![]() At this point I noticed that the progress bar on my Charge HR started moving again, and within a few minutes the update had completed. Next, go into your phone's Bluetooth settings, find your Charge HR and forget that device.First, fully recharge the Fitbit device (when it freezes it carries on using up the battery power, so after it's been stuck for a while it runs out).The full instructions are pinned to the top of the release version 18.128 message thread, but I found I only had to do two things: I found it quite easy to resolve the problem having read several of these threads, although it seems others have had more difficulty. Applying the 1:10:100 ratio between those who post or comment compared to passive readers, that suggests tens of thousands of Charge HR users have experienced a frozen update. The frozen progress bar or HBOD doesn't strike everyone, but at the time of writing there are just shy of 500 messages in the Fitbit product help forums thread devoted to this firmware update getting stuck, another 300 in the thread Charge HR Frozen Progress Bar and many more in threads dating back to 20, when people first started calling it the Half Bar Of Death. Anyone who remembers using Windows PCs in the 1990s will recognize the allusion to BSOD, the Blue Screen of Death that became a familiar sight to PC users on the many times Windows would crash with an unrecoverable error. So much so that users have nicknamed this phenomenon the Fitbit Half Bar Of Death, or HBOD for short. It turns out that the Charge HR is particularly prone to freezing during a firmware update. When later on it still hadn't moved, I started searching online to see if this was a known problem. ![]() ![]() After about half an hour I noticed that the progress bar had got stuck about half way across. While the Charge HR firmware is updating, a solid white progress bar starts spreading across the center of the display from left to right. Having noted the warning that it would take 5-10 minutes to complete, I launched the update. It adds a new feature - the ability to turn off real-time data tracking - but probably more important is a critical security update and some minor bug fixes and stability improvements. This is firmware release version 18.128, which Fitbit has been rolling out to Charge HR owners over the two months since early October. I must have been one of the last Charge HR owners to get a notification last week in my Fitbit app to tell me there was a new update ready to install. I'll upgrade when I'm ready, not when your substandard build quality forces me to. I'm also finding a perverse satisfaction in cheating the built-in obsolescence that Fitbit was no doubt hoping would have persuaded me to buy a new device by now. But when all is said and done, it's still not as slim and compact as my trusty Charge HR. The Ionic is waterproof, and I also like the idea of using it for contactless payment instead of having to pull a phone or wallet out of my pocket. This even has a built-in blood-oxygen sensor which in theory can screen for sleep apnea - except that Fitbit has not yet activated this functionality or given any timeframe for when it will happen. I have to admit I'm tempted by the additional sleep monitoring available on newer devices, in particular the new top-of-the-range Fitbit Ionic. It delivers the time, date, alerts and alarms to my wrist, and I use it to monitor key wellbeing metrics, such as heart rate and sleep time, which it reports to the Fitbit app on my phone. I like the feature set that I get from such an unobtrusive, lightweight device. I've persisted with it because I prefer its slim form factor to more recent but chunkier Fitbit devices. Here's how I resolved these problems, and my take on the real-world lessons for digital innovators.īut first, I should say that I do like my Charge HR, and it's already lasted a lot longer than I feared when I first got it. Like many other Fitbit Charge HR users, I've had problems with the casing falling off and more recently when an update got stuck on what many have been calling the Half Bar of Death. ![]() But my experience with the Fitbit Charge HR draws attention to a wider issue across Silicon Valley and beyond, where digital startups sacrifice quality for the sake of volume. Maybe it's unfair to judge a brand on the performance of a discontinued model.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |