The Xiaomi Band 6 has been on the market for some time now and it will probably not be ages before the Xiaomi Band 7 is presented, but the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 of all things is now falling on the feet of the Chinese tech giant.
According to reports, Xiaomi was fined 80,000 yuan (equivalent to around 11,100 euros) by a Beijing authority – which is certainly manageable given the around 40 billion euros that the group turns over annually.
Specifically, the fine was imposed for an inaccurate description of product features and a resulting violation of the Advertising Act. The website of the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 in the NFC version claims that the wearable has a “24-hour sleep monitoring” function.
Sleep monitoring is not 24 hours
However, the feature actually consists of two parts: recording overnight sleep and recording shorter sleep bursts like an afternoon nap. However, if the night’s sleep lasts less than 60 minutes, it is not taken into account by the corresponding recording mode. The sleep recording mode for spontaneous sessions does not record periods of less than 20 minutes. The bottom line is that the “24-hour sleep monitoring” advertised by Xiaomi does not provide any data under certain circumstances.
Now you can see curses in this, but a company of Xiaomi’s size is trusted to have enough expertise to prevent such mistakes from happening. Of course, it would be even worse if Xiaomi had intentionally formulated it in a misleading way. What do you think?