Microsoft Band’s New Heart Rate Zones Vibrations Not Working

One of the neat, new features in this month’s Microsoft Band/Health update is the ability to have on-Band indicators of when you’re hitting specific Heart Rate Zones based on your “training zones.”

These training zones are generally defined based on what I call a “conversation factor.” The following provides a good example of what I mean:

Despite, the original update rolling out about a week ago now, and a subsequent update delivering more recently to fix bugs in the original’s installation, Microsoft and some bloggers are portraying this new feature with a bit more functionality than actually exists in the update.

Microsoft says this…

When you reach each zone, you’ll get a vibrating notification and your heart rate display will change color: orange for 80 percent and red for 90 percent.

However, while the color notifications work, the vibration notifications just aren’t happening. This was one of my original complaints while testing out the new feature. I was hoping for wrist vibrations because the color changes aren’t exactly visible in bright sunlight. As most of you know, I run every day, so even with the recent bug fix update, vibrating notifications are still not working for me. I spent most of today's run working on getting the vibrations to work to no avail.

Are they working for you?

This is what happens when you have bloggers that choose to report directly from Microsoft blog resources without actually trying or using the new features themselves. (Oops. Did I say that out loud?)

UPDATE: Microsoft has since altered the original blog post to note that...

This post was corrected on June 12. It incorrectly stated that you receive a haptic alert when your heart rate reaches 80 or 90 percent of your maximum. We apologize for this error.

​So, the idea was there, and its possible that the intent was there, but somehow this piece of the feature didn't make it into the final update. Let's hope it shows up in a future update as this would be a great enhancement.