Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 July 2023 concerning batteries and waste batteries
Article 11
Removability and replaceability of portable batteries and LMT batteries
1. Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those batteries are readily removable and replaceable by the end-user at any time during the lifetime of the product. That obligation shall only apply to entire batteries and not to individual cells or other parts included in such batteries.
A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.
There's an exception for "appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable". This ring is described as water-resistant, so I wonder if it would be allowed?
From my reading, the conditions seem to apply to the environment it primarily operates in, not the product itself. So the product primarily operates in the environment of the hand, and the hand is definitely "regularly subject to splashing water".
We regularly get contacted by people in Europe who want to buy our product, but we haven't been providing support due to the cost of certs, and other regulatory needs (medical/wellness device).
We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
Our product is designed to be refurbished, but not user-replaceable.
At the same time, how many products do people give up on because of battery life, and is this a non-issue with future battery chemistries?
Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
This is why repairability isn't restricted to just the battery. And buying the newest thing every year is kinda frowned upon here in the EU now. I'm sure some people still do it but most people aren't flashing their new phone around anymore. And phones have become boring anyway. The latest Samsung S25 is mostly the same as the S23, exact same form factor, cameras. Just a bit faster and a bit more memory.
But the government sets a baseline here to stimulate sustainability. I really agree with it, this planet has to be usable for a lot longer. And economic growth isn't everything.
We have to move away from consumerism for the sake of it and I think we're making good inroads here in the EU. Not to mention it means there's more money left over for important stuff like doing things with friends.
Anecdotally, 2023/24 all media in Germany was full of ads for shops trading refurb phones. Most of those talked lower prices, but some mentioned sustainability.
The first article does not look to be informative; it values the EU smartphone market at around 465 million USD, which is impossibly low. If you assume a smartphone is valued at $1,000, a market of that size would only amount to 465,000 devices sold; this is around 0.01% of the EU’s population.
The second article links to a paper which appears to be more informative (though it has not been peer reviewed):
> For example, in the United States, the average expected life span (replacement
cycle length) of consumer and enterprise smartphones was 2.67 and 2.54 years, respectively, in 2023, while in the UK almost 30% of surveyed consumers use their smartphone up to two years and 41% up to 4 years.
and
> Furthermore, evidence shows that European, American and Chinese consumers have reduced the replacement rate of their smartphones, increasing their average life cycle (see Figure 1). These data suggest that consumer preferences are changing, and new opportunities arise for companies who want to find new profitable ways to meet the needs of their customers.
Those numbers would be more realistic, amounting to around a thousand dollars spent per each EU citizen per year; this seems a little high if replacement rates are hovering around 3 years on average, but not impossible like the other figure.
What I don’t understand is why it would be written “USD 448.87 million.” This convention is common in accounting and finance as well, but they usually make an indication of it in a column header.
BTW this also works the other way: I find myself to avoid US products more and more because they tend to come with inbuilt obsolescence, or, for digital products, with dark patterns preventing subscription cancelling.
> We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us to do so on terms we decide for you.
Yes, a free market isn't the answer to everything. It will never optimise for sustainability unless this is a conscious consumer choice factor. It's way too important to leave it to that though. Hence regulation.
Just change the underlying economic incentives - but nobody is even barely there yet, except maybe the EU. Doughnut Economics, when are you going to save us (& the planet)?
That's an unfair representation of the situation. There's nothing about this device that implies "disposable". The EU is definitely the problem here. I think the problem is the EU loves legislating entrepreneurial creativity into the dirt.
Speaking personally, I've never broken/damaged a phone. Since the Pixel 1 started requiring removal of the screen in order to swap the battery, 100% of my phone replacements have been because the battery isn't good anymore. (Granted, I would've gotten a new phone eventually regardless, when the old one stopped receiving security updates.)
I'm not who you asked that question, but I'd guess it's because it requires "proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product."
It'd be hard to design/manufacture a device that reliably remains waterproof after a typical not-specially-skilled owner opens it up to replace a battery. It's really common to hear of people damaging watches due to water ingress after battery replacements, getting seals or orings seated just right isn't something every user is going to be able to do.
I can imagine some medical devices have similar sealing requirements, perhaps even more robust sealing methods since they might need to be exposed to regular disinfection grade cleaning with chemicals harsher then just water. I could easily understand why a company may design a medical device that its heat-glued together for sealing purposes in a way that can only reasonably be done (and redone) at the factory.
I killed an original Pebble when I Dremelled it open to replace the battery, and failed to hot glue seal it well enough and it got wet inside.
Having said that - I dislike this design choice for the Index 01. I can see myself becoming reliant on this right before they sell out to Garmin or whoever and tell all their customers to FOAD again. Trust is very hard to win back.
I may not be a typical user, but I've run my last few iphones and macbooks until the battery gave up the ghost. I haven't really needed more features or raw horsepower for quite some time, so the battery ends up being the limit I hit.
iPhones and MacBooks can be serviced to replace the battery.
My iPhones typically get a fresh battery around the 3-year mark, or whenever the battery health dips below 80%, and do a second tour of duty with someone in the family. In all cases so far, the OS goes out of support and apps stop working before the second battery degrades.
My personal experience: Electric toothbrush and razor. I especially hate the razors, you can replace the head, they could last a lifetime, but the battery is practically dead after two years. Toothbrushes are improving, the last one has 3 years of service and still work ok.
I don't think it will be possible to make wireless earbuds or a ring with replaceable batteries without seriously compromising the ergonomics of fitting onto or into the human body.
I have a pair of earbuds designed to be as diminutive for sleeping comfortably and I have no idea how you would do that with a replaceable battery even if Airpod sized devices can be done.
My main concern here is that i live in an area that regularly get's below -20° and my electronic devices are regularly dying around me. And while I try to keep my hands warm-ish, they do get cold sometimes, and it would suck if a non replaceable battery died on me early because of this.
While I sympathize with the intent of the law, this is a great example of why it's dumb. There's no possible way you could make that ring, in a reasonably ring-sized form factor, with today's manufacturing processes in such a way that an end user could replace it.
If this law pushes back against the idea that it's ok to make endless tech products which are essentially future rubbish as soon as you buy them, then I think that's a good thing. Perhaps products like this just shouldn't exist until we have better ways of dealing with the remains.
The problem is that it makes it impossible to have a version 0 to iterate on until a whole lot of other industries have advanced. Imagine the situation of in-ear hearing aids: they shouldn't be allowed to exist until they're perfect, unless we're happy telling deaf people they have to wear much larger than necessary devices and advertise their disability.
I'm glad we're reducing e-waste. I'm not thrilled about the idea of saying you can't make a thing until 100% of the bugs are worked out, meaning you can't have a beta version for research and fundraising, meaning, you can't conjure the perfect version into existence.
Fortunately, your link basically says it doesn't apply to something you wear on your hands or arms:
> By way of derogation from paragraph 1, the following products incorporating portable batteries may be designed in such a way as to make the battery removable and replaceable only by independent professionals:
> (a) appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable;
But the only mention of "medical" comes right after it, and doesn't include hearing aids, future smart glasses, etc.:
> (b) professional medical imaging and radiotherapy devices, as defined in Article 2, point (1), of Regulation (EU) 2017/745, and in vitro diagnostic medical devices, as defined in Article 2, point (2), of Regulation (EU) 2017/746.
So ironically, the law allows disposable "junk devices" people are complaining about here, but doesn't allow factory-only serviceable hearing aids. How 'bout that? We can buy our smart rings and throw them away, but hearing aids will have to remain giant hunks of heavy plastic, or at least the models purchasable by average people who can't fly out of the EU to buy the good ones.
Edit: It's easy to downvote. I cited the relevant law. If I'm wrong, cite other law that explains why.
Hearing aids have had replaceable batteries since they were invented basically. I still remember my grandma 20 years ago fiddling with the small batteries, so that really is not a problem.
If you want more freedom to design medical devices for people where there is an actual need, it would easily be done by expanding the exception for medical devices that already exists in the law.
If you think people to be able to sell unsustainable and mostly superfluous electronics because any improvements there might eventually trickle down to hearing aids, your argument is basically "we should accept the millions of tonnes of unnecessary e-waste in order to get slighly smaller hearing aids", which think many reasonable people would disagree with.
Who gets to choose what products are future rubbish?
Even if you think this product is a waste of resources, why is THIS waste of resources something we should stop, but not other, bigger wastes? Should we outlaw flying somewhere when you could take a train? The fuel spent on a short flight wastes way more resources and damages the environment much more than this smart ring does. If we are willing to ban this piece of tech because it is a waste, couldn't the same arguments be made about a short range flight?
If the battery lasts for two years its exceeding the useful life of many other products already, some of which of have higher environment cost for manufacturing and disposal.
The law has chosen poor proxies for lifespan and impact.
The problem with plastic straws was properly disposing them. For a piece of jewelry I doubt many people would throw it away on the side of the road. A ring that last for years is different than a disposal product that people may use for a couple of minutes.
Products are supposed to last two years at the very least in EU (local laws may be more strict, but not less). If your product dies before that time, the customer will cite warranty, and there you go. This device is likely one of the many 'designed to last a little bit more than two years', with the emphasis on 'little bit'. It appears to be a perfect example of planned obsolescence.
If their official sizing kit 3D models are accurate(better be!), there's exact amount of space for an SR721W watch/hearing aid silver oxide coin cell. And these are not even the tiniest of standardized replaceable batteries.
You're too generous. I feel like the entire production run of this ring could be equivalent to a single discarded washing machine. This law is hamfisted.
What has been long considered one of the most wealthy markets is a country descending into a billionaire controlled kleptocracy. And they're pissing off every other country in the world with tariff blackmail and punishment (or extra judicial executions) for any country that fails to bend the knee and fawn obsequiously enough to their leader.
One of the most populous markets is a country that manufactures approximately 100% of all consumer electronics, and will have a hundred versions of this available for 10% of Pebble's price on AliExpress as soon as it shows any signs of gaining market traction anywhere (quite likely stolen or "3rd shift" ones from Pebble's own outsourced production line).
India, who these days has more than enough local skill and experienced ex-H1B tech people to create this from scratch at home (and at least some with a deep resentment over how they were treated by US tech companies while they were there)?
One of the no longer EU markets is suffering post Brexit austerity and isn't likely to be buying a heap if tech toys - even if their fucked up new importing goods paperwork doesn't make it impossible to get your product into the country.
There goes about 40% of the planet's population.
That leaves, what? Manufacture locally and try surviving by selling to the US market at prices driven by US labor costs which'd make the product prohibitively expensive globally? South East Asia, who're likely to buy the Samsung copy over one from a US company? Russia, who (at least for now) is under trade sanctions for a US based company like Pebble? So perhaps Canada (until their southern neighbour make good on their threat to try and make them the 51st state)? South Africa? Australia and New Zealand?
I understand that sentiment but I think its arbitrary. People buy lots of products that don't have a useful life exceeding two years. For example, every pet toy ever sold. Some will have higher impact for manufacturing and disposal than this ring.
1. Arbitrary it may be. You have to start somewhere. In that sense, anything we do is “arbitrary“. Straw man. (see also: ban of plastic straws)
2. I would expect pet toys to be regulated as well and to contain less environmental toxins and hard to recycle elements than batteries, so I doubt the claim about impact per item sold.
As long as their batteries are replaceable, that’s fine, and if not, they will not be legally allowed to be sold in Europe. What point is it that you’re trying to make?
And an endless stream of devices in the form of toys running full software stacks which never receive updates. Great, some products are as shitty. Perhaps we oppose those as well?
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage.
I feel like I’m usually good about being able to imagine a market for different devices even when I’m not the target audience, but I’m having a hard time with this one.
Having 20 different 3-second thoughts transcribed to notes that I have to process every day sounds more like added complications than problem solving. If I stretch, I can think of a few things that flashed into my mind and then I forgot again for a couple days because I wasn’t in a location to immediately pull out my phone and put it on my todo list (which takes about 10 seconds because I put a shortcut in my lock screen). However, those locations weren’t something where I could be “whispering” to a ring, either.
So I don’t know. I hope repebble succeeds with everyone they’re doing, but this product feels like they went too far into the novelty end of the spectrum and neglected some of the actual usability that made the original Pebble popular.
EDIT: On second thought, maybe the lack of recharging is an acknowledgement that they don’t actually expect people to use this product a lot or for very long. Maybe the target audience is people who want to have something new and unique that they can also use as a conversation starter. Once the novelty wears off maybe it doesn’t get worn much. If it does become popular with a niche audience they can release a V2 with charging.
Different people have different lives. I myself can't imagine the type of life where at any given moment during the day I'm in a position to "immediately pull out my phone" when I want to create a record of something. I'm not a Pebble customer, past or present, and I have owned exactly zero smartwatches. Excluding portrayals of futuristic wrist-mounted computers I saw during childhood that seemed cool just because they seemed cool, this is the only worthwhile thing I've ever seen anyone actually propose a smartwatch could be good for. The fact that smartwatches could be (and are) widely embraced but that this seems like pure novelty to someone strikes me as very strange.
It sounds, though, like it doesn't solve a problem you have. I guess the only recourse you have about its existence is to not buy it.
I'm not a watch person, and the only reason I occasionally wear one is because it's a Garmin and I'm recording an outdoor activity with it. But while cycling, when the phone in my backpack makes a notification noise, it is kind of handy to just be able to look at the watch to see what kind of notification it is - the kind hardly worth looking at or the kind worth stopping and pulling out the phone to reply to. This particular gadget doesn't have a microphone and any app interaction on it involves a multi-button dance. But if there was a single button audio recording app, I can totally see myself using it. Especially as you get older (I'm guessing - can't interview younger me) fleeting thoughts can be awfully fleeting.
Yeah, there's lots of places you can't speak out loud bc it's disruptive to others though. Personally I set a lot of Siri reminders, but it's weird and uncomfortable to talk loudly at your phone in public spaces so I can only use it at home or outdoors. If the ring can follow through on the promise of being able to whisper to it, that's fairly valuable imo
There is another way to go about it - ignoring the phone completely while enjoying biking or jogging. Or leaving it at home.
Unless I am on a call duty, all my notifications can wait.
My notification volume is relatively low, but there is one kind of notification, involving a certain significant other (we have high-needs kids) that requires action. So if the phone rings or there is a text message, for example, seeing at a glance (no button presses) what number it is from definitely allows stop/continue decision. I wish I did have a life where I can leave the electronic leash at home, or at least on mute.
On iOS, and probably on Android though I haven't checked, you can choose to only be notified of messages from certain contacts (in iOS it's in Focus Modes). This may help.
My original Pebble purchase decision was made thinking "This will be great, I can use it while commuting to see who's calling or messaging my phone, so I can decide whether to pull over to respond or not!" I had a 35-40 minute each commute where I rode a motorcycle every day back then.
Turns out, the number of times I pulled over to return a call or message was precisely never. There was nothing so important that I could do anything about it by the side of the road, or that couldn't wait half an hour till I got to work/home.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when microcassette voice recorders were a fad, and pretty much everyone found they just weren't worth it.
Psychologically there's a sort of information hoarding aspect to this. I think a lot of people experience this with browser tabs, where they don't want to read something right now, but also don't want to just abandon it. So you end up with this backlog you feel you have to hold onto.
I've learned to just trust my brain more, where if something occurs to me is important, it'll probably occur to me again when its relevant, vs me treating random momentary insights like they're a priceless treasure.
It perhaps starts to make more sense now with better AI transcribing though. For the last few decades, the idea of dictating notes has been nice; but not the reality of typing them up/processing them however yourself if you don't have a secretary.
I could sort of see myself doing this coupled with good speech to text, but I don't know if I'd do it enough that it's worth having special hardware for vs. just recording on my phone or with earphones - or getting a smart watch for this plus other functionality.
I actually tried this workflow with some ebay'ed microcassette recorders - even the really compact ones are bulkier (though not necessarily heavier) than a modern cellphone, plus being non-connected you basically have to set aside some time to transcribe and erase (doable, but if you're specifically using it as a memory assist then having to remember this isn't great.) They did do a good job of "one press and they're operating, and you can confidently believe it" (but you have to pick them up in the right orientation for that to work.)
A modern digital voice recorder would have been a better choice for the experiment perhaps? Pen form factor versions exist, e.g. Olympus VP-20, Philips Voicetracer DVT1600.
I think this could be useful for the type of person that uses uses todo lists to help them tackle lots of small tasks that they intend to do immediately but somehow get distracted mid-action from and never finish (and then forget about altogether). As described in this blog post that front-paged hn some time ago:
> When I notice a micro-task like this, my instinct is not to do it, but to put it in the todo list. Then I try to do it immediately. And if I get distracted halfway through, it’s still there, in the todo list.
The problem with this approach is that recording tasks become a good amount of relative overhead compared to the 'micro-task' if it involves pulling out your phone, and pulling out your phone also introduces a potential distraction. So, having something that is single purpose and as low-friction as possible is appealing.
I'm skeptical that this is actually any better than using a smart watch that you can dictate to though.
As someone with ADHD that’s me. I don’t think this product is for me, but I have to immediately write a thing down or do it. Otherwise it’s lost. Importance is irrelevant.
Funny enough I have a pebble core 2 duo from this team. There’s a simple voice app that jots down a short note quickly on the watch, it can support 10 notes total. I love it. I only use it when I really need to throw something down immediately and I can’t clutter it up with nonsense. It also means I check it every day because it’s not daunting.
