only packs Android, the same OS that powers millions of smartphones, but also adds true 4G nano-SIM support. This does earn the watch an apt ‘wristphone’ moniker, but is there a catch? We used this smartwatch-smartphone hybrid for a week, and here’s our Fire-Boltt Dream review.

Fire-Boltt Dream: Design and Display

The Fire-Boltt Dream doesn’t look very different from other smartwatches you’d find in this segment. With a design that very closely resembles that of the Apple Watch Ultra, you get a rectangular dial, a crown and a button on the right, as well as the nano-SIM slot on the left. While the dial is available in a singular black colour, it is nice of Fire-Boltt to offer the watch with one of three straps options – silicone, metal or leather.

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That said, don’t expect this watch to turn heads in public. The build quality too is quite decent here, with the silicone straps we used being fairly comfortable, and the dial looking like it can handle the occasional beating. You do have a few nice-to-haves, like the crown actually having a rotating functionality and offering haptic feedback for the same.

The 2.02-inch panel, is a mixed-bag. It is not an AMOLED panel, and the lack of crisp contrast shows immediately. Now, everyone may not care about an AMOLED display (or the lack of one), but here’s what will affect every user – the brightness. While Fire-Boltt does advertise 600 nits, step outside and the watch hardly feels like it, being almost unreadable under direct sunlight even at max brightness.

Fire-Boltt Dream: Fitness tracking

The Fire-Boltt Dream is similar to most other smartwatches in this segment when it comes to tracking your fitness. While the step-counter and heart-rate monitor were fairly accurate in our experience, any of the dedicated 150 sports modes can be a hit or miss. The good bit is that you can directly download your health apps like Strava to this watch. The bad bit is that if you don’t, there is no way to log/sync the data from the watch to your phone, but we’ll get to that in the next section.

Fire-Boltt Dream: Software and connectivity

The Fire-Boltt Dream runs Android 8.1 Oreo, complete with Fire-Boltt’s own skin on top. This, coupled with the 2GB RAM and 16GB local storage does make this a mini-phone on your wrist. Once logged in with your Google account, you can use the Play Store to download apps and games, as well as use other Android functionalities like typing on a full-blown QWERTY keyboard, taking a screenshot or changing your wallpaper.

Games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run 2 are also playable on the watch, albeit with a few frame-drops here and there. We also tried playing videos on YouTube and scrolling through Instagram. While there were hiccups that stemmed from what looks like a lack of optimisation for a screen this small, the mere fact that all this was possible on a phone (sorry, a watch) this size still amazes us. So, despite some literal cut-off corners, the addition of a true OS to a watch in this segment is a win.

However, it isn’t all good news. This is where the catch we spoke of earlier comes into play. For achieving the status of a ‘wristphone’, the Fire-Boltt Dream has been given its own full-fledged OS, but its connectivity to your phone is completely cut off. This means you cannot connect the watch to your phone to take calls from it, or view notifications from your phone on your watch – you know, the main point of a smartwatch for many users.

This basically means that the only way to use the Fire-Boltt Dream, is as a standalone device. The only way to see notifications on it, is to install the app there, which for apps like WhatsApp, mean removing it from your primary phone (unless you have a second number). Similarly, the only way to take calls, is via a second SIM on the watch – no Bluetooth calling from your phone.

Fire-Boltt Dream: Battery life

The presence of a full-fledged operating system also means that the Fire-Boltt Dream doesn’t offer the multi-week battery life that some other watches offer. Instead using the watch as intended will have you to running the flimsy pogo-pin charger every night. Of course, you can use the ultra-battery saving mode to combat this, but lose all the app functionality in the process.

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Using heavy apps like Instagram and YouTube, or playing games like Subway Surfers will kill the battery even faster. While some might be fine charging their watch every day, the Fire-Boltt Dream does lose out on the ability to last days on a single charge, one of the best features of watches in this segment.

Verdict: Should you buy the Fire-Boltt Dream?

The Fire-Boltt Dream is a promising step in the right direction, but feels more of a concept smartwatch than a product we could actually recommend to a larger section of smartwatch buyers. While one can get by the lack of software optimisation for Android at the price, it is the lack of connectivity with your phone that’s the real issue here, one that Fire-Boltt’s website and ads are quietly sweeping under the rug.

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Most people looking for a smartwatch would love the new possibilities Android offers, but may not prefer the same at the expense of smartphone-connectivity, locking them into using the watch as a standalone device. Moreover, this also leaves key questions in the air, like what happens when apps like Instagram or WhatsApp decide to stop supporting Android Oreo, a seven-year-old version of the OS? For these reasons, it is difficult to out-and-out recommend the Fire-Boltt Dream to most smartwatch users out there.

That said, if what you are looking for is a compact, full-fledged phone for your second SIM-card, you can totally go for this watch for the Rs 6,999 price tag. Or, you could get a proper smartphone like the Redmi A2 with a camera, larger screen, better battery, all at the same (or lower) price. If you’re looking for a watch that can show your phone’s notifications, and help you with Bluetooth calling, you can instead consider other budget smartwatches like the Fire-Boltt Solaris, or the BoAt Enigma X600.

Coming back to Fire-Boltt’s Android-smartwatch dream, we would love to see a successor that packs Android without sacrificing phone connectivity. Now that would make a versatile smartwatch that can be used both as a companion watch and a standalone phone!