Bangle JS 2 bought less then a month ago started acting up

Hi,

My girlfriend got me the Bangle Js 2 for my birthday less then a month ago, and I've been having a lot of fun exploring its functionalities, it's been all around great.

Today however, for seemingly no reason, other then maybe me putting mild pressure on it without noticing (I am sure it didn't suffer any hit), it suddenly started acting up.

• the screen started looking faded in places on the side where the charging/debug pins are, as if it was damaged
  
• the touchscreen started responding weirdly until I rebooted the watch
  
• I had pixel artifacts that I couldn't get on camera in time, some vertical lines in the widget areas
  
• the accelerometer stopped working temporarily, through a few reboots
  
• the LCD is flickering weirdly on hard reboot
  
• the bootloading gets stuck on the loading screen on hard reboot until I press the button for 2 seconds to do a soft reboot
  
  

To me it looks like some of the hardware got damaged, and I have no idea why, I haven't charged it in 5 days, and the debug pins were covered with a piece of tape since I unpacked it.

I'm worried about it, because I wanted to do a lot with it but now I'm wondering if it's already ruined.

5 Attachments

• VID_20240602_004916.mp4
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Hi - sorry to hear you're having problems with it.

It's really hard to see what's up from the pictures, but is it possible you've been swimming or showering with the watch or something like that? slightly patchy looking screen and touchscreen issues sounds to me like the watch is full of water inside?

If so, I wouldn't charge it for a bit (and would actually choose the 'run battery down' option from the settings menu), and then would leave it somewhere nice and warm and dry for at least a week. If it's got so much water in there that it's visible through the screen, one week may not be enough and it might need a bit more though

All pictures look pretty normal and the video too. Not saying you are not having issues but unfortunately nothing you described is visible there. Flickering/fading display can also be temporary software issue as the display needs to be periodically refreshed via software or it fades away so if it gets stuck due to some bad app it can fade and then flicker during reboot. Maybe factory reset could help?

On the other hand the stuff you describe is definitely not the norm when everything works as expected, but still it is possible it is just software and the hardware is OK. Even if there is no water inside, draining the battery may help if you still have some issues as it will cause complete power off so the hardware will be fully reset and some rare issues not solved by reboot may go away. I never needed this on my watch but for some people here it helped with odd issues.

Actually yes, I should add that with the backlight on, the screen does have slight lighter/darker patches right at the bottom which are slightly visible when there's an area of flat color at the bottom of the screen.

All the watches do it (it's a side effect of the transflective screen being hard to backlight) and yours would have done it from the factory - but maybe you only just noticed it?

I had pixel artifacts that I couldn't get on camera in time, some vertical lines in the widget areas

If it's just within the widget area then that's almost certainly software - a badly behaved widget.

If you've been playing around installing loads of stuff (which is sounds like you might have!) then there is a definite possibility that some of that software is misbehaving and causing problems.

As @fanoush says doing a Factory Reset should definitely be your first port of call, as code that's taking too long to execute could easily be pausing the device for seconds and making the touchscreen appear unresponsive

Thank you for your answers!

I think you're right about everything, although I did pay attention not to submerge the watch and it only got wet once since I got it, with me swiftly drying it afterwards.

I didn't notice the dark patches before, but I can very much imagine that I just missed them, and found out about it when I panicked about the other problems, I'm glad to know the watch didn't get any kind if permanent damage.

The software definitely behaved weirdly for a short amount of time, but as you said, I might have installed some buggy apps, I think the music control gadget bride app is causing occasional problems for the most part.

I tried using it again today and everything seems to be back in order, I guess I just got really worried because of noticing these problems together, anything that can be fixed with a factory reset is not worrying me.

I just want to say again that I really love what you did with this watch, and I hope I can make some nice apps for the community when I have some time!

That's great! Glad it's all working again and you're enjoying it!

I wouldn't worry too much about the water resistance. The Bangle should be fine with short periods of wetness (hand washing, reaching into water to pick stuff up, etc). Mostly where people have had issues it's been from swimming, bathing or showering repeatedly.

But with the software, that's the idea with the watch really - it should be virtually impossible to 'brick' no matter what you do on the software side - but at the same time we don't impose many requirements on apps in the app store, so you get a good selection but some of them may be of varying quality :)