I mean on one side I can see using it for to-do lists, but on other, why would I want another device in addition to smartphone and smartwatch ? Especially that talking to your smartwatch looks slightly less crazy in public than to your finger
The idea is immediately interesting to me because I often am in the car and want to remind myself to look something up and forget when off the road. I do not have a car with CarPlay. This would suffice beautifully.
...But that battery life absolutely kills it for me. I'd feel like each time I recorded something I was burning lifetime off my device. (Technically also true of rechargeable battery lifetimes, but it's abstract enough and minimal enough I don't think about it.)
> Having 20 different 3-second thoughts transcribed to notes that I have to process every day sounds more like added complications than problem solving.
Frankly, I'm surprised this is a selling point, because I think it attaches too much importance to our "ideas". If it's a good idea that you'll pursue in earnest, you'll come across it again. And if you don't, so what?
I say this as someone who does quite a bit of reflection throughout the day. I jot down things I find interesting, which can be, paradoxically, a way to move past the musing and onto other things instead of having it nag and pull my attention from other things. So, in all likelihood, this product would likely lead to a bunch of crap being stored in memory that you'll never return to.
Some people have serious memory issues, such as myself (I recently took a test from a neurologist and scored in the bottom 2%). I see this as being a lifesaver.
It's not just for "ideas", it's for reminders. Most of my remembering happens when I'm driving on the highway, and I don't want to text and drive.
For me it's more observations than ideas - "check out new restaurant/bookstore I saw while driving in Arlington" while not getting distracted from the actual driving...
i would also see this as being super useful for things you need to buy. i often notice halfway through cooking something that i'm running low on an ingredient. that's one of the worst times to have to stop and pull out a phone haha, but if i don't write it down i won't remember to get this random niche ingredient later
I'm sold enough on this form factor to take a flyer on a pre-order. I've been hunting for ways to minimize friction when quickly capturing random thoughts and this is a novel idea that seems to go further than anything else I've tried.
The lack of battery charging/replacement is a bummer, but slimness is far more critical for a ring than just about any other device so I understand the tradeoff. I've also seen stories of injuries from battery expansion in fitness rings, so if the risk of this is significantly reduced by eliminating charge cycles, I personally consider that a notable benefit.
Even though, IMO, there are enough legitimate benefits to warrant this product's trade-offs, I imagine its disposable nature will ultimately make it unsuccessful. Off the cuff, it's easy to look at this as "saying the quiet part out loud" vis-a-vis planned obsolescence, and I understand why many would find that extremely off-putting.
I don't understand why people who are probably OK with ordering Doordash once in a while are up in arms about a disposable device that weighs a couple of grams, lasts for years, and is recycled. You can easily spend more on a single Doordash meal for two people and I guarantee a few Doordash meals have more impact on the environment than this minuscule device ever could.
I doubt it's about the environmental impact. I agree that the environmental impact probably isn't that bad. My biggest concern is that it's $75 USD (plus shipping, presumably), and if the company ever goes under it's now worthless because I can't get a new one.
That said, if I assume that the company will last long enough, I think $75 USD is worth it even if I only get to use it for 4 years. Although if I end up building workflows around the ring, and then I have to get rid of it, that would be very annoying.
On a monthly basis the cost is quite reasonable IMO. It will continue to work if the company goes out of business. Their software is open source. So you can count on using it as long as the battery lasts.
personally, i worry about what happens when it doesn't last for years. a software bug causes high power draw, or you set your ring down and something gets pushed against the recording button for a few hours, or you fall asleep laying on it. given it only has a 15-hour recording life, this happening just once could be the end of your $75 device
Doordash? What does that have to do with this discussion? It is a completely different market. You use the food right away (food is perishable), and you probably could've cooked yourself a healthy meal with much less money. If you live with multiple people, it is even easier to do so due to scaling and sharing what you like. I am very much not OK with spending 50 USD per person on takeaway food (getting it here costs just 3 EUR or so). It is the amount of money I spend at a (for me) fancy restaurant.
I'll give you another example. A smart TV. A smart TV is more expensive than this ring, but yeah. So a cheap smart TV needs a soundbar for decent audio, and it needs a STB for the OS (streaming) in order to make it a dumb TV. It comes with a computer in it. A computer which you cannot upgrade. They decide to quit support whenever they want to (after 2 years you're generally hosed in EU). Planned obsolescence. We don't like that in Europe. I know, in the USA the current leadership denies climate change even exists. But here in Europe, we follow the scientific method, not BS.
Instead of a stand-alone piece of e-waste, how about this: a device with the same format (a ring and an button) but the only thing it does is trigger the pebble watch to start recording a message. This way the microphone isn't needed, just the radio (and much weaker radio at that), and the battery will last exponentially longer. Then just expose the charging terminals so that we can at least hack the device with custom made external charging controllers, or buy a charger separately.
Might as well bundle the ring with the watch at that point, and increase the price accordingly, as it's then become an accessory particular to the pebble watch. And including a charging circuit means more complexity and bulk, also leading to an increase in price. And cost is a factor they're optimizing for.
That's my point exactly. This should have been a pebble accessory, not a standalone device that sends voice notes to your phone. If this device actually has a 2 year battery, if you'd remove the microphone and turn it into a "smart button" to trigger a watch action, the battery should easily last 4+ years.
Yet a design goal is for it to also work standalone, so users who don't have/want a pebble watch can use it with their phone, something that essentially everyone has.
Indeed, I have a remote doorbell where the outer button is a piezo button and the inside bell part is connected to a socket. But the button is quite thick, presumably because it needs a bit of travel to get enough energy. Granted that's for a device that sends multi-wall penetrating strength of 433Mhz radio waves. For something like this where the distance is only about 25cm you might be able to get a button small enough.
UX probably not as good in that case. I am thinking about how buggy my voice-remote is for the TV. 1/3 of the time it works, 1/3 of the time there is some lag before it starts working (and requires waiting for feedback i.e. the listening tone before I can speak) and 1/3 of the time it doesn't work at all (never hears me due to lag or booting up or whatever else).
If I could press one button (and not unlock the phone) I would; my samsung even has an extra wasted button (the "bixby" button) but it isn't reconfigurable. (Still fails for the "while driving" case but I'd be using it the rest of the time)
The cellphone that’s buried in my handbag? I think you missed the expressed use case (admittedly, a few paragraphs into TFA):
”Before, I would take my phone out of my pocket to jot these down, but I couldn’t always do that (eg, while bicycling). I also wanted to start using my phone less, especially in front of my kids.”
It's still easier to turn around a ring than to fiddle with a a phone. And more legal as well, no laws against rotating a ring while rinding your bike. That's fully haptic, no is drawn from traffic for that.
I just tried it, and it worked flawlessly. Now, obviously it's not great for privacy per se, but I'm not jotting down my plans for world domination or anything
Start using your ring/watch/whatever_else more in front of your kids.
Honestly, it isn't about what you use (that is just hype). You can read the paper all day if you want. I grew up with a father who was listening to radio and watching TV all the time (to be fair: he was disabled, including legally blind). It isn't about using your phone less in front of your kids. It is about being there for your kids when they need you; showing genuine interest in your kids; interacting with them. Right now, as I am writing this to you, my kids are watching Peppa Pig before bedtime. Instead of writing this, I could sit next to them and watch an episode with them.
As for cycling, with a ring you'd have to move your hand towards you or not, but it isn't much different compared to a watch, except perhaps when you'd wear a sweater over your watch.
It is also very typical that in-ear buds are expensive, small, yet hard to repair because the battery isn't user replaceable. And guess what, exactly the same for this device.
Apart from the yet another device with microphone (24/7 on, I suppose) and Bluetooth (the wireless spaghetti protocol) and it not being user serviceable the device costs 100 USD. For such a price, I expect it to last longer than two years. I mean, I'm sick of devices lasting only a few years. I wouldn't need yet another one.
> Instead of writing this, I could sit next to them and watch an episode with them.
And as any study into the effects of parental attention and shared experience will show that kind of behavior would be beneficial to their overall long-term mental health. Requiring them to make themselves heard and to actively “disturb you“ is a very high barrier for children to break through (even if you don’t consider it a disturbance). Children need active mirroring and external guidance when it comes to their needs in order to develop a healthy sense for them. They are “left alone“ as soon as you leave the shared emotional space.
The remarks in this comment can only come from a gross misunderstanding of what many people mean when they talk about avoiding use of their phones around their kids. Almost every sentence reveals a very me-focused outlook.
> It isn't about using your phone less in front of your kids. It is about being there for your kids when they need you
That's a very narrow conception if the problem—it isn't solely about being "there" for them or trying to get control over (and maintain control over) one's own addictions. The main thing that people have an issue with when they talk about kids and phone use (and TV for that matter) is addiction observed in the kids themselves. It's absolutely about using one's own phone less while they're around as a means of quashing overexposure.
You can show as much genuine interest in them as you want, and it doesn't change anything, because whether the kids feel like the parent is "there for them" not the problem that a parent is is already genuinely interested in them is concerned about and trying to address.
> As for cycling, with a ring you'd have to move your hand towards you or not, but it isn't much different compared to a watch, except perhaps when you'd wear a sweater over your watch.
"Not much" except that the fingers that are attached to the hand that's attached to the wrist where you're wearing your watch certainly aren't capable of reaching back to press a button on said watch.
> Apart from the yet another device with microphone (24/7 on, I suppose)
The folks in this thread are really committed to just plucking things out of thin air and acting on foregone conclusions, huh?
You supposedly speak for masses and claim I am having some exceptional, unique look but you don't cite anything to support your claim.
> That's a very narrow conception if the problem—it isn't solely about being "there" for them or trying to get control over (and maintain control over) one's own addictions. The main thing that people have an issue with when they talk about kids and phone use (and TV for that matter) is addiction observed in the kids themselves. It's absolutely about using one's own phone less while they're around as a means of quashing overexposure.
> You can show as much genuine interest in them as you want, and it doesn't change anything, because whether the kids feel like the parent is "there for them" not the problem that a parent is is already genuinely interested in them is concerned about and trying to address.
I grew up with my father who was really hip. He didn't use his smartphone much. Sometimes, he did this weird thing. Out of nowhere, he'd comment about something seemingly unrelated to the discussion. I didn't understand what he was yapping at. At first, I thought he was talking to mom. One time, I noticed he did it when mom was upstairs. At one point, I thought dad was having imaginary friends. Turns out, dad had this smart ring he'd use to record notes. One day, the ring was gone. Gone from his finger. I guess it broke, or something.
IOW, replacing one tool with another, you can't fool people. If social media distracts you, remove it from your smartphone, or limit the exposure to it. My wife when she is done with cooking, regularly uses her smartphone after that when we are eating. Usually to fill in about groceries. We're not overly strict on that, and we don't expect our kids to be strict on it when they got a smartphone later on. But it is about proportion. Using it for a short amount of time is perfectly possible. If you want to have a 'no tech' rule during dinner, fine, but then also smart rings. If you want to allow certain specific tasks, a technical barrier like a smart ring versus a smartphone can work, yes. But you can also decide to limit yourself whilst using your smartphone. IMO that starts with uninstalling all kind of BS apps you don't need, and removing notifications you don't require. Either way, the bottom line is this: the ring doesn't solve the issue of distractions on smartphones. It tries to mitigate the issue. So whenever you do use your smartphone, you are still suffering from the issue.
> "Not much" except that the fingers that are attached to the hand that's attached to the wrist where you're wearing your watch certainly aren't capable of reaching back to press a button on said watch.
This is true, it isn't hands-free, hands-free is superior. Although a device on the bike also works well. You can buy such a tool right now to attach your smartphone to your bike, and it'll last for more than two years. It is a matter of moving your hand once to the other one to enable the mic. A Pebble, too, you can replace the battery yourself and I absolutely despise all these smartwatches where you cannot.
I'm sure it won't be able to handle wind noise well (it doesn't look big enough to have multiple microphones) so you'd have to stop the bicycle to make a good recording. Might as well grab the phone then.
Yes I know but I doubt it will capture much at all when there's significant wind noise, even enough to understand by ear without STT.
A friend of mine has her phone on her handlebars in a gps mount and she sends me voice messages through her bluetooth headset and those are hardly intelligible. A hand on the handlebar would be even further from the mouth.
And those are pretty good ones with multiple microphones.
Why stop there? Why use your phone at all? Just go visit your mum instead of calling...
Sorry the sarcasm, but not everything should need you to take your phone, unlock, get distracted, open social media on a reflex and forget what you were doing in the first place.
Get distracted? I mean, are you American? Have you ever looked around you in traffic? Look at all these billboards and bullshit and tell me about distraction. If you are on a mission you do not open your social media. People do so due to boredom, I guess. The sensible thing to do is... stop using social media.
Aside from that, let us assume you won't stop with that (after all, it is free!). Smartphones have a driving mode which you can set, setting them on DnD. I take my smartphone out of my pocket when I wait before a traffic light, and that works, but I only do so when I need to and what I certainly do not need to do at that point is have a look at Facebook or Twitter. I also don't have Bluetooth on 24/7 on my smartphone (one reason being tracking concerns). On a Pebble watch, I can put this off. Sadly a software killswitch, but better than nothing.
Well, you could just turn off unnecessary notifications like I do, same with emails. I get like 3 notifications a day on average now, and most of those are just dms from friends.
Hmm... I sort of would've preferred it was JUST a button. I wonder if you could even make it perpetually powered by body heat + buffer battery if it's ONLY job was to emit a couple packets over BLE with some burned in ID that you save on the watch. I don't know how efficient peltier elements are going to be on such a small area, but the cold side would be attached to a big metal ring, which feels like an adequate heat sink. (Peltier elements work on heat differential right? Not an expert.)
I know they mentioned that they thought of making this just a watch app, but didn't like the two-handed button press or raise to wake gesture. Why not just optimize for removing the gesture entirely? The microphone has to be better on a full size watch on your wrist vs the tiny ring further away on your finger.
This hits the same nerve in me as those single-use vapes with screens, except you can't harvest the battery out of this one.
You can use it just as a button - that's one of the ways you can hack it. Just hook the button up to whichever action (webhook, Tasker, etc) you'd like.
Any chance of diy, at-home battery replacements? That would definitely let me consider it. I don't mind if it's a 10 hour process to replace the battery. Just the option to have a device that lasts is great.
Waterproofing, tiny batteries, yadda yadda... it's either "charge it weekly", or "recycle" every year or two (eg: $9.99/mo)
Thinking through: many people in the pebble-verse (back in the day) were super-hot about wanting the voice-control stuff/microphone responses to text messages. Instead of thinking about this as a standalone "ring", think of this as a "remote button + mic" for the pebble watch.
As a (former) avid biker, being able to spam: "How much longer until sunset (and how far away am I from home [and will I get home before sunset])?" and having a rough answer "on the wrist" is super useful.
On the Home Assistant front, the Apple ecosystem is waaaay too universal for Siri-isms. We have 3-4 home pod's (upstairs, downstairs, kids bedroom, guest room), along with phones (car-play), and airpods. All of them can be used as "Hey Siri, set a timer, turn on/off the lights, what's the weather, etc".
Looking at the HA voice controls, it's utter garbage trash (unfortunately) until The Hackers(tm) get around to fixing things up, BUUUT we're still screwed b/c HA speakers/mic's will be worse than Apple's, and HA will never come out with AirPods or CarPlay integration (and likely: Apple will never support a "non-Siri" voice connection via their microphone relationships).
This ring is an incredibly interesting way to sidestep all of that!
You have the ring (mic input, 2yr battery), you have the watch (text display, 1 month battery), and your phone (cellular + storage + compute, 1 day battery), all of which are nominally "every day carry" items.
In the home automation world, having your star-trek communicator pin (quite literally!) on your finger at all times w/ a 2yr battery life is VERY VERY intriguing!
I feel like this should be promoted or made clearer on the product page - this is how I think many people would prefer to use it, provided it could trigger voice input on the pebble/device/other watch - for example, as a Siri trigger.
It was one of the devices I was most excited about way back when, and I'd still love to see it – button, headphone jack, running Android. I would love a headless (and thus longer-charge-for-smaller-device) Android device like that again.
Yes! The ring reminded me of the Core too. Perhaps with voice processing and the infrastructure around MCP (which I haven't used myself, but Eric brings up in the blog) a fully headless, voice-based device like this is more feasible now than in those days
> Why not just optimize for removing the gesture entirely? The microphone has to be better on a full size watch on your wrist vs the tiny ring further away on your finger.
Agreed, let the ring just be a button that can trigger recording on a watch or phone (among other tasks) rather than squeezing in a microphone and audio transmitter.
> I wonder if you could even make it perpetually powered by body heat + buffer battery if it's ONLY job was to emit a couple packets over BLE...
Neat! Or maybe a tiny solar cell? Perhaps the button itself is piezoelectric, like a wearable version of the EnOcean Nodon line of battery-free wireless switches -- a BLE advertising event costs less than 100 microjoules which a button press should be able to provide, though ensuring 100% reliability over BLE with such a tiny energy budget would be hard.
Alternately it could communicate with the watch using IR, but the knuckles might occlude line of sight. The button press could mechanically emit an ultrasonic tone, but that requires an always-on mic in the watch/phone and would be susceptible to shenanigans. Maybe pressing the button causes a specific vibration that a watch accelerometer can reliably recognize?
Now I want someone to find a way to make this work... but long term I expect that the real solution will be making hand gestures work reliably 100% of the time with no ring at all.
There are battery-free switches for Hue light systems and, presumably, other similar systems. They're pretty large, though, and pushing the button has a lot of travel, which can be used to generate electricity.
