If you’re anything like me, the whole point of getting a smart watch or fitness tracker is the cool factor of it all. I’ll probably get laughed out of many forums and groups (I’ve already been the subject to this in the office), but sometimes all I really want is to be able to customise my band as much as I possibly can, to get it to look as personalised as possible.
I recently got my hands on a Xiaomi’s latest Mi Band 4, which isn’t officially available in Malaysia yet—you can still get a set through AP dealers; click here to find out more. The first thing I wanted to do, of course, was to see what sort of customisability options I had with the Mi Band 4’s OLED colour display.
You can open the Mi Fit app on your smartphone, and even if your set is a China set (mine was bought at a Mi Store in China by a colleague), it will automatically set your language preferences based on your location and settings. Through the app, go to Profile, and click on Mi Smart Band 4 under My devices. Head over to Band displays, and you’ll have quite a few options from Xiaomi that you can sync over to your Mi Band 4.
The selection is somewhat limited for some (including me), so here’s a quick way to install custom watch faces, along with a site that you can use to access a huge database of watch faces created by users just like yourself.
- First, head to this site, and go to the Mi Band 4 section. Pick a display theme you like—I went for this Stranger Things theme—and download the .bin file.
- Now, open the Mi Fit app on your smartphone, and sync any theme over from the Band displays section.
- Open your smartphone’s file manager, and head to Android>data>com.xiaomi.hm.health>files>watch_skin_local. You should see a folder that contains the .bin file for the theme you synced at the previous step.
- Copy the name of the .bin file here, and rename your custom watch face .bin file with it.
- After deleting the original .bin file from above, move the custom .bin file over to the same folder.
- Open your Mi Fit app again, and go to Band displays—sync the same watch face as before (it will still show the default preview), and you’ll now have a custom watch face on your Mi Band 4.
There are a whole host of watch faces available from the site from video game-themed faces to more general face designs, and most of them are free to use. The site is also updated with more custom designs from users, or you can even upload custom faces of your own.
We’ll be reviewing the Mi Band 4 some time soon, so do let us know if you’d like to know anything about the Mi Band 4 in the comments section. Have fun!
