How to connect m3 fitness band to mobile - Techness

Setting up an M3 smart watch with an Android phone

So after I had the painful process of setting an M3 smartwatch up to my Huawei Honor 7 Android phone today, I thought I’d share the process. It seems that there was not too much help available on the internet, and I had to scan around for quite a while to get everything set up and configured properly. I mean, don’t get me wrong – Bluetooth connectivity is plug and play, but try using some of the functions!

The M3 Smart Watch and an Android phone connect fairly easily with Bluetooth. You can do this using the following process:

• Access the Smart watch, and go to “Bluetooth”
• Ensure the “Power” option is set to “On”
• Switch on your phone’s Bluetooth visibility on your Android phone;
  • Go to Settings
  • Go to “Bluetooth”
  • Turn on Bluetooth
  • Turn on Visibility.
• On the Smart Watch, go back to “Bluetooth”
• Select “My Device” and then “Search new device”
• Select your phone’s Bluetooth name and select “Pair”
• Confirm that the pairing codes match on your phone and the Smart Watch.

Brilliant! I thought that all of it would be set up now to be honest, but I found the following issues;

• When making or receiving calls, my phone was sending the phone audio to the watch by default.
  This could be changed on the phone itself every time you make a call, but I considered it really annoying because I imagine that there’s few people who would actually use the smart watch as a default audio device for making/receiving calls. Are we in a Sci-Fi movie? I think not. To top it off, I found a method to disable “phone audio” connectivity to the watch in the Bluetooth settings. “Great!” I thought, but then, no, it stops communicating to the watch when your phone is ringing. Probably one of the most useful things about a smart watch is that you can see who’s calling you on it. I knew there must be some kind of way around this…
• When trying to use any of the M3’s “apps”, I was given the message “Please install “”BT Notice”” app in remote device”.
  Funnily enough, when you try to find said “BT Notice” app in Google Play Store, there is no exact matches. Instead you find apps with similar names, like “BT Notifier”, “BT Notifications”. These all require accessibility permissions to read your notifications, and permissions to read your messages, access your files, access your camera, etc. So I consider it fairly important to ensure that ANY app that you download, whether through the Google Play Store, or via a downloaded APK file that it does not contain any kind of infection or malware. Leading me on to my next point…
  • Eventually I found a website which stated that you should just be able to get a QR code from the watch, use a bar code scanner and download the app from that. I did that, and let me warn you. Please… don’t do that…
    All I can say is that the QR code I scanned took me to an unknown file sharing website, where I had to download the APK. Once I had done this, I had change the settings in my phone to allow installation of apps from unknown sources – I would always recommend looking into any apps before doing this, though I had confidence that something advertised on a smart watch available to the general consumer would be safe to use. Once I had downloaded and installed the app, my Avast! mobile antivirus alerted me straight away of a malware infected application, that being the app downloaded via the QR code on the watch. I obviously removed the app from my phone, and was then left with a Smart Watch that wasn’t very smart at all.
• The watch kept getting partially disconnected from my phone in the sense of it was still connected, but the watch reverted back to stating that the app wasn’t installed.

So how was it set up in the end, did I get it working? Well, yes I did. But without technical know-how you may struggle. Please let me state again that this method has worked for my phone, though I cannot say that it will work for any other/every other Android phone, and although I will try to respond to any comments – I do not provide support for this, it’s all off your own back.

You will need to download the “SmartWatch” app by Iday.
It is available from the Google Play Store. Please let me state that I am in no way associated with the developers of this app, and that there are many other applications that will provide the same features – but after many tries myself with different apps, this is the one that finally worked.

Once you have downloaded and installed the app, you will need to ensure that your phone can communicate it’s notifications with the Smart Watch app. You can do this as follows;

• Go to your phone’s “Settings” app
• Find “Advanced Settings”
• Select “Accessibility”
• Enable “SmartWatch” service.

Once you have done this, save and close your settings. You will then need to open the SmartWatch app, and go into it’s settings, enabling everything in the list;

• Push SMS messages
• Push missed call
• Close the media audio for saving power.
• Show connection status in the status bar when BT notification is connected.
• Push notification always.

Go back to the “SmartWatch” app “home”, and then select “App Push”. On this page, ensure that “Notification Service” is ticked.
Further to this, you can then configure which applications are allowed to send notifications to your watch by selecting “Notification app”.

What you will then want to do, is go and download the “SoundAbout” app by RareEarth Software.
Please let me note, again, I am in no way affiliated with the developers of this application and I’ve seen a couple of other applications that do the same thing, but this is the one that worked best for me. Also note that I have only downloaded this app today, and it is free – but I get a message when opening the app that the PRO features are only available for a couple of days, and that they will need to be purchased after that via the “SoundAbout PRO” app. I’m not sure what the PRO features include, but that being said, if I need to purchase it – the app is only £2.99 in the Google Play Store, and I’m sure I could part with that considering the money you save on this watch compared to many other Smart Watches.

Once you have installed the SoundAbout app, you will need to open it and complete the following;

• Ensure that “SoundAbout Service” is ON.
• Change “Media Audio” to “Speaker”
• Change “Phone call audio” to “Earpiece”
• Go into the “Connectable devices” menu
  • Go to “Wired Headset” settings and ensure the settings are as follows;
    • Wired Headset detection: ALLOWING port in/out detection.
    • Wired Headset microphone: DETECT microphone for Wired Headset.
    • Un-plug pauses music player: PAUSE music player while unplugging.
    • Plug-in continues music player: NOT changing music player status.
    • Headset disconnect audio: NO audio. This prevents accidental audio if headset media disconnects.

If you’ve done all that, you should now have a Smart Watch that will see your call history, messages, notifications and alert you of all of these. Awesome! Now it’s set up. But now I had another problem, the functionality was intermittent…

I worked out that this was because the app was automatically being closed by my phone when it was locked. I’m not sure if the settings will be the same for every phone, but it’s basically a power saving setting. The method for me to resolve this was as follows;

• On your phone, go to “Settings”
• Go to “Advanced Settings”
• Go to “Battery Manager”
• Go to “Protected Apps”
• Enable the “SmartWatch” and “SoundAbout” app so that they can run in the background.

I hope this guide has been of use, if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments below and if I can answer them I will try to.

Peace,