> I sort of would've preferred it was JUST a button
Exactly. The Pebble already has all the hardware to capture voice notes. There are at least a few third party Pebble apps that do this already. The problem that Eric has is limited to the activation of the feature, not the feature itself, but he overengineered a disposable standalone gadget instead of making an accessory for his already capable platform.
One aspect about e-waste is really the size, this has by volume less than an AA-battery, which means the e-waste is pretty much within this realm. For a decently size powerbank, you could have a lifetime of those rings and probably still create less e-waste.
I think it's an interesting approach, in terms of hack-ability a non-rechargable device is pretty much bad - also just imagining that any sort of software or hardware glitch could easily just permanently render the device useless is not super decent either.
I was typing in my CC info when I went back to read about battery life. This is meant as positive feedback: I won't be ordering a non-rechargeable device with 12 hours of recording for $100.
Imagine I fall asleep with it on my finger and accidentally press the button with my head. It's recording me snore for 3 hours, and 25% battery life gone.
Based on the description, this doesn't seem plausible. If the button is as clicky as it sounds, it would hurt your head/hand/both to do the thing you describe.
I wouldn't think about the total recording time so much as the actual usage you'll get out of it. If based on typical usage, you could get even eighteen months out of it, then you're looking at around $5/month for a device to serve this purpose for you.
Is that worth it to you? Perhaps not. But plenty of us pay similar amounts of money for software subscriptions related to productivity, so it's not especially outlandish compared to paying for Standard Notes, Todoist, etc.
I sometimes speak into my voice recorder when I’m out for a walk and have a thought. Those voice notes can be many minutes long, and full of repetition and silence.
When no one’s looking obviously.
Not sure how that would work with the ring. Either lots of small similar notes. Or a dead battery.
I don't think that's the use case they're aiming for. If you want to have a meandering voice recording that lasts minutes, the friction to pull out your phone is less of an issue while you're out walking your dog.
But when you're having a conversation with someone and they ask you to pick up milk from the store later, or you're running to the bus and want to just jot down an idea you had briefly, and other moments where the friction is higher...then this seems like the solution.
You can buy a rechargeable e-ring with several sensors and even a tiny screen for like 20$ on AliExpress. 75$ for a non-rechargeable, e-waste ring with just a button and a mic is insane.
Point is to not having to take it off at all, as next thing is going out without it and losing that convenience. Though I guess they can also invent a finger-mounted powerbank for it; I remember buying a case with an embedded powerbank for one of my earlier Android phones...
Sure, but I don't think that ditching the combo O2 blood & heartbeat sensor, charging chip and the screen, and adding instead a mic is worth a 55$ upcharge.
This sounds kind of cool, but I'm more worried about the e-waste. A device that is cheap, will get "recycled", and sounds cool, will get a tiny amount of use after the initial wow factor wears off or doesn't fit the needs, then gets thrown away or lost. And is this feature in the new repebble watches? I would rather have it there with a bigger battery.
Wow I was just looking for finding like this, but.. can't be recharged? It would be one thing if it had like 500 hours of recording, but this has 12-15.
It's pretty bad when you consider that you have to limit it to just this use-case (3-6 second recordings 10-20 times a day), when it could have instead been useful for other things e.g. recording much longer thoughts or making notes while reading a book or watching a video.
Even for just the narrow use-case, 2 years is still pretty poor. I generally expect my tech to last a lot longer than that.
this seems to be optimised for the use case where you just want to record something quickly; if you wanted a longer recording session the up front overhead of pulling out a dictaphone or something wouldn't be too bad, and you would have better ergonomics than holding a button pressed and your hand to your face.
I still would have preferred it to be serviceable. I know I'll be able to buy new batteries in 6 years, 10 years, etc. I'm suspect as to whether you'll still be able to buy this device in that time ("this device" meaning same comfortable fit, no new onboard bloat, compatible with my other ancient but beloved devices, similar focus on doing one simple thing well, privacy characteristics, etc). Apropros of nothing, is repebblering.com available?
If it keep me from having to take out my phone, which both a) I don't want to do for my own sanity and b) I don't want to do in many social situations out of respect for my companions, then it may be worth it. You could say "but Apple watch" however a big swath of society already hates those for the same reasons above
Not even just a flat-fee subscription, but technically a usage based one! Since every time you activate the device it consumes power stored in the battery, it essentially turns electricity into credits and now your hardware-based device is a usage based subscription. What a time to be alive!
Years is literally just the plural of a single year. Ergo, years feels like the appropriate word here. What are you suggesting they phase it as instead?
On this page [1] in the technical specifications under battery life, instead of actually saying 12-15 hours of recording or 2 years, it just says "Years of average use"
Two is years. Some people would even say that 1.5 is "years". I go back and forth on this. Is it correct to say that something costs "thousands of dollars" if it costs $1,800? If it costs $2,000, IMO it's clear.
If someone said a shirt will last for years I would have a different impression than if someone said that a battery-powered thing will last for years.
For example, I have motion sensors in my home and I have to replace the batteries from time to time. If the manual said "the batteries last for years, depending on usage" I would not be surprised if it lasted for 2 years.
Here, it sounds like the battery life will vary greatly based on usage. In fact, it sounds like the battery life is almost entirely a function of how much you use it. It would be interesting to know how much the battery will drain over time if you don't use it, but of course we can't know this for certain before this has been in the wild for years.
Think of it more like this: If I was selling you a car and said it would last for years, then would you expect it to fall apart after two years? I certainly wouldn’t. When talking about small quantities we tend to specify an exact number (two, three), however as the range becomes larger and less exact we use generalities (years). Because of this “years” would typically refer to a span of at least 3-5 years, and I would argue even longer.
Even given that convention, with your example, a car is a far steeper investment than this ring. The more you invest in something, the more you expect to get out of it, and this ring is designed for a very low investment point, while still being highly durable (there are other similar rings out there at even lower investment points, but they probably won't survive anything beyond a sprinkle).
Where did you read that? The article says 5 minutes. Which is fine because it meant to transfer directly to the phone app. And the battery is said to "lasts for up to years of average use".
This makes it a non-starter for me. It feels utterly wasteful, and I’m basically paying USD$100 for a ring subscription every two years, plus international shipping. I can’t support that, sorry.
The only thing that matters here is how good the transcription is. You absolutely have to save the recording. You also have to enable the user to connect to their own transcription service and preserve the recording for that if yours sucks or is not trusted. People have accents. Third party transcription vendors can sell data. Do not mess this up. Enable users to add their own trusted transcription.
If we want to give this to grandparents to save their stories, we can want to have the stories too. If we want it for ourselves, we have to trust it.
Yes, but they mention there will be a subscription plan for their cloud-based transcription. If you want an open platform of devices - ensure users can use a range of transcription providers for quality and security.
You have the options of using the transcription in the app, subscribing to their cloud service, or building out your own service that access the data via webhooks:
> I love customizing and hacking on my devices. What could I do with Index 01?
> Lots of stuff! Control things with the buttons. Route raw audio or transcribed text directly to your own app via webhook. Use MCPs (also run locally on-device! No cloud server required) to add more actions.
Random note to whoever put the Pebble blog together - you don't need 2-4 megabyte images inline in the article! Since the images are limited to ~544px wide, make thumbnails of that size rather than using the original full-size image inline. They already link to the full size so you're already halfway there.
Hmm does it actually set reminders? Or does it just take a note and you have to manually set the reminder later? I would love this if it actually could create reminders like "remind me when I get home" etc. Otherwise I'm sure I'll never go back and look at notes I took.
Edit: "It’s converted to text on-device, then processed by an on-device large language model (LLM) which selects an action to take (create note, add to reminders, etc)." This is perfect!
Given that the user will typically have their watch on them as well, why not make the ring a battery-less BLE transmitter that triggers voice input on the watch? It’s still one-handed operation, but now the battery life is infinite since there’s no battery? The disposable ring seems like a solution in search of a problem to me, unfortunately.
Piezo switches like the one you linked have a minimum size to generate the power necessary, and that minimum size is larger than the entire current ring.
Are you still considering implementing the feature as a Pebble app as well? As someone who is very forgetful I like the low-friction external memory concept, but it would be nice if I could try it out (admittedly sub-optimally) before jumping in with a second device. It could also be a nice option for Index owners to keep a similar flow even when they don't want to wear the Index for whatever reason.
In general I really like the idea of a local-first, privacy-first, one-way/low-interaction digital assistant regardless of the form factor. A big frustration I have with Gemini as a voice assistant is that I have to wait out the other half of super simple interactions like setting a timer or making a note.
Love the idea as a very easily distracted individual, but the battery is keeping me on the fence. I understand how charging circuitry makes this product a non-starter, but is there any hope of the battery being replaceable?
If you look at other rechargeable smart rings they're in the $250 to $300 range, plus a $10/month subscription. We didn't want to do that for a new product like this.
I like the price here, but my question was not about adding charging circuitry, but some way to open the ring and replace the battery once it's depleted.
Can I use something like syncthing to easily backup the recordings and transcripts off my phone?
Google's Recorder app makes this a big PITA if I don't want to enable upload to cloud storage, there is a very tedious manual way to export recordings.
I really just want plain old data and to be able to copy or delete files via the filesystem. And not be required to use some cloud service.
Why didn’t you make it just a button which activates the watch? It’d be an addon to pebble watch. It couldn’t be used standalone, but you could make it rechargeable and it would solve your issue (actions with only one hand)
Do you mean that this is technically possible, or that this is a feature that will be supported? I've preordered the Time 2, so having the ability to configure it that way to significantly extend the battery life of the ring could be interesting. On the other hand, using it standalone might be fine for me. I wouldn't really know how fast I might go through the battery without using it for a while.
2: the transcription happens on your phone for free (or via subscription to a slightly better transcription model, not sure about privacy for the paid model)
3: ok to wash hands or shower, but just 1 foot of depth (so no swimming)
I really like the thought and the format, but I do not like that I can't change the battery. Even if it is not easy, I still think there should be a way to change the battery.
could this be a used a bluetooth microphone, so I could use it with a laptop as a quick voice dictation/input for various uses? I'm thinking like a simple microphone for an localy hosted app like Hex: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex
what safety measures does this have to avoid some incident (held down button, software bug, etc) draining the entire battery within a few hours, thus bricking the device?
I actually like the device and can see the purpose of it - I’ve tried to kick together similar solutions in the past, but I like the very “one thing only” nature of this.
That said, I absolutely cannot buy a device like this without a replaceable battery. I don’t actually care about the recharge, I get what you’re trying to do with it, but given the state of the e-waste world and, bluntly, the history of hardware brands - a big, big part of the sales pitch for the pebble is the OSS nature of the device because we need to hedge against any one company for longevity. I’d seriously consider this if I knew the battery was replaceable, but I can’t bet on you being around in 4, 6, or 8 years, and I’m not willing to buy intentionally disposable tech anymore.
I think the design is bad: my girlfriend would never wear it. Maybe they know already and that's why the webpage contains only picture of male hands.
Given the many smartwatches on the market which can do so much more, are lightweight and some of them with acceptable battery life (Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit), a smartring is of very little interest to me. But I often struggle to understand why certain products fascinate people, so I may be totally wrong and I wish the makers best of luck.
Yeah, I have to wonder what lead them to these color choices. Not sure why they wouldn't include a white option or any other good neutral colors that actually go with silver and gold. And I think the number of people willing to wear a matte black ring is quite low, especially among women.
I wanted to use it to capture my musical ideas. They usually come unexpectedly and in bundles. There's a problem though – one of them is 0:40-1:30 min in duration; the ring wouldn't last half a year for me.
I'm sure other musicians would love it as well, but are disqualified completely from the userbase. That's a shame as I think for us it would be really, really useful.
(The first iteration of a musical idea usually emerges somewhat spontaneously from an emotional state, and repetition always loses some important part of it. This ring could be an always-on photocamera for these spontaneous, naturally arising states.)
This is a great example of use outside the box they got themselves in.
The solution is simple: market this as a trigger for the pebble voice. Only thatz. Nothing else. Make the electronics as simple and cheap as possible. Sell it as an option to the watch. Less than 30$ would be ideal.
"Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage." They really don't seem have tested the battery life, so 2 years is probably the best case scenario here. He says there's no subscription but if you need to buy one every 2 years or less, then that's the subscription. The primary reason given for not having an option to charge is just awful: "You would probably lose the charger before the battery ran out". This is seriously a device for reviewers and youtubers to hype, make a video about it, and then it's gone.
For what it's worth, I 100% perfectly solved this problem for myself MANY years ago and still use it just about every day.
On Android, it's called "Blitzmail," I'm pretty sure there's an Apple equivalent.
Beautifully simple app; on one touch it pops open a text box (which you can type, dictate to, also do "shares/attachments")
And emails to one and only one pre-specified address, usually "yourself."
From there, pick your poison. I personally have a dedicated address/account for these, and I have some bash scripts that pick them up and move them around, but I imagine for many "checking that email address periodically" would be sufficient.
I do exactly the same, except via a button in the quick settings panel, using Tasker, so I don't have to go to the home screen. It's incredibly useful. I hope this can be configured to make the notes emails to yourself.
I very much enjoy Eric's commitment to new and novel and imaginative hardware.
Bought and am loving my Pebble 2 Duo etc - still yet to charge it once in fact!
This device doesn't quite hit the mark for me, but I love the commitment to thinking about what's novel and useful, and putting a prototype out into the world. To use an Irish phrase, "more luck to them" - and hope we see many more projects from them!
My first concern is that this looks very difficult to remove if the battery begins to swell, as silver-oxide batteries are wont to do. Perhaps that's less likely with single use batteries.
How much rechargeability really requires from hardware point of view?
I suppose the problem is that there are no standard for tiny magnetic chargers/cables. Every watch comes with their own, and they need be custom designed. For a device this large as much of the charging electronics should be outside the ring.
And another (small?) problem is that you'd need to electrically protect those external pins.
I'm with you, a little pogo-pin connector with all the charging circuitry in the external dongle would add, I don't know, ten dollars to the BOM. Very cool product but I won't buy a gadget I know I'd dispose in two years.
Yeah, this would have been a neat tool for "middle-of-the-night" thoughts, but I don't want a disposable electronic device. I get why it is that way; not having any charging hardware probably makes the device much smaller. But I'd rather it be a bit bigger and rechargeable.
I am not sure about the use case but I was happy to see they advertise a long battery life. Still, as soon as I learnt that it is disposable I lost any interest in the product.
I very likely wouldn't have bought it anyway but I am surely not going to buy disposable tech.
"Years of average use" is great until you realize that it actually means "Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording".
Not sure how long my iphone can record for, but it's probably close to that. Afterwards I get to charge my phone instead of recycle it, though.
Apple, don't hire this man.
Edit for the downvoters: can my iphone not record that long or something? iphones can't recharge? Just hate Apple and love e-waste rings? Enlighten me.
At the lower 12-hour end, if you're doing ~10 seconds per recording (remember this device is primarily for very short reminders and quick commands), that's ~4.3k recordings total. Also keep in mind that you'd only use it when it's inconvenient/undesirable to reach for your phone or any other device, so it's possible this may only be used say 5x in a day at most on average (likely far less). Which means ~2.5 years worth of usage at the lower end, and you'd only ever have to take it off if going for a swim.
Contrast to a phone that, though it has far more capability, you'd have to remember where it is before even reaching for it wherever, and usually has to be on a charger for anywhere from 30 minutes (with super charging) to a few hours daily. Or even being at a laptop/desktop, and at least having to open the relevant app, type/talk into it and then close again to return to primary task. The ring is an instant win for 24/7/365 convenient presence.
You have to trust it will actually get recycled though. I struggle to believe they'll be swapping out the batteries and reselling these as reconditioned. (I struggle to believe many people will even send them in for recycling tbh.)
The environmental benefit of sending it in for recycling is probably negated by transporting it all the way back to them for starters. Better to just drop it at the local ewaste collection facility. They'll be less specialised but there isn't a lot of material in it.
I guess there's a market for it and in the scale of things it isn't so bad: you could make 10 disposable vape sticks from the materials in one of these rings. And they're expensive enough that they'll never sell more than 100k or so of them. Relatively speaking it's no measurable impact.
For me it's more a matter of principle though. As a society we frown on disposable gizmos these days and for good reason.
This specific use case is awesome-- I use an integrated AI notetaker in my self-built notes app for my thoughts and I wonder if I could connect the index to it?
More broadly: Invisible wearable microphones are coming for everyone and perfect memory will follow. I'm incredibly excited about this for myself and simultaneously terrified about everyone else having it.
It's coming fast enough that I'm beginning to assume in any decently sized crowd of tech folks /someone/ is recording everything.
> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
I’ve never had that issue with my Apple Watch. Granted, apple are a world-class developer (arguably), so their stuff might be more reliable, but I use raise-to-speak and hey siri with my watch all the time.
This is probably also part of the reason that the AW battery lasts so much less time. It's always on the lookout for these events, and over time that ends up having a non-trivial impact on battery. For Pebble users, that would significantly compromise one of the main selling points of the Pebble.
But you have to instruct Siri to record/transcribe/save what you want to say; this does it automatically. It removes friction if you just want to record short notes.
I almost never want to take a note though, I usually want to perform an action.
Recording a note isn’t high friction in my opinion though: “Hey siri make a note XYZ”. Admittedly I don’t create or use notes like this, but I use reminders a lot and I’ve never felt like there was friction: “hey siri remind me to call Dave when I get home”
I do this too, the biggest issue I have is when the shitty voice to text doesn’t get it right, and I look at my shopping list the next day wondering wtf an “ear pig” is.
