⌚ Watches that don't tell the time: the case of the Mi' Band

In today’s world, with modern technology, we are truly absurd.
Many consumer electronics objects have evolved so much over the years, changing shape so strongly, that they no longer even respect the key points on which their very existence is based.

After smartphones, phones so advanced that in some cases they had problems making and receiving phone calls (and therefore they turned on and didn’t make calls, who knows, who knows), it was only a matter of time before we started to see watches that don’t make watches. .. I mean, they do three hundred things except keep the time correctly.
And this was the case with my Mi Band 3 the other day.

About the band ❔️

The Mi Band, for those who don’t know, is Xiaomi’s line of cheap fitness bands. These are watches with OLED screens, an interesting pill shape, designed to give great aesthetic freedom (both with the interchangeable straps and with the support for themes in the software), and above all with various sensors on board to extrapolate various body metrics , as well as Bluetooth for downloading data and receiving notifications.

Unfortunately they don’t pay me, but in my opinion they are truly epic stuff. When I bought the Band 3 at the beginning of 2019, even though it is now laughable compared to the models released later, I really fell in love with it, and in all these years it has truly done its thing.
Lately, however, it seems like it’s asking me in every way to change it… which my hyper-consumerist side would also like, but my main personality is instead very stingy.

Previous problems 🔨️

I have already talked on my MicroBlog about some problems that have come up recently… for example, how a few weeks ago some water got inside the band, above the display, simply because I wore it in the shower, despite over the years I even took a bath in it and nothing ever happened (because, in theory, it is water resistant).
(See https://octospacc.altervista.org/2024/10/09/mibandacua/.)

Finally, after a week, this hydrogen and oxygen problem resolved itself, but other snags appeared.
Of course, that would already be a problem in itself, because with the water stain that was on the screen, visibility was reduced, and therefore the time was more difficult to read, which on a watch is a bit of a rip-off. … but never mind, since the time is still ticking.

The freezing day 🥶

The moment when patience was running out was the other morning, when the band had a nice surprise for me: the time had literally stopped, frozen. This is what I want to talk about today.

The interface seemed fine, it responded to all my various inputs, but the time passed only for me and my other devices, while on the screen the time didn’t move at all. In fact, I noticed how every now and then he managed to go forward for a minute, and then immediately go back!

Let’s say it could have been even worse, because I noticed the freeze in an instant when… I still believed it at the time, but the doubt came to me and I checked the time elsewhere.
Otherwise, I would have calmed down my usual morning rush and missed my bus! And then I would have had bigger problems.

The chain symptoms 📜️

In any case, it’s all too strange, given that until recently the Mi Band was working correctly… or at least, that’s what I initially thought, given that I heard the alarm that I had set ringing (despite it being very useful, because it vibrates 5 times and then stops).
When I checked the companion app again hours later, I saw that it had failed to record a lot of data over the past 2 days.

The watch remains in that strange state for a good ten minutes, after which it decides to reconnect to the phone and, a few moments later, reset itself with the time.
At this point, the list of symptoms only increases, because it’s rather strange that the Bluetooth connection was first interrupted (but it could be, given that I was moving around the house), and then had a bit of uncertainty in re-establishing it. .. but that’s okay.

Unfortunately, it was clear that the watch was no longer able to keep time when it lost connection with the phone… the technology is truly incredible, some would say!
Sometimes, it simply froze on the disconnection time, other times it even went back, still others it ran but accumulated delays.

Tears and attempts 😓️

That bus ride was a little more mystical than usual, as I was absorbed in my wrist with the Mi Band, and in my phone with the Zepp Life app. A good half hour passed by asking for advice on bands, complaining about other bands, doing tests, and reformatting the Mi Band.
I didn’t quite understand whether it was due to a bug in the application (which perhaps conflicted with the previously associated band profile), or because of the state of that damned thing, but it took me quite a while to re-associate it after restoring the factory.

Unfortunately, the reset was in vain, and the problems continued, so throughout the day I continued with the experiments.
Having tried leaving the band disconnected from the phone for a few hours, I noticed that it had curiously accumulated an hour and a few minutes of delay, which by continuing further became a precise hour of delay. (No, that didn’t get me anywhere, but it was hilarious to say.)

One of the tests I did was to use the watch’s stopwatch function normally, and it behaved even more absurdly.
I started a count, left it there thinking about something else, and after a few moments I realized that it had totally disappeared: the screen turned off (normally it shouldn’t), and when I woke it up it showed the nice frozen time screen.
Only once did I catch him just as he disappeared, but it was clear that it was anomalous.

A light of hope 💡️

I started to get closer to the welcome but bitter solution by moving on to testing the heart rate measurement sensor.
When starting a measurement, it never managed to complete; after a few variable seconds, the screen would suddenly turn off, and once again waking it up would bring you back to the main view.
It may happen that the Mi Band fails to measure the heartbeat, but normally it should vibrate with an error, and never crash like this.

The reason why the heartbeat detection failed was obvious to me, however: the green LED on the bottom, the operation of which I don’t even want to attempt to explain, was not flashing as usual, and instead remained very dim and completely static.
As worrying as it was, this was good, because then I at least had something to get my hands on. And so, I turned off the automatic heart rate measurement, which happens every few minutes.

Solution but at what cost… 🪨️

Does it make sense to create suspense? I would say no; with this move of mine, the Mi Band really seemed to be working again.
At the time it actually still had some problems: the time worked, but it was a few tens of seconds behind the phone it synchronized with, and then the battery reported having lost around 20 percentage points in those few hours.
However, at the moment everything seems to be working… or almost.

Although the connection via Bluetooth is fine, and the data synchronizes and the push notifications arrive, and not only is the time kept well but the alarm, stopwatch and timer also work, no longer being able to use the heart rate measurement takes away some usefulness from the many of this deal.
Furthermore, the sleep measurement is much less accurate, and the pedometer seems to manage its calculations less in real time (it doesn’t update my count on sight) and perhaps with more errors.

Reflecting on the ending 😮‍💨️

Some will perhaps say that I expect too much if I want a watch to keep the right time and not stop at random, but beyond that it’s a bit tedious. Not so much for the band itself, but for the fact that I haven’t found anyone on the web with this exact problem of mine, and therefore neither the cause nor the real solution.
The only upside is that, without cardiac measurement, a battery charge will last longer. (…Should I rejoice?)

But alas, I think I’ll have to spend some money and finally get this upgrade — which I’ve honestly wanted for ages, but have never been able to justify, because “the band I have still works perfectly”.
Knowing me, however, I fear that I will procrastinate further, until one day it stops turning on and I will be left without a watch…