The stunning Citizen CZ smartwatch is incredibly available for just $95, but there might be a catch
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If you're a loyal PhoneArena reader, you've probably gotten used to saving big bucks on some of the most popular mobile devices and accessories out there. Finding good deals on great products is part of our daily mission at this wonderful (or so we like to think) website here, but what happens when a promotion seems too good to be true?
In general, we'd strongly recommend you pounce on such offers whenever you can and hope you're not looking at a pricing error that a retailer might then fail to honour, but in today's very particular and very special case... we'll let you decide what works best for you.
You have 24 hours (or less) to purchase an undeniably beautiful and seemingly feature-packed Citizen CZ Smart Touchscreen wearable at $94.99 in brand-new, unused, unopened, and undamaged condition, which looks like an absolute no-brainer at first glance.
One of the reasons why you should definitely consider taking advantage of this extremely time-sensitive Woot deal is that you're almost surely looking at a second-gen Citizen CZ smartwatch here released earlier this year at a recommended price of $395 with Play Store access, Android and iOS compatibility, a built-in speaker and microphone, heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen sensor, a large, circular, and high-quality display, and a premium stainless steel body.
But Citizen's official website currently lists the same device as "temporarily unavailable", and there's a good (and worrying) reason for that. According to a Wired report from just last week, the company "recently identified a technical issue" with the 2023 product that is "negatively affecting the user experience", deciding to recall "review models" and temporarily suspend sales while trying to "pinpoint the source of the issue and the best path to a solution for customers and partners."
The recall and sales halt has evidently not reached third-party retailers like Woot and parent company Amazon... yet, with the latter also listing the same Wear OS-powered device as available at a substantial $165 discount at the time of this writing.
So should you or should you not buy the ultra-affordable Citizen CZ Smart Touchscreen (Gen 2) right now? Well, that depends largely on your tolerance to performance issues, bugs, and weak battery life. If you think you can live with such problems (day in and day out) and/or are confident that Citizen will be able to patch things up for units that are already in distribution, then go right ahead! If not, you might want to wait and hope that similar deals will pop up when/if Citizen fixes all the existing issues.
Of course, these types of issues don't always affect all devices of the same sort in the same exact way, so maybe you'll be lucky and receive a perfectly functional unit in exchange for your 95 bucks. Because Woot doesn't offer a lot of details about today's deeply discounted smartwatch, there's even a chance you're looking at a model not impacted by the aforementioned recall in the first place, like an inferior but still pretty great Gen 1 device. But we highly doubt that.
Finally, it's important to note that this killer new deal, which is very similar to a first-party Amazon promo from a few weeks back, only includes a 90-day warranty. Once again, you will have to decide for yourselves if that's a deal breaker or not.
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