Pixel watch is an order of magnitude more powerful and expensive than a Pebble though. Raise to wake is not as simple as it may seem considering most big brand smart watches didn't have a decently working implementation of it until only recently. It seems like the author wanted to keep it within the Pebble realm.
The pixel watch can be a nightmare. I've had the version 1 and the version 2 for years and I gave up because of the bugs. Random crashing, randomly dialing 911, just weird stuff that should not happen.
And then there's the support which is zero support. Completely frustrating to post a message and then get some volunteer support Tech, hahaha, saying expect improvements! And it's a volunteer saying that. And they have no authority. And There is no support, it all falls through. Random crashing on both versions of the watch. The first version screen was flickering like an old school television trying to tune in a distant UHF broadcast. Display drivers anyone?
So, pixel watches are in the drawer and I've got a Garmin watch on right now. Garmin is clunky but at least it's reliably clunky.
So it feels like a mis comparison, to me who's had the pixel watches.
I used to own the pebble, a couple versions of it, when they were first announced for several years again. And I found them to be very reliable and lightweight and usable.
I wanted a smartwatch that could talk to Google's home ecosystem and so I traded out of Pebble. And it's just been kind of mediocre misery.
Plus I don't know what Google is doing but recharging the pixel watch every 18 hours, or 36 if you're super lucky and your apps on the pixel watch behave themselves correctly, makes me feel like a slave to Google's naive product manager aspirations.
Like, "it can do everything, and we make money off of you because you are the product!" While at the same time making me miserable.
Economics don't work like that though. Google has the benefits of economies of scale and stable manufacturing partnerships, not to mention probably a lot more of the watch parts are designed in-house. I'd be surprised if Pebble could achieve anything close to the Pixel hardware for even twice the price.
It seems like Pebble is focusing on a niche market and this new product seems completely in line with that. There are plenty of other companies targeting the common folk who have no desire to optimize their life like this.
Niche market seems like an exaggeration, because they're competing against literal monopolies.
Pebble serves those people who want to watch or a ring that doesn't require being a slave to a wall wart, who want the watch to last for a long time. Take a look at Garmin, they do that too and they are a successful company. They are much older than Google and they still have a hard time keeping up with Google and it's billions of dollars of of mystery money advertising revenue.
The pixel hardware is a battery draining nightmare, in my personal experience having pixel watches for years and being a long-term pixel phone user. Even today the pixel phone that I have, after having I think five of these things, drains battery probably 20 to 40% faster than .. the competitor that I would next buy if I weren't feeling like I wanted some of the features that Google has bundled in with their phone and home and other like mnvo and messaging products. So, it seems like a mis comparison there, in my opinion. I don't want a smartwatch that lasts 25 hours and then has to be recharged. Or a smartwatch where the screen turns into a UHF channel just going out of tune and there's no tech support on Earth literally that is willing to help me. Volunteers on Google's support forums are lying to themselves that they have any power or sway with Google. It's a waste of time in my experience.
It looks to me like the big benefit is being able to use just one hand for this. I'd be more likely to use the watch, too, but this would be great for people with one arm, for example.
More importantly your phone and notes app is always with you and you can type your thought into it without disturbing people and looking like a schizophrenic Green Lantern.
I've been looking for a solution like this for years. I briefly had an iOS shortcut on my Apple Watch working, but an OS update broke it. Now I'm on Android and I don't even know what I'd use for it. And it's exactly for these random thoughts and reminders that otherwise nag me or I forget them. David Allen (GTD) will love this too.
My only wish is that I hope it preserves the audio file, in case the transcription is wrong, so you don't lose the thought. Google Keep does this well and it's a life saver sometimes, when the transcription comes through as "Eat the cat" or something ridiculous.
The battery lasts for 12-15 hours and how long you manage to stretch that out to is up to you. The site says "On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage."
So, you can use it for 30 seconds a day to get 2 years of usage. They also mention using it to control your music, the lights in your home and are assuming STT accuracy of 100% using a local model. The fallback of having to manually transcribe it from the audio recording if the STT fails is going to happen often enough that it'll get annoying. You're not going to be sending any messages to people as that will take a lot longer than 30 seconds a day.
I suspect the battery will last about 3 months if you just use it how you'd think it can be used. You would need to really discipline yourself to keep to a limit of 30 seconds of use a day.
I think they will need to end up adding some charging contacts to the surface once they start sending these things out into the wild or sales will be very limited.
How do you know how much time you have left on the ring's battery? Do you have to keep checking the app? Why not just use your phone for notes then.
I've written many variations of my own "quick, take a note!" app, and they all succumb to the same problem: I can't safely write a note when I'm in a car.
Driving by myself and listening to podcasts is when I have so many thoughts I want to write down.
Couldn't you, like, build this into the Pebble Watch? I think I might be interested in this but I fundamentally don't want to wear a ring on my finger.
(Also, I do really want an excuse to switch from my Apple Watch to a new Pebble.)
The blog post says:
> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
I don't understand how the ring makes any of this better.
Yeah, hopefully they add the same functionality to the watch for people who don't want the ring. Might boost sales for the ring as well, if people use the feature on the watch a lot and really like it.
I think I'm as interested in it from a pure "button that's always with me" perspective. I already have my original Amazfit Bip watch configured to send a "track back" signal to Snipd via Gadgetbridge to snip podcast notes while I'm driving or washing dishes or whatever. And I've configured a basic Bluetooth remote camera shutter to turn pages forward and backward in KOReader on my Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color so I can read it on a stand while riding a stationary bike under my desk.
In other words, I am apparently exactly the kind of weirdo who would use the heck out of something like this!
I'd be willing to pay around $100 for a rechargeable version with a battery life of around 24 hours and 2–3 minutes of usage. However, a single-use battery would only be acceptable to me at a much lower price point, such as $30–$40.
I'd love to have a ring that incorporates Yubikey like NFC functionality, I was worried it could allow login when I didn't intend it, but the idea of a switch might work. Having a USD dongle for hardware that doesn't support NFC but can negotiate the handshake between my ring and the device could work.
I'd buy a ring with just authentication, if it was rechargeable and did a few other things (pulse, sleep monitoring, etc.) even better, but the bare bones would be amazing so I could have something I wear for my authentication.
I'll be honest, after seeing a nightmare situation where a smartring battery inflated and cut off circulation to a finger, I will never ever buy a ring with a battery in it.
I’d be interested to see a battery-less ring that uses the mechanical energy of the press to power a BLE transmitter to trigger voice input on a watch. I feel like it’s much safer, plus it has no fixed lifespan.
It's a single press, which has to power the microphone for several seconds, and wireless connection to communicate with the sync device, even later if it isn't immediately available. In what way would piezo generate that much energy?
I posted it as a comment as well - but even just giving the opportunity of
a diy, at-home battery replacements would be great for a lot of people. I think the disposability aspect is very counter to the kind of people who use a Pebble Steel for half a decade (or more!)
just got my RePebble 2 Duo yesterday, wearing it right now :) was looking forward to the new device, but a voice-memo ring really isn't something i care about. oh well!
I'm not sure what other people's hands are like, but mine are pretty big and I can just barely push my thumb against the part of my index finger where I would wear a ring, and doing so renders my thumb useless for any of the opposable things that I usually use my hand for. It's also extremely uncomfortable for my hand and thumb. I've managed to press buttons on my watch with my hands full, but it would literally be impossible to activate this thing with my hands full.
I've worn rings, and they can rotate in place on the hand if they're not perfectly sized, and there aren't any half sizes here, so this would definitely rotate on my finger, making no guarantee that I can even reach the button without adjusting the ring with my other hand, or maybe awkwardly spinning it with my thumb until the button is in reach again.
And it only lasts for 10-15 hours of recording time. And there looks to be a cloud services upsell for better STT than the open source offering on device.
This seems like an early alpha version of something that might be a good idea, but as it is I can't imagine buying one.
it's easier for me to touch my thumb to the bottom of my finger (palm side) than the other way around, and you could also press it into whatever you're holding potentially.
This is competing with “Hey [voice assistant] remind me of…” or an automation you can assign to the quick action button of your phone.
Open source hardware is very cool but phones have already taken most of our portable needs. It needs to be extremely compelling to justify another thing to carry, charge, update, etc.
Not sure how I feel about it being a throwaway device for $100. I get they say you can send it back to be recycled, but this feels like you’re just proactively creating e-waste.
Not even an attempt to make a replaceable or chargeable battery?
Also they point out oura rings need to be charged every few days, but that’s because they’re constantly chewing through battery monitoring your health stats. I’m willing to bet if they were in a constant state of deep sleep and only woken up to record short audio clips they’d also last for months at a time.
I know folks around here love pebble, but this feels like a miss to me.
Their Oura comparison really didn't sit well with me because of that. The device clearly uses a fraction of the power that the Oura is using. If it had a rechargeable battery you would not have to charge it that frequently.
Agreed. Brave to launch disposable tech with the current environmental awareness. e-waste in 12-15hours, when people are pushing for more and more for repairable devices just feels very out of touch.
> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
That's a pretty long life, TBF. I appreciate your concerns, though, and do wonder if there was a better middle ground (maybe a micro sterling engine leveraging the heat gradient from my finger to ambient, ha!).
People are buying Fitbit charge6 products today and those probably have an 18 shelf life and cost more.. so maybe it's not totally left field - although the charge6 isn't advertised to fail so soon lol.
That lifespan is based on the user recording for 12 to 15 hours over those two years. It's a $100 device that can record
12 hours of audio and then you throw it away. You could expend the battery on your first day by holding down the button.
Honestly I can see a niche use but this device strikes me as quite weird and I'm not sure why it isn't a button on their new watch.
this is a device that would potentially last years though, not months — if you're in the niche of needing something like this you're paying less than $10 a month (maybe as low as $5)... doesn't net out too terribly in exchange for not charging
> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
I guess I don't bicycle or carry stuff enough for this to matter. And often when my hands are full, I have my AirPods in and can just ask Siri (and cross my fingers that she'll understand).
This seems neat, but I try to keep my life as simple as possible, which means not having a ring when I can use my watch/earbuds to do the same thing about 99% of the time.
Original title: Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain
It's a memo recorder in ring form. Neat idea that seems really obvious but somehow I haven't seen it before
Edit: ah. "No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling." Planned obsolescence
I imagine a partial rebate for the returned device to lessen the burden but this does feel like a $5 subscription just for the device.
I generally like the idea. I use my Apple Watch for Siri and needing the other hand to hold Siri is not ideal. I do use “hey siri” a lot but it doesn’t always work, though pretty reliable.
I don’t dislike the forever battery and the value proposition, however voice memos never appealed to me?
The obvious voice commands that work only half of the time, can’t voice memo in bed with your parters, in the office, or in public. That leaves very limited opportunities for this to be useful.
At only ~12 hours of recording per device, this wouldn't replace other forms of notetaking where you can afford the necessary interaction cost (e.g. taking out your phone). It reduces the number of times that you're unable to take notes (due to ergonomics/physical factors or otherwise).
It increases the surface area of your day where "I am able to take a note right now (because I don't have anything stopping me)" is a true statement.
I'd be more worried that a replacement product wouldn't be available after 2 years of use. 2 years seems quite good for a small product.
As a tangential question, how do people find the new pebbles? I prefer a smartwatch that lasts more than a couple of days between charges. And want one with a screen that stays on. The Fitbit Charge 3 I had never detected raising my arm.
Oh this is fantastic. Amazon made one but didn’t go beyond limited trials. I loved being able to dictate thought and tasks and even ask Alexa questions and get answers.
I've wanted exactly this since I first saw spider's note-recorder in the first issue of Transmetropolitan (before the fancy glasses.) Just something with exactly one button, positive confirmation that it's recording, a decent pipeline into my private infosphere, and safe to use while driving.
But in 2025, the disposable aspect is a crime... and wouldn't you be able to use the body of the ring to interface with an inductive charger?
I wonder why they added this to the finger rather than adding this capability to the watches they are already making? One handed operation is one reason, though I'd think a UX could be designed to make this an app on the watch, rather than a stand-alone device.
Seems like overkill, particularly when other rings do bio-metric tracking, so is this focused on a big enough problem to want to solve?
"Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff."
This interacts directly with the Pebble App, so I would be shocked if the watches never get an equivalent app.
Wait.. if you need to push a button and then have to get it somewhat close to your mouth to record an audio clip, why not just have a watch app? Pressing the button is still a two-hand thing. Or did I miss something?
You put the ring on your index finger (and likely have it rotated so that the button is pointing to your thumb) and then press the button using the thumb on your same hand. That allows it to be one-handed.
No way this made it out of internal vetting without a recharchable battery.
Man, if I even suggested this over lunch with my old Sparkfun colleagues, I would have been shot down before I finished chewing my bite of open-faced turkey sandwich.
> When your phone is in range, the recording is streamed to the Pebble app. It’s converted to text on-device, then processed by an on-device large language model (LLM) which selects an action to take (create note, add to reminders, etc).
So does this mean that my lists have to be managed within the Pebble app? Or can the Pebble app interact with my Notes and Reminders apps? If I'm limited to the Pebble app's features, that would be more limiting. But I can't see how it would be able to break out and give instructions to other apps (at least beyond a preset list, via programmed Shortcuts).
Actions: [...] you can also ask it to do things like ’Send a Beeper message to my wife - running late’ or answer simple questions that could be answered by searching the web. You can configure button clicks to control your music [...] play/pause or skip tracks [...] where to save your notes and reminders (I have it set to add to Notion) [...] Add your own voice actions via MCP. Or route the audio recordings directly to your own app or server!
Yeah I saw that, but didn't know if it was Android-only (the Beeper reference made me wonder). Can anyone weigh in on what it can do, or how it does it?
Oh I love this. I am going to contextually switch the instructions from this to my home trained instruction fine tuned LLM for doing a multitude of things.
The double-tap gesture is something I was very excited about and have completely forgotten about since getting my watch. The caveats around what it takes to activate it (screen activated and facing vertically) are just so great, you wonder if anyone at Apple actually tried this and found it to be a better alternative to interacting with the screen. Their demo video actually does a perfect job of capturing just how ridiculously theatrical you have to be to get it to work: https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/use-double-tap-for-com...
I was also excited about it, until I tried it and discovered it has pretty poor usability. It's not always clear what the double tap will do. Maybe it will scroll, maybe it will clear the item you are looking at, and maybe it won't do anything.
Interesting idea, but those gestures only work on AW when not in low-power mode, meaning they take a non-trivial amount of battery. It would probably dampen Pebble's battery life significantly, and might not even be possible with the chip that it has.
yup that's what the Apple Watch double tap gesture does. On the hand wearing the watch you tap your thumb and index finger together 2 times in quick succession and the watch recognizes that unique motion pattern on your arm and does [something].
This could be such a delightful upgrade for my hybrid digital/analog personal task management system. Right now I use an apple watch to capture tasks which then hackily route through a series of apps/endpoints to get to a thermal label printer, but that's just about the only thing I use the apple watch for.
Having an affordable single purpose device like this could be much better -- how straightforward will it be to post transcriptions of the recorded messages to a webhook via the Index 01?
Why not just make the electronics removable through a topside opening to have battery replaced at a watch shop? I don't get why the "jewel" part of this has to be resin molded. Normally you do this because smart rings are made by affixing a flexible PCB with somewhat-bendable battery inside a ring and then molding the entire inner part of the ring using clear resin, but the ring part for this one appears to be just a dead ring.
The concept is interesting but without charging it’s a non-starter for me. Also it’s a bit awkward and I’d prefer to use my phone or watch instead of adding a ring.
That’s the bummer for me. The primary place I’d like to use this is surfing. Too much time to think, and too few practical ways to record those thoughts.
We have built a new device.
The device is a ring with a button and a microphone.
Pressing the button initiates recording of your voice
captures voice via the built in microphone and saves
it on your phone.
I think it would take a lot of heavy software to process
and index the voice notes for the claim
"Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain"
is honest
I'd be curious what happens if you're the kind of person who wears a ring a bit more loosely and/or has slippery skin.
That button isn't always going to be facing your thumb. Maybe you rotate it back with your thumb? Or you need to use your other hand anyway to rotate it?
I think I would use this. I am the kind of person who needs to write things down immediately when they come into my head or I will forget them. I picture wearing it on my ring finger, button down, and use my thumb to press the button, is that realistic or would it be uncomfortable that way?
Eventually going to end up in a landfill because no part is replaceable or repairable. And if the app/software support ends, it becomes an useless piece of plastic. No thanks.
I wish there was a device that just recorded and transcribed all the time and sent it to my phone, with time stamps, and then you could take action on that.
12-15 hours of recording is maybe 2 weeks usage for heavy users. It would've been perfect if it could connect to computers and had a rechargeable battery. Oh well, hope someone else takes inspiration and makes the same thing but can recharge.
> It would've been perfect if it could connect to computers
If their goal truly is "New Pebble", then surely something that could connect to a phone could connect to a computer, granted you have the available radios connected to your computer. Seems to be BT in this case.
> and had a rechargeable battery
Yeah, seems like a weird thing to do, but I guess trying to solve this would make the device a lot harder. Hoping at least there will be a DIY route to replace the batteries, I don't have the will to be sending back an electrical device every second month because the battery died, and then waiting for a new device to arrive in the mail.
Edit: I was just about to ask if you think they'll send the replacement device before you've sent in the one that had the expired battery, but now I realize it isn't even clear if they expect us to buy a brand new device when the battery runs out, or if they provide a replacement? The former would be an absolutely bananas proposition.
