Nuuk BFF is a handheld fan that makes a lot of sense in a Delhi summer

The BFF arrived on a Thursday, which in Delhi in late May meant it arrived at exactly the right time and also about a month too late. I unboxed it, charged it overnight, and put it in my bag the next morning without thinking too much about it.

The first time I actually used it was on the metro platform at Rajiv Chowk. Not because I'd planned to—just because the platform was doing what metro platforms do in summer, which is trap warm air and hold it still while you wait. I pulled the BFF out, turned the dial to around 40, held it near my face for the four minutes until the train came. It worked. I put it back in my bag when the train arrived and took it out again at the next platform when I had to change lines.

That's mostly how it's gone since.

A hundred speeds sounds like marketing. Actually, it isn’t.

The BFF has one control—a ridged dial on the side of the handle. Double-click to turn on, single-click to turn off, rotate to move through 100 speed settings, long-press for the cooling mode. The display next to it cycles between speed and battery percentage. That's the whole interface, and once you're used to it you stop noticing it.

The 100 speeds aren't a gimmick. At 20 the fan is quiet, almost background. At 60 it's purposeful—you feel it from half an arm's length away. At 100 the BLDC motor is running at 13,000 RPM and it's loud enough that the person next to you will look up. I spent most of my time between 45 and 65, which was enough to be useful without being conspicuous, and gave me five to six hours of battery on a charge. The 3,600 mAh cell charges in about three and a half hours over USB-C and runs while plugged in, which I needed exactly once but was glad for.

The one thing I kept getting wrong: single-click is off, double-click is on. My hands kept doing it the other way. Two weeks in and I'm mostly past it, but it's the kind of inconsistency that shouldn't be there.

IceTouch is real. Use it like it costs something.

IceTouch—long-press the dial—drops the surface of the fan to around 5°C using a Peltier element behind the head. You press it against your wrist or neck, and the air coming through is cooler than ambient. On humid days you'll see condensation forming on the front of the device.

I tried it properly for the first time on a Saturday walk back from the market—fifteen minutes, full sun, the kind of afternoon that makes you reconsider most of your life choices. I held it to my face with IceTouch on for the last five minutes.

It doesn't fix the heat. You're still outside, still warm. But there's a meaningful difference between the walk with it and the walk without it, and that difference is what the feature is selling, and it delivers. The catch is that IceTouch roughly halves your battery life at any given speed, so I started using it in short stretches—a few minutes when it was actually needed, not a setting I left running.

Two weeks in, it's just part of the bag.

The BFF had stopped being something I thought about. It was just in my bag—out at the bus stop, back in, out again at my desk in the afternoon when the room got warm. The pouch it came with is still on my desk. The fan just goes straight into the front pocket now.

At Rs 2,299 it's not something you buy without thinking. But two weeks in, on a May that had no interest in being reasonable, I'd have been genuinely annoyed to be without it. That's probably the most accurate thing I can say about it.