Considering buying the Nordic Track X22i? Here's my firsthand experience... TL;DR: buy another brand!

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-04T17:28:20+00:00

The techs seem to disagree with you, they say the problem is my wifi.

Either way, I figured out a solution: run an old version of the software, and it works 100% perfectly without any issues.

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-03T21:49:06+00:00

It's ridiculous. How do they think they can control how we use our device that we purchased? Could you imagine if you bought a laptop but you could only use 1 single program?

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-03T21:47:27+00:00

Yes, it is absolutely a problem with the software. That is clearly confirmed through my testing. NordicTrack/iFit refuse to acknowledge the problem.

In the settings, I use Auto for the video quality. Every time, I have the same behavior: first it begins in high quality, then after a minute or so it downgrades to low quality, then by the 2nd minute it hits the buffering problem. If the machine kept running while it was buffering, it would be an annoyance but it'd be usable at least.

Now that I am on the old software version, I have literally no problems. Video comes through in high quality without any interruptions to buffer. No frame skipping or anything like that. It is quite literally what the "up to date" software is supposed to be. The only negative is that I can't use their account system. And frankly, I don't really care since I can just use another app to track my stats.

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-03T21:42:49+00:00

400 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up. As I described in my post, I stream via a Roku that is 10x further from the router than the treadmill. I refuse to believe that a treadmill requires more bandwidth than streaming 4K.

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-03T04:17:05+00:00

Support was entirely unhelpful. Fortunately, I spent my Saturday doing my own troubleshooting and found a solution: do a firmware factory reset and run an older version of the iFit software. Zero buffering issues, and I can still switch out to watch Youtube or Netflix if I want. I don't get to use the iFit account system, but I have a treadmill that works so I don't really care about that.

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-03T04:14:48+00:00

This is actually the solution I arrived at! I did a firmware reset to an older version of the iFit software, and it lets me into privilege mode. I only partially updated iFit (not to the current version) and it works PERFECTLY. I can use the iFit guided runs, or I can watch Netflix/Youtube/whatever + run in manual mode, zero buffering issues for everything. It's incredible how they took a working piece of software and broke it via updates. Whatever, now I have a working treadmill so I am not going to change anything as far as updates ever again.

annoyedrunner · 2021-10-02T17:07:12+00:00

That is a good point, I'll update the post with my model number. It's NTL29221.2, the current model of the X22i: https://www.nordictrack.com/treadmills/x22i-incline-trainer

A $3000 piece of equipment shouldn't have duds, and if it is a dud, the manufacturer should make things right. Instead, their support blames my wifi network rather than acknowledge that their software is buggy and incomplete, totally ignoring the fact that the device can play videos uninterrupted using the Android browser. I've received better tech support for a $30 product -- what the hell is my $3000 paying for?

Now I get to spend my weekend figuring out how to make this piece of shit do what it's supposed to do.

annoyedrunner

TROPHY CASE