I.... I kinda love this. Non-rechargeable battery and all. I don't need something else to charge. I understand this is a "luxury" but seamlessly recording "thoughts" is my personal computing holy grail.
There are dozens of different watch batteries in various sizes available everywhere. Why not make the ring slightly larger and allow for battery replacement?
Something like this isn't very practical for me. I just pull out my phone and dictate or type when I need to take notes. If I can't pull out my phone, I probably have gloves on or am in a loud environment.
A gesture on the watch that just starts the recorder seems a lot more practical, this ring just adds an unnecessary complication. Plus, $100 is a lot for something that they don't want you to service.
I'd rather much have a lot of big programmable buttons on the watch itself and have a smaller display or a separate BLE remote with lots of buttons.
"No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling."
This is terrible. This is literally e-waste. They are literally asking people to buy a product that is discardable.
Besides, why not just put a dedicated button on the pebble to do exactly this? I don't even get the purpose of this device when the device they ideally want it to live with, could do exactly the same thing but much better in every way without carrying a ring around: At least in some cultures, men don't usually wear rings without a clear significance.
Oh look it's a Humane AI Pin without the AI, or rechargeable battery, or ...
It's an app. It's an app that will run on somebody else's platform. Putting that in a ring has so marginal benefits (you can't find a phone or computer or notepad or... to record ideas and do it better) and has so many limitations. It's a non-starter.
I mean, this is a textbook over-simplifaction to devalue an idea. Hell, with that logic, you could call all kinds of things a non-starter.
"Why buy a watch, it just shows the time on my phone"
"Why buy a car, I can just use uber"
"Why buy headphones? My phone has speakers."
The context of where something is changes the idea of what it is. Just become something tells the time, for example, doesn't mean it is the same thing as a watch.
No it's text-book pointing out the bloody obvious. It's a voice memo app sitting in an ring with limited functionality/usefulness. You can tart that idea up however you want but it's an obvious limited value idea itself at it's core and it is exactly the type of thing that will do better as an app on somebody else' platform.
We considered this but decided not to for several reasons:
You’d probably lose the charger before the battery runs out!
Adding charge circuitry and including a charger would make the product larger and more expensive.
You send it back to us to recycle.
Wait, it’s single use?
Yes. We know this sounds a bit odd, but in this particular circumstance we believe it’s the best solution to the given set of constraints. Other smart rings like Oura cost $250+ and need to be charged every few days. We didn’t want to build a device like that. Before the battery runs out, the Pebble app notifies and asks if you’d like to order another ring."
Uhhh... Huh... Ok. Welp, that's a nope from me then.
The choice release a non-rechargeable/non-serviceable product feels like something that shouldn't be dismissed with "...lasts for years..." and "...you''d probably lose the charger..." This language feels patronizing to me. Even the "...[it] asks if you’d like to order another ring," begs the question: at what cost?? 99$, I presume.
The target market might not be exclusively other engineers and tinkerers, but as an engineer and tinkerer, I'm eager for more details about the testing, verification, construction, etc., of such a solution.
> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
I shared your concerns but I read this bit and I think it's all pretty reasonable if you ask me. They're open and upfront about it, and you can very quickly choose not to buy one.
Who's recycling their Oura battery anyway? Probably nobody.
More like buying a 99$ “12 to 15 hour recording” pack. Also created real tangible waste, I’m failing to see how recycling a bunch (what are they expecting to sell, hundreds-of-thousands order of magnitude?) of 99$ rings after two years will be worth it (how much material, and for what worth, can they really exctract?).
This seems like one of those devices that seems like "meh" at a glance but grows on you once you used it. In fact just the Bluetooth button feature alone is warranted a second take let alone a mic embedded in to the ring with a crazy battery life. If there's a way to hack the device and pipe the mic features to other apps I think i might get this thing. edit: never mind i just noticed 15 hours recording time with no recharging. yeah bud that's a no go.
Even if the battery lasts "years", it still seems wildly irresponsible to make this a single use device. I suspect this thing will get very few sales because it's single use.
how often do you replace your phone? in terms of weight/waste this is probably in the area of about 1/50th of one... you could wear these for ~100 years and produce the maybe the equivalent waste of 2 phones.
I was extremely excited for this until I got to the party about the battery. I have wanted something exactly like this for ages.
But I wont pay you $75 for a product I can’t use anymore when the battery dies. I’d pay twice as much if I could change the battery myself, but this consumer-hostile, anti-ownership design is not something I will support.
Now this is cool. Combined with localLLMs and some nice Obsidian integration of some sort, all away from Google and other Big Tech - this is the future of tech I want to see - not some centralized bullshit from Google or Meta.
Wait what ? Why can't they add a feature to the watch that is already there on the wrist and especially already bought that will start recording the thought after a hand shake (that triggers the mic) plus magic keyword ?
This thing seems to stand alone though? As in - I don't have to have a watch, nor, it sounds like, do I have to have my phone within pairing range when I record something.
It's unlocked though, so maybe a software toggle will let you turn off the mic and just have it activate your watch's mic. This would presumably extend the battery, which seems to be a focus of discussion.
An interesting idea, but I look at it as yet another thing to make my life more complicated than it needs to be.
A pen and paper, plus a mechanical watch have served me well so far.
Any know if there are plans to make a new pebble watch that includes both Barometer/Compass plus Heart Rate Monitor in one device? This looks like a useful UI mode, but I'm holding out for a Pebble that doesn't require choosing between two basic (these days) watch sensors.
Wow, uh, it’s kind of astounding how poorly Eric is reading the room there.
A weird disposable(!) voice recorder ring seems to go against pretty much all of the “open and repairable” image that the Pebble brand has been cultivating.
This product should probably have been “Core” branded and kept on a different website entirely. Its very existence seems kind of toxic to the Pebble brand, IMO.
I am SO close to switch to Android to buy and properly use a Pebble watch. I love the hacker attitude, the retro tech, the quirkyness.
Seeing them introducing One More Thing on the other side of the spectrum, deep in big-corp, locked down, consumerist throwaway territory makes me reevaluate that.
I guess they might overestimate the fanboyness of their clientele. I hope enough people find this as laughable as I do and ignore this.
I mean, I'll probably ditch the LLM - after all, it's open source so I can just build my own app to receive the messages - but it seems like a neat bit of kit.
Modern smartphones are very private, featuring full disk encryption, sandboxed app data storage, and mandatory lock screens. Why do you think the data stored on your phone isn't private?
> Here’s the best part: the battery lasts for years
I wonder how many years?
> The battery lasts for up to years of average use.
...how many?
> a battery that lasts for years
How many years does the battery last?
> That’s up to 2 years of usage.
Ah.
I guess "2" is the absolute minimum that you could describe as "years".
It's a shame because it does look like an interesting proposition. It might be more compelling if it was "send your ring back to us for recycling - and we'll send you a new one". I doubt the economics would work at this price point though.
Given it's doing nothing when not activated, I would imagine it heavily depends on how often you're using it. Still would be nice to be able to say "1,000 hours of recording" or something like that
Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 July 2023 concerning batteries and waste batteries
Article 11
Removability and replaceability of portable batteries and LMT batteries
1. Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those batteries are readily removable and replaceable by the end-user at any time during the lifetime of the product. That obligation shall only apply to entire batteries and not to individual cells or other parts included in such batteries.
A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.
[…]
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
(This is active law; there is however a grace period for products until 2027.)
There's an exception for "appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable". This ring is described as water-resistant, so I wonder if it would be allowed?
I don't know if it counts as "primarily" operating in those conditions.
From my reading, the conditions seem to apply to the environment it primarily operates in, not the product itself. So the product primarily operates in the environment of the hand, and the hand is definitely "regularly subject to splashing water".
Not sure about you but I regularly wash my hands
What about an iPhone. Can you change the battery without specialized tools?
We regularly get contacted by people in Europe who want to buy our product, but we haven't been providing support due to the cost of certs, and other regulatory needs (medical/wellness device).
We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
Our product is designed to be refurbished, but not user-replaceable.
At the same time, how many products do people give up on because of battery life, and is this a non-issue with future battery chemistries?
Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore, or is it more likely they've broken the screen, cameras, etc to the point where it doesn't make sense to replace those anymore? Or they just want the newest thing?
This is why repairability isn't restricted to just the battery. And buying the newest thing every year is kinda frowned upon here in the EU now. I'm sure some people still do it but most people aren't flashing their new phone around anymore. And phones have become boring anyway. The latest Samsung S25 is mostly the same as the S23, exact same form factor, cameras. Just a bit faster and a bit more memory.
But the government sets a baseline here to stimulate sustainability. I really agree with it, this planet has to be usable for a lot longer. And economic growth isn't everything.
We have to move away from consumerism for the sake of it and I think we're making good inroads here in the EU. Not to mention it means there's more money left over for important stuff like doing things with friends.
> And buying the newest thing every year is kinda frowned upon here in the EU now.
Is there any evidence that Europeans aren’t buying new phones at the same rate that they used to?
Some sources say so, e.g. "Declining Replacement Cycles Among Consumers" on https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/europe-sma...
And https://www.unibocconi.it/en/news/disposable-smartphones-tri... has replacement cycles in Italy going up.
Anecdotally, 2023/24 all media in Germany was full of ads for shops trading refurb phones. Most of those talked lower prices, but some mentioned sustainability.
The first article does not look to be informative; it values the EU smartphone market at around 465 million USD, which is impossibly low. If you assume a smartphone is valued at $1,000, a market of that size would only amount to 465,000 devices sold; this is around 0.01% of the EU’s population.
The second article links to a paper which appears to be more informative (though it has not been peer reviewed):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5117319
Notably:
> For example, in the United States, the average expected life span (replacement cycle length) of consumer and enterprise smartphones was 2.67 and 2.54 years, respectively, in 2023, while in the UK almost 30% of surveyed consumers use their smartphone up to two years and 41% up to 4 years.
and
> Furthermore, evidence shows that European, American and Chinese consumers have reduced the replacement rate of their smartphones, increasing their average life cycle (see Figure 1). These data suggest that consumer preferences are changing, and new opportunities arise for companies who want to find new profitable ways to meet the needs of their customers.
It is standard to list market size data in units of $1,000; i.e. that report is 465 billion USD.
Those numbers would be more realistic, amounting to around a thousand dollars spent per each EU citizen per year; this seems a little high if replacement rates are hovering around 3 years on average, but not impossible like the other figure.
What I don’t understand is why it would be written “USD 448.87 million.” This convention is common in accounting and finance as well, but they usually make an indication of it in a column header.
BTW this also works the other way: I find myself to avoid US products more and more because they tend to come with inbuilt obsolescence, or, for digital products, with dark patterns preventing subscription cancelling.
> We want to help people in the EU, but with laws like replaceable batteries, it's going to push us further and further away from being able to do that.
We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us to do so on terms we decide for you.
> We want to help people, but only if and when it’s profitable for us
If s/he is running a company and not a charity, this is responsible, understandable, and predictable.
Of course, but that makes "help" a weasel word. They want to be able to sell their product, that they possibly strongly feel will help the buyers.
Yes, and that's exactly why we need regulations, and can't leave it to the market!
> A market doesnt want our products, we wont provide those products to that market.
The terms seem at least, largely influenced by the laws euros seem happy with. Regulation has a cost.
e-waste also have a cost.
And regulations are here to make businesses internalize this cost instead of letting society as a whole pay it out.
This is, I believe, the definition of a free market choice
And this is why regulation exists, QED lol
Yes, a free market isn't the answer to everything. It will never optimise for sustainability unless this is a conscious consumer choice factor. It's way too important to leave it to that though. Hence regulation.
Just change the underlying economic incentives - but nobody is even barely there yet, except maybe the EU. Doughnut Economics, when are you going to save us (& the planet)?
Uh... yeah. It's called a business.
So it's 2025 and we're building more disposable electronics? I'm sorry but I think the EU is not the problem here.
That's an unfair representation of the situation. There's nothing about this device that implies "disposable". The EU is definitely the problem here. I think the problem is the EU loves legislating entrepreneurial creativity into the dirt.
Not having a replacable battery - a part that wears predictably and is critical to operation - makes this device disposable.
There's more important things than "entrepreneurial creativity". Not everything that can make sense as a business plan makes sense for the world.
We can survive without rings that allow us to mutter voice notes into our fists while walking around.
It does not have a rechargeable battery. I could even understand non replaceable in this form factor.
Speaking personally, I've never broken/damaged a phone. Since the Pixel 1 started requiring removal of the screen in order to swap the battery, 100% of my phone replacements have been because the battery isn't good anymore. (Granted, I would've gotten a new phone eventually regardless, when the old one stopped receiving security updates.)
Currently trying to stretch a Pixel 7 until 2027.
> (Granted, I would've gotten a new phone eventually regardless, when the old one stopped receiving security updates.)
And that's why the EU also mandate a 5-years software support period (and I wish it was even more).
> Our product is designed to be refurbished, but not user-replaceable.
Why?
I'm not who you asked that question, but I'd guess it's because it requires "proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product."
It'd be hard to design/manufacture a device that reliably remains waterproof after a typical not-specially-skilled owner opens it up to replace a battery. It's really common to hear of people damaging watches due to water ingress after battery replacements, getting seals or orings seated just right isn't something every user is going to be able to do.
I can imagine some medical devices have similar sealing requirements, perhaps even more robust sealing methods since they might need to be exposed to regular disinfection grade cleaning with chemicals harsher then just water. I could easily understand why a company may design a medical device that its heat-glued together for sealing purposes in a way that can only reasonably be done (and redone) at the factory.
I killed an original Pebble when I Dremelled it open to replace the battery, and failed to hot glue seal it well enough and it got wet inside.
Having said that - I dislike this design choice for the Index 01. I can see myself becoming reliant on this right before they sell out to Garmin or whoever and tell all their customers to FOAD again. Trust is very hard to win back.
Design inherently involves trade-offs. Size, weight, cost, water resistance, etc.
Regs aside; I'd more likely be a buyer if you offered a discount on replacements when customer returns "years" old expired ring.
I may not be a typical user, but I've run my last few iphones and macbooks until the battery gave up the ghost. I haven't really needed more features or raw horsepower for quite some time, so the battery ends up being the limit I hit.
iPhones and MacBooks can be serviced to replace the battery.
My iPhones typically get a fresh battery around the 3-year mark, or whenever the battery health dips below 80%, and do a second tour of duty with someone in the family. In all cases so far, the OS goes out of support and apps stop working before the second battery degrades.
I use Android, but this is me, too. I keep it until the battery goes bad or until it breaks.
My personal experience: Electric toothbrush and razor. I especially hate the razors, you can replace the head, they could last a lifetime, but the battery is practically dead after two years. Toothbrushes are improving, the last one has 3 years of service and still work ok.
I guess Core use the same excuse to only provide 30 day warranty, using a loophole to avoid the annoyance of having to provide a proper warranty?
Its going to be interesting to see what will happen with Airpods and the like…
Apple will proudly announce that they've invented the replaceable battery.
I don't think it will be possible to make wireless earbuds or a ring with replaceable batteries without seriously compromising the ergonomics of fitting onto or into the human body.
I have a pair of earbuds designed to be as diminutive for sleeping comfortably and I have no idea how you would do that with a replaceable battery even if Airpod sized devices can be done.
What are those sleeping earbuds?
Counterexample: hearing aids.
The Fairbuds proved that it's possible.
My main concern here is that i live in an area that regularly get's below -20° and my electronic devices are regularly dying around me. And while I try to keep my hands warm-ish, they do get cold sometimes, and it would suck if a non replaceable battery died on me early because of this.
This makes me wonder about things like air pods. Do they replaceable batteries? Does Apple plan to make them so?
> at any time during the lifetime of the product
Eric said that the lifetime of the product is 'up to years'. Presumably because that's the limitation imposed by a disposable battery.
I wonder if the circular reasoning would fly in the EU.
How do other smart-ring companies deal with this?
wireless charging at the expense of size/bulk
But the rechargeable batteries are still not user replaceable, right?
While I sympathize with the intent of the law, this is a great example of why it's dumb. There's no possible way you could make that ring, in a reasonably ring-sized form factor, with today's manufacturing processes in such a way that an end user could replace it.
If this law pushes back against the idea that it's ok to make endless tech products which are essentially future rubbish as soon as you buy them, then I think that's a good thing. Perhaps products like this just shouldn't exist until we have better ways of dealing with the remains.
The problem is that it makes it impossible to have a version 0 to iterate on until a whole lot of other industries have advanced. Imagine the situation of in-ear hearing aids: they shouldn't be allowed to exist until they're perfect, unless we're happy telling deaf people they have to wear much larger than necessary devices and advertise their disability.
I'm glad we're reducing e-waste. I'm not thrilled about the idea of saying you can't make a thing until 100% of the bugs are worked out, meaning you can't have a beta version for research and fundraising, meaning, you can't conjure the perfect version into existence.
"Invisible In-the-Canal" hearing aids are battery replaceable. That argument just won't fly.
1: https://assets-ae.rt.demant.com/-/media/project/retail/audik...
That's hyperbole and I think you know it. I'm pretty sure they explicitly exclude medical devices.
It's not hyperbole at all.
Fortunately, your link basically says it doesn't apply to something you wear on your hands or arms:
> By way of derogation from paragraph 1, the following products incorporating portable batteries may be designed in such a way as to make the battery removable and replaceable only by independent professionals:
> (a) appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable;
But the only mention of "medical" comes right after it, and doesn't include hearing aids, future smart glasses, etc.:
> (b) professional medical imaging and radiotherapy devices, as defined in Article 2, point (1), of Regulation (EU) 2017/745, and in vitro diagnostic medical devices, as defined in Article 2, point (2), of Regulation (EU) 2017/746.
