A women’s watch in India is usually bought for one of three reasons: as a gift, as something that goes with office wear, or as an everyday piece that has to survive being worn daily and still look right at a wedding. Those are genuinely different requirements, and the watch that suits one often doesn’t…
There aren’t many products that have been continuously good for forty years, but the Casio digital watch is one of them. The same square steel case that turned up on wrists in the eighties is still on sale, still costs very little, and still does the one thing a watch has to do without ever…
Noise is one of the two brands that made wireless audio genuinely affordable in India, and it competes almost entirely at the bottom of the market. That comes with a trade-off worth stating plainly before anything else: ratings across this brand’s range run lower than for pricier competitors. That isn’t a scandal, it’s what the…
OnePlus is unusual in Indian audio in that it isn’t really trying to be the cheapest. boAt and Noise fight it out at the very bottom of the market; OnePlus sits slightly above and competes on the thing those two are weakest at – sound quality and consistency. For a few hundred rupees more you…
realme built its whole business in India on a simple promise: more specification per rupee than anybody else. That’s still true. What’s changed is that realme now runs three separate lines that overlap confusingly in price, and picking the wrong one means paying for something you didn’t need. The short version: narzo is the budget…
OPPO is one of the biggest phone brands in India by units sold, and yet if you shop mostly online you might barely notice it. That’s not an accident. OPPO built its Indian business through physical retail – thousands of small stores, in-shop promoters, EMI paperwork done at the counter – and a lot of…
Motorola occupies an unusual spot in India. It doesn’t have the retail footprint of vivo or OPPO, it doesn’t do the aggressive online launches Redmi and realme do, and yet it keeps producing phones that people who actually care about software quietly recommend to each other. The reason is Hello UI. Motorola ships something very…
Let’s deal with the obvious objection first: most Indian kitchens already cook rice perfectly well in a pressure cooker, and if that’s working for you, a rice cooker isn’t going to change your life. I’d rather say that upfront than sell you something you don’t need. Where a rice cooker genuinely earns its place is…
Home security cameras have gone from a society-gate installation job to something you plug in yourself for the price of a decent dinner. In India that’s led to a very specific set of use cases: keeping an eye on elderly parents living alone, checking in on domestic help, watching a toddler or a pet during…
JBL has been the default Bluetooth speaker in India for years, and the range makes a lot more sense once you realise it’s basically a size ladder. Go is pocket-sized. Clip hangs off a bag. Flip is the one you take to a beach or a terrace. PartyBox is for actual parties. Sound quality broadly…