Question :

As I was fiddling with connecting to a bluetooth speaker, the connection to my Xiaomi Mi Band Pulse suddenly vanished. Even though my iPhone can still see the Mi Band, but it says “Can’t connect to band” and on manual retry connection cannot be established due to a time-out error. In Bluetooth Preferences the Mi Band is visible, but not connected, and on manual retry I also get no connection due to a time-out error.

Is my Mi Band bricked or broken ? If not, what is the right way to reconnect my Mi Band to my iPhone ?

Answer :

You are probably in luck as even when your Mi Band seems bricked or broken, is most of the time just hangs and can be fixed doing a reset.

The reset & reconnect procedure in short :

• switch-off Bluetooth
• reset the Mi Band
• reboot your iPhone
• switch-on Bluetooth
• reconnect via Bluetooth

That probably isn’t enough info, so here’s a step-by-step walk-through :

• on your iPhone, swipe-up from the bottom of the screen to get the ‘underwater’ Settings pull-up panel
• click on the Bluetooth-icon in a white circle, which will then turn grey, indicating Bluetooth is OFF
• now take the sensor-pod of the Mi Band Pulse out of the bracelet and put it in the refrigerator (yes, the one in your kitchen, but not in the freezer)
• leave it there for at least one hour (officially that should be at least 4 hours, but experience shows that only one hour will also do most of the time…)
• first, do a reboot of your iPhone by pressing the MENU- and ON/OFF-buttons at the same time until the screen goes black and a white Apple-logo is displayed [ NOTE : for some iPhones the reboot procedure (a.k.a. “hard reset”) is slightly different ; more info can be found here ]
• when the iPhone comes back up, type your access code to unlock your iPhone
• then swipe-up from the bottom of the screen, and in the pull-up Settings panel, click on the Bluetooth-icon in a grey circle, which will then turen white, indicating Bluetooth is ON
• and open the MiFit-app on your iPhone
• then, take the Mi Band sensor-pod out of the fridge and plug it in the Mi Band-charger cable and put the USB-end into a USB power adapter (a powered USB-port will also do most of the time)
• now be quick : only during the blinking of a LED on the Mi Band sensor-pod you have the opportunity to reconnect !
• while the LED blinks, in the Mi Fit-app, in the Status view, click on reconnect to re-establish the Bluetooth-connection between Mi Band and iPhone
• if all orange-collored texts are gone from the Mi Fit-app, you have successfully reconnected, if not : just unplug & replug the Mi Band sensor-pod, try again and make sure you act quickly
• everything should now work properly ; enjoy !

If you can’t get it to work using the above procedure, just try again. And if that still doesn’t help after several tries, try these versions of the procedure, in this order :

1. try again, without putting the Mi Band sensor-pod in the refrigerator
2. try again, exactly as described (so including the refrigerator procedure)
3. try again, now keeping the Mi Band sensor-pod in the fridge for at least 4 hours
4. try again, now keeping the Mi Band sensor-pod in the fridge overnight
5. try again, but start with deleting the MiFit-app from your iPhone, and reinstall it after reboot
6. try again, exactly as described

You probably have things up and running by then, but if you’ve done all this and it still doesn’t work, your Mi Band sensor-pod is probably broken and you should contact your reseller for a replacement…

Good Luck & enjoy !

Note/update : there seems to be a German language unofficial manual for the similar Mi Band (so not the Mi Band S1 Pulse), that you can get here :

Xiaomi Mi Band – Anleitung, Tipps & Tricks – das inoffizielle Handbuch

A preview excerpt of this book (which might give you some answers also) can be found here :

Google Books preview – Xiaomi Mi Band – Anleitung, Tipps & Tricks – das inoffizielle Handbuch