So ironically, the law allows disposable "junk devices" people are complaining about here, but doesn't allow factory-only serviceable hearing aids. How 'bout that? We can buy our smart rings and throw them away, but hearing aids will have to remain giant hunks of heavy plastic, or at least the models purchasable by average people who can't fly out of the EU to buy the good ones.
Edit: It's easy to downvote. I cited the relevant law. If I'm wrong, cite other law that explains why.
Hearing aids have had replaceable batteries since they were invented basically. I still remember my grandma 20 years ago fiddling with the small batteries, so that really is not a problem.
> Edit: It's easy to downvote. I cited the relevant law. If I'm wrong, cite other law that explains why.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want more freedom to design medical devices for people where there is an actual need, it would easily be done by expanding the exception for medical devices that already exists in the law.
If you think people to be able to sell unsustainable and mostly superfluous electronics because any improvements there might eventually trickle down to hearing aids, your argument is basically "we should accept the millions of tonnes of unnecessary e-waste in order to get slighly smaller hearing aids", which think many reasonable people would disagree with.
Who gets to choose what products are future rubbish?
Even if you think this product is a waste of resources, why is THIS waste of resources something we should stop, but not other, bigger wastes? Should we outlaw flying somewhere when you could take a train? The fuel spent on a short flight wastes way more resources and damages the environment much more than this smart ring does. If we are willing to ban this piece of tech because it is a waste, couldn't the same arguments be made about a short range flight?
There are already several existing and proposed bans on short haul flights when train routes exist. [1, 2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-haul_flight_ban
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2024/03/18/spain-sho...
You may find this a useful read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Sure, thanks for bringing it up. Short-range flights should have a higher higher threshold for permitted use in service of the environment.
Please, ask more questions.
If the battery lasts for two years its exceeding the useful life of many other products already, some of which of have higher environment cost for manufacturing and disposal.
The law has chosen poor proxies for lifespan and impact.
Yes, other things cause e-waste. Sometimes worse.
That's not a good justification for more e-waste.
It's a ring. It's a tiny amount of waste.
So is plastic straws and we know what happened with those.
The problem with plastic straws was properly disposing them. For a piece of jewelry I doubt many people would throw it away on the side of the road. A ring that last for years is different than a disposal product that people may use for a couple of minutes.
Not when millions of people buy it
It's still a tiny amount of waste for those millions of people amortized over its lifespan.
Products are supposed to last two years at the very least in EU (local laws may be more strict, but not less). If your product dies before that time, the customer will cite warranty, and there you go. This device is likely one of the many 'designed to last a little bit more than two years', with the emphasis on 'little bit'. It appears to be a perfect example of planned obsolescence.
Yep. There's some strong "How dare they interfere with Thneed production!" energy.
If their official sizing kit 3D models are accurate(better be!), there's exact amount of space for an SR721W watch/hearing aid silver oxide coin cell. And these are not even the tiniest of standardized replaceable batteries.
1: https://imgur.com/a/yupC9lN
You're too generous. I feel like the entire production run of this ring could be equivalent to a single discarded washing machine. This law is hamfisted.
Perhaps the ring need not exist.
Maybe it's the ring that is dumb?
Good thing that there are plenty of markets outside of EU
Cynical thinking ahead.
What has been long considered one of the most wealthy markets is a country descending into a billionaire controlled kleptocracy. And they're pissing off every other country in the world with tariff blackmail and punishment (or extra judicial executions) for any country that fails to bend the knee and fawn obsequiously enough to their leader.
One of the most populous markets is a country that manufactures approximately 100% of all consumer electronics, and will have a hundred versions of this available for 10% of Pebble's price on AliExpress as soon as it shows any signs of gaining market traction anywhere (quite likely stolen or "3rd shift" ones from Pebble's own outsourced production line).
India, who these days has more than enough local skill and experienced ex-H1B tech people to create this from scratch at home (and at least some with a deep resentment over how they were treated by US tech companies while they were there)?
One of the no longer EU markets is suffering post Brexit austerity and isn't likely to be buying a heap if tech toys - even if their fucked up new importing goods paperwork doesn't make it impossible to get your product into the country.
There goes about 40% of the planet's population.
That leaves, what? Manufacture locally and try surviving by selling to the US market at prices driven by US labor costs which'd make the product prohibitively expensive globally? South East Asia, who're likely to buy the Samsung copy over one from a US company? Russia, who (at least for now) is under trade sanctions for a US based company like Pebble? So perhaps Canada (until their southern neighbour make good on their threat to try and make them the 51st state)? South Africa? Australia and New Zealand?
You’re 100% correct companies can’t survive by being a niche market choice. The options are complete global market saturation or failure.
/unjerk out of all the potential mindsets to inherit from the US, the “corporate maximalist” frame of reference is one of the dumbest we have to offer
Wow, sucks to bE yoU!
As a European, I actually fully support this regulation!
Me too, i hate that I would have to throw out a fully functioning device if the battery dies.
I understand that sentiment but I think its arbitrary. People buy lots of products that don't have a useful life exceeding two years. For example, every pet toy ever sold. Some will have higher impact for manufacturing and disposal than this ring.
1. Arbitrary it may be. You have to start somewhere. In that sense, anything we do is “arbitrary“. Straw man. (see also: ban of plastic straws)
2. I would expect pet toys to be regulated as well and to contain less environmental toxins and hard to recycle elements than batteries, so I doubt the claim about impact per item sold.
There is an endless stream of cheap battery powered pet toys flowing out of China with far more plastic, circuit boards etc than this watch.
As long as their batteries are replaceable, that’s fine, and if not, they will not be legally allowed to be sold in Europe. What point is it that you’re trying to make?
What difference does it make if you can replace the batteries in a toy the animal loses interest in within 20 minutes?
Then don't buy it? I'm not buying these toys, and why would I?
And an endless stream of devices in the form of toys running full software stacks which never receive updates. Great, some products are as shitty. Perhaps we oppose those as well?
This is exactly the problem they're trying to tackle. Repairability goes further than just batteries.
> How long does the battery last?
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage.
I feel like I’m usually good about being able to imagine a market for different devices even when I’m not the target audience, but I’m having a hard time with this one.
Having 20 different 3-second thoughts transcribed to notes that I have to process every day sounds more like added complications than problem solving. If I stretch, I can think of a few things that flashed into my mind and then I forgot again for a couple days because I wasn’t in a location to immediately pull out my phone and put it on my todo list (which takes about 10 seconds because I put a shortcut in my lock screen). However, those locations weren’t something where I could be “whispering” to a ring, either.
So I don’t know. I hope repebble succeeds with everyone they’re doing, but this product feels like they went too far into the novelty end of the spectrum and neglected some of the actual usability that made the original Pebble popular.
EDIT: On second thought, maybe the lack of recharging is an acknowledgement that they don’t actually expect people to use this product a lot or for very long. Maybe the target audience is people who want to have something new and unique that they can also use as a conversation starter. Once the novelty wears off maybe it doesn’t get worn much. If it does become popular with a niche audience they can release a V2 with charging.
Different people have different lives. I myself can't imagine the type of life where at any given moment during the day I'm in a position to "immediately pull out my phone" when I want to create a record of something. I'm not a Pebble customer, past or present, and I have owned exactly zero smartwatches. Excluding portrayals of futuristic wrist-mounted computers I saw during childhood that seemed cool just because they seemed cool, this is the only worthwhile thing I've ever seen anyone actually propose a smartwatch could be good for. The fact that smartwatches could be (and are) widely embraced but that this seems like pure novelty to someone strikes me as very strange.
It sounds, though, like it doesn't solve a problem you have. I guess the only recourse you have about its existence is to not buy it.
I'm not a watch person, and the only reason I occasionally wear one is because it's a Garmin and I'm recording an outdoor activity with it. But while cycling, when the phone in my backpack makes a notification noise, it is kind of handy to just be able to look at the watch to see what kind of notification it is - the kind hardly worth looking at or the kind worth stopping and pulling out the phone to reply to. This particular gadget doesn't have a microphone and any app interaction on it involves a multi-button dance. But if there was a single button audio recording app, I can totally see myself using it. Especially as you get older (I'm guessing - can't interview younger me) fleeting thoughts can be awfully fleeting.
> if there was a single button audio recording app
Would the watch require 1 or 2 hands to record audio?
The ring seems easier to use while biking. Or driving.
It's easy to use a Pebble while driving. Not like you can't take one hand off the wheel briefly to hit a button.
Can't you just say "Hey siri, add a note"? I add reminders, send texts, etc. that way.
Yeah, there's lots of places you can't speak out loud bc it's disruptive to others though. Personally I set a lot of Siri reminders, but it's weird and uncomfortable to talk loudly at your phone in public spaces so I can only use it at home or outdoors. If the ring can follow through on the promise of being able to whisper to it, that's fairly valuable imo
There is another way to go about it - ignoring the phone completely while enjoying biking or jogging. Or leaving it at home. Unless I am on a call duty, all my notifications can wait.
My notification volume is relatively low, but there is one kind of notification, involving a certain significant other (we have high-needs kids) that requires action. So if the phone rings or there is a text message, for example, seeing at a glance (no button presses) what number it is from definitely allows stop/continue decision. I wish I did have a life where I can leave the electronic leash at home, or at least on mute.
On iOS, and probably on Android though I haven't checked, you can choose to only be notified of messages from certain contacts (in iOS it's in Focus Modes). This may help.
Understood.
My original Pebble purchase decision was made thinking "This will be great, I can use it while commuting to see who's calling or messaging my phone, so I can decide whether to pull over to respond or not!" I had a 35-40 minute each commute where I rode a motorcycle every day back then.
Turns out, the number of times I pulled over to return a call or message was precisely never. There was nothing so important that I could do anything about it by the side of the road, or that couldn't wait half an hour till I got to work/home.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when microcassette voice recorders were a fad, and pretty much everyone found they just weren't worth it.
Psychologically there's a sort of information hoarding aspect to this. I think a lot of people experience this with browser tabs, where they don't want to read something right now, but also don't want to just abandon it. So you end up with this backlog you feel you have to hold onto.
I've learned to just trust my brain more, where if something occurs to me is important, it'll probably occur to me again when its relevant, vs me treating random momentary insights like they're a priceless treasure.
It perhaps starts to make more sense now with better AI transcribing though. For the last few decades, the idea of dictating notes has been nice; but not the reality of typing them up/processing them however yourself if you don't have a secretary.
I could sort of see myself doing this coupled with good speech to text, but I don't know if I'd do it enough that it's worth having special hardware for vs. just recording on my phone or with earphones - or getting a smart watch for this plus other functionality.
I actually tried this workflow with some ebay'ed microcassette recorders - even the really compact ones are bulkier (though not necessarily heavier) than a modern cellphone, plus being non-connected you basically have to set aside some time to transcribe and erase (doable, but if you're specifically using it as a memory assist then having to remember this isn't great.) They did do a good job of "one press and they're operating, and you can confidently believe it" (but you have to pick them up in the right orientation for that to work.)
A modern digital voice recorder would have been a better choice for the experiment perhaps? Pen form factor versions exist, e.g. Olympus VP-20, Philips Voicetracer DVT1600.
I think this could be useful for the type of person that uses uses todo lists to help them tackle lots of small tasks that they intend to do immediately but somehow get distracted mid-action from and never finish (and then forget about altogether). As described in this blog post that front-paged hn some time ago:
> When I notice a micro-task like this, my instinct is not to do it, but to put it in the todo list. Then I try to do it immediately. And if I get distracted halfway through, it’s still there, in the todo list.
https://borretti.me/article/notes-on-managing-adhd
The problem with this approach is that recording tasks become a good amount of relative overhead compared to the 'micro-task' if it involves pulling out your phone, and pulling out your phone also introduces a potential distraction. So, having something that is single purpose and as low-friction as possible is appealing.
I'm skeptical that this is actually any better than using a smart watch that you can dictate to though.
As someone with ADHD that’s me. I don’t think this product is for me, but I have to immediately write a thing down or do it. Otherwise it’s lost. Importance is irrelevant.
Funny enough I have a pebble core 2 duo from this team. There’s a simple voice app that jots down a short note quickly on the watch, it can support 10 notes total. I love it. I only use it when I really need to throw something down immediately and I can’t clutter it up with nonsense. It also means I check it every day because it’s not daunting.
I on the other hand love it. I am often out without my phone closeby and having a way to take notes with one hand during some activity would be great.
I mean on one side I can see using it for to-do lists, but on other, why would I want another device in addition to smartphone and smartwatch ? Especially that talking to your smartwatch looks slightly less crazy in public than to your finger
Au contraire, you'll look like a Secret Service agent talking into your wrist.
if it lasts even 1 year with on avg 1 min audio, I think it's nice disposable device to have.
Some ideas if you have an app which can be integrated to other services:
* I feel sick today, notify my manager about it, probably I will stay home
* schedule a task to pickup a trash
* something to remember, colleague X told me he is using service A for data clean up
...
The idea is immediately interesting to me because I often am in the car and want to remind myself to look something up and forget when off the road. I do not have a car with CarPlay. This would suffice beautifully.
...But that battery life absolutely kills it for me. I'd feel like each time I recorded something I was burning lifetime off my device. (Technically also true of rechargeable battery lifetimes, but it's abstract enough and minimal enough I don't think about it.)
> Having 20 different 3-second thoughts transcribed to notes that I have to process every day sounds more like added complications than problem solving.
Frankly, I'm surprised this is a selling point, because I think it attaches too much importance to our "ideas". If it's a good idea that you'll pursue in earnest, you'll come across it again. And if you don't, so what?
I say this as someone who does quite a bit of reflection throughout the day. I jot down things I find interesting, which can be, paradoxically, a way to move past the musing and onto other things instead of having it nag and pull my attention from other things. So, in all likelihood, this product would likely lead to a bunch of crap being stored in memory that you'll never return to.
Some people have serious memory issues, such as myself (I recently took a test from a neurologist and scored in the bottom 2%). I see this as being a lifesaver.
It's not just for "ideas", it's for reminders. Most of my remembering happens when I'm driving on the highway, and I don't want to text and drive.
For me it's more observations than ideas - "check out new restaurant/bookstore I saw while driving in Arlington" while not getting distracted from the actual driving...
i would also see this as being super useful for things you need to buy. i often notice halfway through cooking something that i'm running low on an ingredient. that's one of the worst times to have to stop and pull out a phone haha, but if i don't write it down i won't remember to get this random niche ingredient later
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I'm sold enough on this form factor to take a flyer on a pre-order. I've been hunting for ways to minimize friction when quickly capturing random thoughts and this is a novel idea that seems to go further than anything else I've tried.
The lack of battery charging/replacement is a bummer, but slimness is far more critical for a ring than just about any other device so I understand the tradeoff. I've also seen stories of injuries from battery expansion in fitness rings, so if the risk of this is significantly reduced by eliminating charge cycles, I personally consider that a notable benefit.
Even though, IMO, there are enough legitimate benefits to warrant this product's trade-offs, I imagine its disposable nature will ultimately make it unsuccessful. Off the cuff, it's easy to look at this as "saying the quiet part out loud" vis-a-vis planned obsolescence, and I understand why many would find that extremely off-putting.
I don't understand why people who are probably OK with ordering Doordash once in a while are up in arms about a disposable device that weighs a couple of grams, lasts for years, and is recycled. You can easily spend more on a single Doordash meal for two people and I guarantee a few Doordash meals have more impact on the environment than this minuscule device ever could.
I doubt it's about the environmental impact. I agree that the environmental impact probably isn't that bad. My biggest concern is that it's $75 USD (plus shipping, presumably), and if the company ever goes under it's now worthless because I can't get a new one.
That said, if I assume that the company will last long enough, I think $75 USD is worth it even if I only get to use it for 4 years. Although if I end up building workflows around the ring, and then I have to get rid of it, that would be very annoying.
On a monthly basis the cost is quite reasonable IMO. It will continue to work if the company goes out of business. Their software is open source. So you can count on using it as long as the battery lasts.
personally, i worry about what happens when it doesn't last for years. a software bug causes high power draw, or you set your ring down and something gets pushed against the recording button for a few hours, or you fall asleep laying on it. given it only has a 15-hour recording life, this happening just once could be the end of your $75 device
Doordash? What does that have to do with this discussion? It is a completely different market. You use the food right away (food is perishable), and you probably could've cooked yourself a healthy meal with much less money. If you live with multiple people, it is even easier to do so due to scaling and sharing what you like. I am very much not OK with spending 50 USD per person on takeaway food (getting it here costs just 3 EUR or so). It is the amount of money I spend at a (for me) fancy restaurant.
I'll give you another example. A smart TV. A smart TV is more expensive than this ring, but yeah. So a cheap smart TV needs a soundbar for decent audio, and it needs a STB for the OS (streaming) in order to make it a dumb TV. It comes with a computer in it. A computer which you cannot upgrade. They decide to quit support whenever they want to (after 2 years you're generally hosed in EU). Planned obsolescence. We don't like that in Europe. I know, in the USA the current leadership denies climate change even exists. But here in Europe, we follow the scientific method, not BS.
