First round of China’s Baomi smart air filters sells out in one second

The air in many China’s cities is bad. Really bad. And while there’s probably no way to fix an entire city’s air supply with a consumer tech product, smart air filters are an increasingly popular option for homes and apartments. Shut the windows, start the filter, and you’ll have cleaner, more breathable air indoors.

One such smart air filter is the Baomi, a smartphone-controlled filter from Beijing app company Cheetah Mobile. If the Baomi name reminds you of Xiaomi, that’s not the only similarity: Cheetah also takes a very similar approach to Baomi sales, selling only via its website and offering batches of its product in limited quantities to drive up demand and hype. On Friday, the first round of Baomi filters went on sale. They reportedly sold out in one second.

That may not be quite as impressive as it sounds, as Cheetah Mobile hasn’t made it clear exactly how many units were available in the first place. A significant part of the one-second sale also appears to have been preorders, meaning that many of the customers weren’t actually on Baomi’s website that second, that’s just when their orders were processed. But even so, it’s obvious there’s quite a lot of interest in the smartphone-controlled air filter.

Baomi product representatives told Techweb that they plan to gather feedback from this first round of customers to improve the filter further before it goes on sale again. That means if you didn’t get one already, you may have to wait a while for the next sale to come around.

See: In China, even creating a pollution tracking app is a risky business

(Source: Techweb)