I’ve had a great time testing out the Bolt from Roav and was able to discover some of it’s highlights and flaws.
From the first appearance, this looks like a sold little device. The packaging was well executed and designed. The instructions, contents, and layout are all professional, clean, and easy to follow. The way the Bolt is displayed in the box is really nice and made me excited to get it out of there and start using it.
Now onto the design. It has a similar design to many of the other car chargers by Anker and Roav. This one is a little longer, but pretty narrow, which is a great plus! The Viva just barely fits in my car. The Bolt fits with no problem at all. Here’s a size comparison of the Bolt, the Viva, and the PowerDrive+ 1.
“How does it work?” you may ask. Well, I was a bit underwhelmed, to be perfectly honest. I truly think that comes from a few different things. I’ve been using the Viva almost daily for the last year and it’s a fairly solid little device. I have few issues with it and the ones I have are easy to troubleshoot and fix. I’m use to Alexa and how easy everything works. The Bolt is a little trickier and does have some bugs and settings that need to be addressed and updated. One is the amount of time it takes to get an answer to a question or a request to happen. There are a lot of thinking sound effects that happen.
Another issue I’ve had were the large amount of false confirmations. “Hey Google, play some music from YouTube Music.” She answers and says she’ll play it, but nothing happens. The workaround for this is to have the app launched on your phone and ready to go before asking. Then it works. Several of the commands will require you to interact with your phone to get them running and working, like navigation. I’m not the biggest fan of having to do that, especially while driving. This was the case with the Viva when it came out too, but that has since been corrected.
The far-field voice and quick charging works great! She hears me 95% of the time and understands what I’m asking. When asking for the news you’ll get rich audio with news read directly from the source by the actual news anchors.
Overall, I’m very excited for the future of this little device. I think it still needs some tweaking, but if you’re invested in the Google Home ecosystem, this is going to be a must have for your car. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, some of the bugs and things that don’t work that great will be addressed and fixed. For now, it’s an awesome car charger, great for news, weather, and random question, and looks really nice in the car.
Any questions? I’ll be happy to try to answer them.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and don’t forget check out my review video above. 
. Keep up the good work! I’ll watch the video later 