Instead of a stand-alone piece of e-waste, how about this: a device with the same format (a ring and an button) but the only thing it does is trigger the pebble watch to start recording a message. This way the microphone isn't needed, just the radio (and much weaker radio at that), and the battery will last exponentially longer. Then just expose the charging terminals so that we can at least hack the device with custom made external charging controllers, or buy a charger separately.
Might as well bundle the ring with the watch at that point, and increase the price accordingly, as it's then become an accessory particular to the pebble watch. And including a charging circuit means more complexity and bulk, also leading to an increase in price. And cost is a factor they're optimizing for.
That's my point exactly. This should have been a pebble accessory, not a standalone device that sends voice notes to your phone. If this device actually has a 2 year battery, if you'd remove the microphone and turn it into a "smart button" to trigger a watch action, the battery should easily last 4+ years.
Yet a design goal is for it to also work standalone, so users who don't have/want a pebble watch can use it with their phone, something that essentially everyone has.
That could be achievable without a battery, using a Piezo button like some Hue remotes... Though not sure with the small form factor.
That's interesting. A Piezo Button generates enough power to send a radio signal?
Have a look at the EnOcean kinetic smart home switches, there are now also other companies making them.
Indeed, I have a remote doorbell where the outer button is a piezo button and the inside bell part is connected to a socket. But the button is quite thick, presumably because it needs a bit of travel to get enough energy. Granted that's for a device that sends multi-wall penetrating strength of 433Mhz radio waves. For something like this where the distance is only about 25cm you might be able to get a button small enough.
It's open source and the button is customizable. So it's very likely that could be achieved with the product as-is.
UX probably not as good in that case. I am thinking about how buggy my voice-remote is for the TV. 1/3 of the time it works, 1/3 of the time there is some lag before it starts working (and requires waiting for feedback i.e. the listening tone before I can speak) and 1/3 of the time it doesn't work at all (never hears me due to lag or booting up or whatever else).
It can't be worse than a tiny ring that records notes...
Or better yet. Use your cellphone wich most of us carry 90% of the time?
That sounds like the perfect thing to do while I'm driving.
iOS has recently added a ”trigger voice recorder” to the swipe-down screen from the lock screen.
It takes a random length of time to start recording. But it’s always too long. And it’s unreliable.
This would be much more convenient. Though I’m not sure the battery situation would convince me.
If I could press one button (and not unlock the phone) I would; my samsung even has an extra wasted button (the "bixby" button) but it isn't reconfigurable. (Still fails for the "while driving" case but I'd be using it the rest of the time)
You can do it on the iphone with the action button.
The cellphone that’s buried in my handbag? I think you missed the expressed use case (admittedly, a few paragraphs into TFA):
”Before, I would take my phone out of my pocket to jot these down, but I couldn’t always do that (eg, while bicycling). I also wanted to start using my phone less, especially in front of my kids.”
as I wondered in another comment, the button may not always be facing your thumb. so then you'd need to keep fiddling with it anyway.
It's still easier to turn around a ring than to fiddle with a a phone. And more legal as well, no laws against rotating a ring while rinding your bike. That's fully haptic, no is drawn from traffic for that.
"Hey google, make a note: ..."
I just tried it, and it worked flawlessly. Now, obviously it's not great for privacy per se, but I'm not jotting down my plans for world domination or anything
Stop using your phone less in front of your kids.
Start using your ring/watch/whatever_else more in front of your kids.
Honestly, it isn't about what you use (that is just hype). You can read the paper all day if you want. I grew up with a father who was listening to radio and watching TV all the time (to be fair: he was disabled, including legally blind). It isn't about using your phone less in front of your kids. It is about being there for your kids when they need you; showing genuine interest in your kids; interacting with them. Right now, as I am writing this to you, my kids are watching Peppa Pig before bedtime. Instead of writing this, I could sit next to them and watch an episode with them.
As for cycling, with a ring you'd have to move your hand towards you or not, but it isn't much different compared to a watch, except perhaps when you'd wear a sweater over your watch.
It is also very typical that in-ear buds are expensive, small, yet hard to repair because the battery isn't user replaceable. And guess what, exactly the same for this device.
Apart from the yet another device with microphone (24/7 on, I suppose) and Bluetooth (the wireless spaghetti protocol) and it not being user serviceable the device costs 100 USD. For such a price, I expect it to last longer than two years. I mean, I'm sick of devices lasting only a few years. I wouldn't need yet another one.
TL;DR hard pass, do better.
> Instead of writing this, I could sit next to them and watch an episode with them.
And as any study into the effects of parental attention and shared experience will show that kind of behavior would be beneficial to their overall long-term mental health. Requiring them to make themselves heard and to actively “disturb you“ is a very high barrier for children to break through (even if you don’t consider it a disturbance). Children need active mirroring and external guidance when it comes to their needs in order to develop a healthy sense for them. They are “left alone“ as soon as you leave the shared emotional space.
> Apart from the yet another device with microphone (24/7 on, I suppose) and Bluetooth
Considering the tiny non-rechargeable battery I can guarantee it's not on 24/7 because then it would literally last a day :)
Unlike a smartphone which often does listen for a wake word all day without much impact on battery life, this really couldn't.
The remarks in this comment can only come from a gross misunderstanding of what many people mean when they talk about avoiding use of their phones around their kids. Almost every sentence reveals a very me-focused outlook.
> It isn't about using your phone less in front of your kids. It is about being there for your kids when they need you
That's a very narrow conception if the problem—it isn't solely about being "there" for them or trying to get control over (and maintain control over) one's own addictions. The main thing that people have an issue with when they talk about kids and phone use (and TV for that matter) is addiction observed in the kids themselves. It's absolutely about using one's own phone less while they're around as a means of quashing overexposure.
You can show as much genuine interest in them as you want, and it doesn't change anything, because whether the kids feel like the parent is "there for them" not the problem that a parent is is already genuinely interested in them is concerned about and trying to address.
> As for cycling, with a ring you'd have to move your hand towards you or not, but it isn't much different compared to a watch, except perhaps when you'd wear a sweater over your watch.
"Not much" except that the fingers that are attached to the hand that's attached to the wrist where you're wearing your watch certainly aren't capable of reaching back to press a button on said watch.
> Apart from the yet another device with microphone (24/7 on, I suppose)
The folks in this thread are really committed to just plucking things out of thin air and acting on foregone conclusions, huh?
You supposedly speak for masses and claim I am having some exceptional, unique look but you don't cite anything to support your claim.
> That's a very narrow conception if the problem—it isn't solely about being "there" for them or trying to get control over (and maintain control over) one's own addictions. The main thing that people have an issue with when they talk about kids and phone use (and TV for that matter) is addiction observed in the kids themselves. It's absolutely about using one's own phone less while they're around as a means of quashing overexposure.
> You can show as much genuine interest in them as you want, and it doesn't change anything, because whether the kids feel like the parent is "there for them" not the problem that a parent is is already genuinely interested in them is concerned about and trying to address.
I grew up with my father who was really hip. He didn't use his smartphone much. Sometimes, he did this weird thing. Out of nowhere, he'd comment about something seemingly unrelated to the discussion. I didn't understand what he was yapping at. At first, I thought he was talking to mom. One time, I noticed he did it when mom was upstairs. At one point, I thought dad was having imaginary friends. Turns out, dad had this smart ring he'd use to record notes. One day, the ring was gone. Gone from his finger. I guess it broke, or something.
IOW, replacing one tool with another, you can't fool people. If social media distracts you, remove it from your smartphone, or limit the exposure to it. My wife when she is done with cooking, regularly uses her smartphone after that when we are eating. Usually to fill in about groceries. We're not overly strict on that, and we don't expect our kids to be strict on it when they got a smartphone later on. But it is about proportion. Using it for a short amount of time is perfectly possible. If you want to have a 'no tech' rule during dinner, fine, but then also smart rings. If you want to allow certain specific tasks, a technical barrier like a smart ring versus a smartphone can work, yes. But you can also decide to limit yourself whilst using your smartphone. IMO that starts with uninstalling all kind of BS apps you don't need, and removing notifications you don't require. Either way, the bottom line is this: the ring doesn't solve the issue of distractions on smartphones. It tries to mitigate the issue. So whenever you do use your smartphone, you are still suffering from the issue.
> "Not much" except that the fingers that are attached to the hand that's attached to the wrist where you're wearing your watch certainly aren't capable of reaching back to press a button on said watch.
This is true, it isn't hands-free, hands-free is superior. Although a device on the bike also works well. You can buy such a tool right now to attach your smartphone to your bike, and it'll last for more than two years. It is a matter of moving your hand once to the other one to enable the mic. A Pebble, too, you can replace the battery yourself and I absolutely despise all these smartwatches where you cannot.
I'm sure it won't be able to handle wind noise well (it doesn't look big enough to have multiple microphones) so you'd have to stop the bicycle to make a good recording. Might as well grab the phone then.
Yet another retort addressed directly in the post:
> Raw audio playback: Very helpful if STT doesn’t work perfectly due to wind or loud background noises
Yes I know but I doubt it will capture much at all when there's significant wind noise, even enough to understand by ear without STT.
A friend of mine has her phone on her handlebars in a gps mount and she sends me voice messages through her bluetooth headset and those are hardly intelligible. A hand on the handlebar would be even further from the mouth.
And those are pretty good ones with multiple microphones.
Why stop there? Why use your phone at all? Just go visit your mum instead of calling...
Sorry the sarcasm, but not everything should need you to take your phone, unlock, get distracted, open social media on a reflex and forget what you were doing in the first place.
Get distracted? I mean, are you American? Have you ever looked around you in traffic? Look at all these billboards and bullshit and tell me about distraction. If you are on a mission you do not open your social media. People do so due to boredom, I guess. The sensible thing to do is... stop using social media.
Aside from that, let us assume you won't stop with that (after all, it is free!). Smartphones have a driving mode which you can set, setting them on DnD. I take my smartphone out of my pocket when I wait before a traffic light, and that works, but I only do so when I need to and what I certainly do not need to do at that point is have a look at Facebook or Twitter. I also don't have Bluetooth on 24/7 on my smartphone (one reason being tracking concerns). On a Pebble watch, I can put this off. Sadly a software killswitch, but better than nothing.
...and face the seductive allure of all those delicious notifications trying to get me to task switch to a bunch of other things?
No, sir. I'm pretty much on board with anything that reduces the number of times I need to light up that phone screen.
Well, you could just turn off unnecessary notifications like I do, same with emails. I get like 3 notifications a day on average now, and most of those are just dms from friends.
I do, aggressively. Honestly, the messages from friends are the hardest to ignore/defer. That's why I also have a highly tedious DND schedule.
That aside, there's also far more friction to pull out a device, turn it on, unlock it, then open an app.
Then just put the button on the watch? In fact, why isn't this just a button on the watch?
Because you need to use your other hand to press that button, instead of the adjacent finger.
> Because you need to use your other hand to press that button, instead of the adjacent finger.
Funnily enough, I've used my nose to tap my watch when my hands are full
Yes, I've gotten some strange looks
I do this all the time in the winter as well when I'm wearing gloves that aren't really "touch screen" friendly
I thought I was the only one on Earth to do that (but surely I'm the only boomer doing it).
If you had read the post you would know the answer.
"This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff."
That seems an incredibly limited set of use cases for the complication of adding another device to one's life.
But you don't have to charge this one! (because you can't) :D
Hmm... I sort of would've preferred it was JUST a button. I wonder if you could even make it perpetually powered by body heat + buffer battery if it's ONLY job was to emit a couple packets over BLE with some burned in ID that you save on the watch. I don't know how efficient peltier elements are going to be on such a small area, but the cold side would be attached to a big metal ring, which feels like an adequate heat sink. (Peltier elements work on heat differential right? Not an expert.)
I know they mentioned that they thought of making this just a watch app, but didn't like the two-handed button press or raise to wake gesture. Why not just optimize for removing the gesture entirely? The microphone has to be better on a full size watch on your wrist vs the tiny ring further away on your finger.
This hits the same nerve in me as those single-use vapes with screens, except you can't harvest the battery out of this one.
You can use it just as a button - that's one of the ways you can hack it. Just hook the button up to whichever action (webhook, Tasker, etc) you'd like.
Battery would last for decades just as a button.
Any chance of diy, at-home battery replacements? That would definitely let me consider it. I don't mind if it's a 10 hour process to replace the battery. Just the option to have a device that lasts is great.
Waterproofing, tiny batteries, yadda yadda... it's either "charge it weekly", or "recycle" every year or two (eg: $9.99/mo)
Thinking through: many people in the pebble-verse (back in the day) were super-hot about wanting the voice-control stuff/microphone responses to text messages. Instead of thinking about this as a standalone "ring", think of this as a "remote button + mic" for the pebble watch.
As a (former) avid biker, being able to spam: "How much longer until sunset (and how far away am I from home [and will I get home before sunset])?" and having a rough answer "on the wrist" is super useful.
On the Home Assistant front, the Apple ecosystem is waaaay too universal for Siri-isms. We have 3-4 home pod's (upstairs, downstairs, kids bedroom, guest room), along with phones (car-play), and airpods. All of them can be used as "Hey Siri, set a timer, turn on/off the lights, what's the weather, etc".
Looking at the HA voice controls, it's utter garbage trash (unfortunately) until The Hackers(tm) get around to fixing things up, BUUUT we're still screwed b/c HA speakers/mic's will be worse than Apple's, and HA will never come out with AirPods or CarPlay integration (and likely: Apple will never support a "non-Siri" voice connection via their microphone relationships).
This ring is an incredibly interesting way to sidestep all of that!
You have the ring (mic input, 2yr battery), you have the watch (text display, 1 month battery), and your phone (cellular + storage + compute, 1 day battery), all of which are nominally "every day carry" items.
In the home automation world, having your star-trek communicator pin (quite literally!) on your finger at all times w/ a 2yr battery life is VERY VERY intriguing!
"Ready to beam up" ... Smartwatch plays transporter sounds.
I feel like this should be promoted or made clearer on the product page - this is how I think many people would prefer to use it, provided it could trigger voice input on the pebble/device/other watch - for example, as a Siri trigger.
This reminds me of Pebble Core. Does anyone but me remember that?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...
It was one of the devices I was most excited about way back when, and I'd still love to see it – button, headphone jack, running Android. I would love a headless (and thus longer-charge-for-smaller-device) Android device like that again.
Yes! The ring reminded me of the Core too. Perhaps with voice processing and the infrastructure around MCP (which I haven't used myself, but Eric brings up in the blog) a fully headless, voice-based device like this is more feasible now than in those days
> Why not just optimize for removing the gesture entirely? The microphone has to be better on a full size watch on your wrist vs the tiny ring further away on your finger.
Agreed, let the ring just be a button that can trigger recording on a watch or phone (among other tasks) rather than squeezing in a microphone and audio transmitter.
> I wonder if you could even make it perpetually powered by body heat + buffer battery if it's ONLY job was to emit a couple packets over BLE...
Neat! Or maybe a tiny solar cell? Perhaps the button itself is piezoelectric, like a wearable version of the EnOcean Nodon line of battery-free wireless switches -- a BLE advertising event costs less than 100 microjoules which a button press should be able to provide, though ensuring 100% reliability over BLE with such a tiny energy budget would be hard.
Alternately it could communicate with the watch using IR, but the knuckles might occlude line of sight. The button press could mechanically emit an ultrasonic tone, but that requires an always-on mic in the watch/phone and would be susceptible to shenanigans. Maybe pressing the button causes a specific vibration that a watch accelerometer can reliably recognize?
Now I want someone to find a way to make this work... but long term I expect that the real solution will be making hand gestures work reliably 100% of the time with no ring at all.
There are battery-free switches for Hue light systems and, presumably, other similar systems. They're pretty large, though, and pushing the button has a lot of travel, which can be used to generate electricity.
Plus, even if you wear the watch on one arm and the ring on the opposite hand, they're only ever a maximum of your wingspan apart when in use.
I'd just love the "customizable button on a ring" concept, and that battery could last basically forever.
> I sort of would've preferred it was JUST a button
Exactly. The Pebble already has all the hardware to capture voice notes. There are at least a few third party Pebble apps that do this already. The problem that Eric has is limited to the activation of the feature, not the feature itself, but he overengineered a disposable standalone gadget instead of making an accessory for his already capable platform.
Like the oldschool tv clickers? Piezo should be enough.
As long as the receiver is always-on and always listening. Easy when plugged into the wall, like a TV. Not so easy when it's on battery.
One aspect about e-waste is really the size, this has by volume less than an AA-battery, which means the e-waste is pretty much within this realm. For a decently size powerbank, you could have a lifetime of those rings and probably still create less e-waste.
I think it's an interesting approach, in terms of hack-ability a non-rechargable device is pretty much bad - also just imagining that any sort of software or hardware glitch could easily just permanently render the device useless is not super decent either.
I was typing in my CC info when I went back to read about battery life. This is meant as positive feedback: I won't be ordering a non-rechargeable device with 12 hours of recording for $100.
Imagine I fall asleep with it on my finger and accidentally press the button with my head. It's recording me snore for 3 hours, and 25% battery life gone.
Based on the description, this doesn't seem plausible. If the button is as clicky as it sounds, it would hurt your head/hand/both to do the thing you describe.
It doesn't matter if it's plausible or not. It's the fact that it's non-rechargeable device with 12 hours of recording...
I wouldn't think about the total recording time so much as the actual usage you'll get out of it. If based on typical usage, you could get even eighteen months out of it, then you're looking at around $5/month for a device to serve this purpose for you.
Is that worth it to you? Perhaps not. But plenty of us pay similar amounts of money for software subscriptions related to productivity, so it's not especially outlandish compared to paying for Standard Notes, Todoist, etc.
I sometimes speak into my voice recorder when I’m out for a walk and have a thought. Those voice notes can be many minutes long, and full of repetition and silence.
When no one’s looking obviously.
Not sure how that would work with the ring. Either lots of small similar notes. Or a dead battery.
I don't think that's the use case they're aiming for. If you want to have a meandering voice recording that lasts minutes, the friction to pull out your phone is less of an issue while you're out walking your dog.
But when you're having a conversation with someone and they ask you to pick up milk from the store later, or you're running to the bus and want to just jot down an idea you had briefly, and other moments where the friction is higher...then this seems like the solution.
You can buy a rechargeable e-ring with several sensors and even a tiny screen for like 20$ on AliExpress. 75$ for a non-rechargeable, e-waste ring with just a button and a mic is insane.
Point is to not having to take it off at all, as next thing is going out without it and losing that convenience. Though I guess they can also invent a finger-mounted powerbank for it; I remember buying a case with an embedded powerbank for one of my earlier Android phones...
but probably not a microphone, right.
Not one that they tell you about anyway
Sure, but I don't think that ditching the combo O2 blood & heartbeat sensor, charging chip and the screen, and adding instead a mic is worth a 55$ upcharge.
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This sounds kind of cool, but I'm more worried about the e-waste. A device that is cheap, will get "recycled", and sounds cool, will get a tiny amount of use after the initial wow factor wears off or doesn't fit the needs, then gets thrown away or lost. And is this feature in the new repebble watches? I would rather have it there with a bigger battery.
Wow I was just looking for finding like this, but.. can't be recharged? It would be one thing if it had like 500 hours of recording, but this has 12-15.
> How long does the battery last?
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage.
Two years isn’t too bad, but at $99 the price is still a bit high for that.
It's pretty bad when you consider that you have to limit it to just this use-case (3-6 second recordings 10-20 times a day), when it could have instead been useful for other things e.g. recording much longer thoughts or making notes while reading a book or watching a video.
Even for just the narrow use-case, 2 years is still pretty poor. I generally expect my tech to last a lot longer than that.
this seems to be optimised for the use case where you just want to record something quickly; if you wanted a longer recording session the up front overhead of pulling out a dictaphone or something wouldn't be too bad, and you would have better ergonomics than holding a button pressed and your hand to your face.
I still would have preferred it to be serviceable. I know I'll be able to buy new batteries in 6 years, 10 years, etc. I'm suspect as to whether you'll still be able to buy this device in that time ("this device" meaning same comfortable fit, no new onboard bloat, compatible with my other ancient but beloved devices, similar focus on doing one simple thing well, privacy characteristics, etc). Apropros of nothing, is repebblering.com available?
If it keep me from having to take out my phone, which both a) I don't want to do for my own sanity and b) I don't want to do in many social situations out of respect for my companions, then it may be worth it. You could say "but Apple watch" however a big swath of society already hates those for the same reasons above
... and then they go on to say there's no subscription involved.
At $99 every 2 years it might as well be a subscription.
Not even just a flat-fee subscription, but technically a usage based one! Since every time you activate the device it consumes power stored in the battery, it essentially turns electricity into credits and now your hardware-based device is a usage based subscription. What a time to be alive!
Sure the world was destroyed but at one beautiful point in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
Brilliant way to look at it. We already do this with phones
The article says the battery lasts for years. Is that a misleading claim?
Edit FTA:
> How long does the battery last?
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage.
It says two years of average use.
“Two” is not “years” in my opinion. “Years” implies at least 3-5.
Years is literally just the plural of a single year. Ergo, years feels like the appropriate word here. What are you suggesting they phase it as instead?
I would always say “two” when talking about such a small quantity. “Years” is misleading, as evidenced by many other comments here.
“The battery lasts two years”
On this page [1] in the technical specifications under battery life, instead of actually saying 12-15 hours of recording or 2 years, it just says "Years of average use"
[1] https://repebble.com/index
Two is definitely on the low end for “years”… really the lowest.
But I did have a similar thought when I read it was only “two”
Two is years. Some people would even say that 1.5 is "years". I go back and forth on this. Is it correct to say that something costs "thousands of dollars" if it costs $1,800? If it costs $2,000, IMO it's clear.
Something can be technically true while still being misleading. In fact arguably that's what the word misleading means (as opposed to false).
I think most people, when told that something will last for "years", would be quite surprised to learn that it will fail after 2 years.
If someone said a shirt will last for years I would have a different impression than if someone said that a battery-powered thing will last for years.
For example, I have motion sensors in my home and I have to replace the batteries from time to time. If the manual said "the batteries last for years, depending on usage" I would not be surprised if it lasted for 2 years.
Here, it sounds like the battery life will vary greatly based on usage. In fact, it sounds like the battery life is almost entirely a function of how much you use it. It would be interesting to know how much the battery will drain over time if you don't use it, but of course we can't know this for certain before this has been in the wild for years.
If English is your first language, this is the funniest comment I've seen today by a margin.
> It says two years of average use.
Even this is misleading. The product hasn't been released yet. So what is it an average of? How do you know how people will use it?
2 years: Couple years
3 years: Few years
4 years: Several years
5+ years: Years
"Two year of average use"?
I’m not talking grammar, I’m talking convention.
Think of it more like this: If I was selling you a car and said it would last for years, then would you expect it to fall apart after two years? I certainly wouldn’t. When talking about small quantities we tend to specify an exact number (two, three), however as the range becomes larger and less exact we use generalities (years). Because of this “years” would typically refer to a span of at least 3-5 years, and I would argue even longer.
Even given that convention, with your example, a car is a far steeper investment than this ring. The more you invest in something, the more you expect to get out of it, and this ring is designed for a very low investment point, while still being highly durable (there are other similar rings out there at even lower investment points, but they probably won't survive anything beyond a sprinkle).
Where did you read that? The article says 5 minutes. Which is fine because it meant to transfer directly to the phone app. And the battery is said to "lasts for up to years of average use".
This makes it a non-starter for me. It feels utterly wasteful, and I’m basically paying USD$100 for a ring subscription every two years, plus international shipping. I can’t support that, sorry.
The only thing that matters here is how good the transcription is. You absolutely have to save the recording. You also have to enable the user to connect to their own transcription service and preserve the recording for that if yours sucks or is not trusted. People have accents. Third party transcription vendors can sell data. Do not mess this up. Enable users to add their own trusted transcription.
If we want to give this to grandparents to save their stories, we can want to have the stories too. If we want it for ourselves, we have to trust it.
Already a part of it. Recordings are saved (on the sync device) in case a transcript is a bust.
Yes, but they mention there will be a subscription plan for their cloud-based transcription. If you want an open platform of devices - ensure users can use a range of transcription providers for quality and security.
You have the options of using the transcription in the app, subscribing to their cloud service, or building out your own service that access the data via webhooks:
> I love customizing and hacking on my devices. What could I do with Index 01?
> Lots of stuff! Control things with the buttons. Route raw audio or transcribed text directly to your own app via webhook. Use MCPs (also run locally on-device! No cloud server required) to add more actions.
That’s awesome! I’m sold. Now can it fit a size 3 finger?
Random note to whoever put the Pebble blog together - you don't need 2-4 megabyte images inline in the article! Since the images are limited to ~544px wide, make thumbnails of that size rather than using the original full-size image inline. They already link to the full size so you're already halfway there.
Hmm does it actually set reminders? Or does it just take a note and you have to manually set the reminder later? I would love this if it actually could create reminders like "remind me when I get home" etc. Otherwise I'm sure I'll never go back and look at notes I took.
Edit: "It’s converted to text on-device, then processed by an on-device large language model (LLM) which selects an action to take (create note, add to reminders, etc)." This is perfect!
(Pebble founder)
Happy to answer any questions you have!
Given that the user will typically have their watch on them as well, why not make the ring a battery-less BLE transmitter that triggers voice input on the watch? It’s still one-handed operation, but now the battery life is infinite since there’s no battery? The disposable ring seems like a solution in search of a problem to me, unfortunately.
Example button: https://core-electronics.com.au/self-powered-wireless-switch...
I imagine the reason is reliability, but USD$99 plus international shipping every two years isn’t worth that to me, sorry.
Aside: I loved my kickstarter pebble and my steel, btw!
Piezo switches like the one you linked have a minimum size to generate the power necessary, and that minimum size is larger than the entire current ring.
Are you still considering implementing the feature as a Pebble app as well? As someone who is very forgetful I like the low-friction external memory concept, but it would be nice if I could try it out (admittedly sub-optimally) before jumping in with a second device. It could also be a nice option for Index owners to keep a similar flow even when they don't want to wear the Index for whatever reason.
In general I really like the idea of a local-first, privacy-first, one-way/low-interaction digital assistant regardless of the form factor. A big frustration I have with Gemini as a voice assistant is that I have to wait out the other half of super simple interactions like setting a timer or making a note.
How often do you get accidental clicks? Does it interfere with day-to-day activities because you're trying to avoid the button?
Also, I love the idea of providing 3d models for something like this that needs to be perfectly sized
Love the idea as a very easily distracted individual, but the battery is keeping me on the fence. I understand how charging circuitry makes this product a non-starter, but is there any hope of the battery being replaceable?
If you look at other rechargeable smart rings they're in the $250 to $300 range, plus a $10/month subscription. We didn't want to do that for a new product like this.
I like the price here, but my question was not about adding charging circuitry, but some way to open the ring and replace the battery once it's depleted.
Then you'd run into waterproofing issues, and there's greater inherent complexity in providing replacement ability.
Can I use something like syncthing to easily backup the recordings and transcripts off my phone?
Google's Recorder app makes this a big PITA if I don't want to enable upload to cloud storage, there is a very tedious manual way to export recordings.
I really just want plain old data and to be able to copy or delete files via the filesystem. And not be required to use some cloud service.
Why didn’t you make it just a button which activates the watch? It’d be an addon to pebble watch. It couldn’t be used standalone, but you could make it rechargeable and it would solve your issue (actions with only one hand)
It can work exactly like that, if you have a Pebble. But it works standalone as well.
Do you mean that this is technically possible, or that this is a feature that will be supported? I've preordered the Time 2, so having the ability to configure it that way to significantly extend the battery life of the ring could be interesting. On the other hand, using it standalone might be fine for me. I wouldn't really know how fast I might go through the battery without using it for a while.
1. Will it fit on a female with a size 3 finger?
2. Can we pick our own transcription service or export audio to transcribe elsewhere if you transcription is not reliable or privacy is needed?
3. Is it waterproof? Can I wash my hands without taking it off?
according to the video [1]
1: size 4 is the smallest
2: the transcription happens on your phone for free (or via subscription to a slightly better transcription model, not sure about privacy for the paid model)
3: ok to wash hands or shower, but just 1 foot of depth (so no swimming)
How hackable is the firmware, if we want to assign different handling to the button presses?
Can we flash our own firmware to the device?
I really like the thought and the format, but I do not like that I can't change the battery. Even if it is not easy, I still think there should be a way to change the battery.
could this be a used a bluetooth microphone, so I could use it with a laptop as a quick voice dictation/input for various uses? I'm thinking like a simple microphone for an localy hosted app like Hex: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex
what safety measures does this have to avoid some incident (held down button, software bug, etc) draining the entire battery within a few hours, thus bricking the device?
how large are the STT and LLM models that you use on-device? are they part of the OS or downloaded with the app?
I actually like the device and can see the purpose of it - I’ve tried to kick together similar solutions in the past, but I like the very “one thing only” nature of this.
That said, I absolutely cannot buy a device like this without a replaceable battery. I don’t actually care about the recharge, I get what you’re trying to do with it, but given the state of the e-waste world and, bluntly, the history of hardware brands - a big, big part of the sales pitch for the pebble is the OSS nature of the device because we need to hedge against any one company for longevity. I’d seriously consider this if I knew the battery was replaceable, but I can’t bet on you being around in 4, 6, or 8 years, and I’m not willing to buy intentionally disposable tech anymore.
Why aren't you doing a wild degree of miniaturized power electronics R&D for your low-cost beta test of a new computing modality?
/s
I think the design is bad: my girlfriend would never wear it. Maybe they know already and that's why the webpage contains only picture of male hands.
Given the many smartwatches on the market which can do so much more, are lightweight and some of them with acceptable battery life (Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit), a smartring is of very little interest to me. But I often struggle to understand why certain products fascinate people, so I may be totally wrong and I wish the makers best of luck.
The overmoulding is seriously ugly. Gold and navy blue?! Silver and medical grey? Only the black is passable.
Yeah, I have to wonder what lead them to these color choices. Not sure why they wouldn't include a white option or any other good neutral colors that actually go with silver and gold. And I think the number of people willing to wear a matte black ring is quite low, especially among women.
I wanted to use it to capture my musical ideas. They usually come unexpectedly and in bundles. There's a problem though – one of them is 0:40-1:30 min in duration; the ring wouldn't last half a year for me.
I'm sure other musicians would love it as well, but are disqualified completely from the userbase. That's a shame as I think for us it would be really, really useful.
(The first iteration of a musical idea usually emerges somewhat spontaneously from an emotional state, and repetition always loses some important part of it. This ring could be an always-on photocamera for these spontaneous, naturally arising states.)
This is a great example of use outside the box they got themselves in.
The solution is simple: market this as a trigger for the pebble voice. Only thatz. Nothing else. Make the electronics as simple and cheap as possible. Sell it as an option to the watch. Less than 30$ would be ideal.
Voila.
"Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage." They really don't seem have tested the battery life, so 2 years is probably the best case scenario here. He says there's no subscription but if you need to buy one every 2 years or less, then that's the subscription. The primary reason given for not having an option to charge is just awful: "You would probably lose the charger before the battery ran out". This is seriously a device for reviewers and youtubers to hype, make a video about it, and then it's gone.
For what it's worth, I 100% perfectly solved this problem for myself MANY years ago and still use it just about every day.
On Android, it's called "Blitzmail," I'm pretty sure there's an Apple equivalent.
Beautifully simple app; on one touch it pops open a text box (which you can type, dictate to, also do "shares/attachments")
And emails to one and only one pre-specified address, usually "yourself."
From there, pick your poison. I personally have a dedicated address/account for these, and I have some bash scripts that pick them up and move them around, but I imagine for many "checking that email address periodically" would be sufficient.
I do exactly the same, except via a button in the quick settings panel, using Tasker, so I don't have to go to the home screen. It's incredibly useful. I hope this can be configured to make the notes emails to yourself.
I very much enjoy Eric's commitment to new and novel and imaginative hardware.
Bought and am loving my Pebble 2 Duo etc - still yet to charge it once in fact!
This device doesn't quite hit the mark for me, but I love the commitment to thinking about what's novel and useful, and putting a prototype out into the world. To use an Irish phrase, "more luck to them" - and hope we see many more projects from them!
My first concern is that this looks very difficult to remove if the battery begins to swell, as silver-oxide batteries are wont to do. Perhaps that's less likely with single use batteries.
This is one of the reasons why we decided not to have rechargeable batteries! We saw what happened to the Samsung ring.
There is no risk of swelling with Index 01
I thought you might find it interesting to know that it’s “wont” instead of “want”, when saying “wont to do”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wont
Also: I agree with your concern
I'm embarrassed. Thanks for the correction!
Don’t be :) learning is lifelong
Should be relatively straightforward to remove with a small wire cutter.
just like with the samsung rings, oh wait...
No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
Apple hire this man.
they should still have made it rechargeable tbh.
How much rechargeability really requires from hardware point of view?
I suppose the problem is that there are no standard for tiny magnetic chargers/cables. Every watch comes with their own, and they need be custom designed. For a device this large as much of the charging electronics should be outside the ring.
And another (small?) problem is that you'd need to electrically protect those external pins.
I'm with you, a little pogo-pin connector with all the charging circuitry in the external dongle would add, I don't know, ten dollars to the BOM. Very cool product but I won't buy a gadget I know I'd dispose in two years.
Yeah, this would have been a neat tool for "middle-of-the-night" thoughts, but I don't want a disposable electronic device. I get why it is that way; not having any charging hardware probably makes the device much smaller. But I'd rather it be a bit bigger and rechargeable.
I dont believe it would be even more circuitry. 2 exposed pins and maybe a diode if you really want some protection. They did this to sell more rings.
They can still make another version which is slightly larger and is rechargeable; and let people decide what they prefer more.
I am not sure about the use case but I was happy to see they advertise a long battery life. Still, as soon as I learnt that it is disposable I lost any interest in the product.
I very likely wouldn't have bought it anyway but I am surely not going to buy disposable tech.
Always wonder why companies see suing people as a better course of action than hiring them.
"Years of average use" is great until you realize that it actually means "Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording".
Not sure how long my iphone can record for, but it's probably close to that. Afterwards I get to charge my phone instead of recycle it, though.
Apple, don't hire this man.
Edit for the downvoters: can my iphone not record that long or something? iphones can't recharge? Just hate Apple and love e-waste rings? Enlighten me.
At the lower 12-hour end, if you're doing ~10 seconds per recording (remember this device is primarily for very short reminders and quick commands), that's ~4.3k recordings total. Also keep in mind that you'd only use it when it's inconvenient/undesirable to reach for your phone or any other device, so it's possible this may only be used say 5x in a day at most on average (likely far less). Which means ~2.5 years worth of usage at the lower end, and you'd only ever have to take it off if going for a swim.
Contrast to a phone that, though it has far more capability, you'd have to remember where it is before even reaching for it wherever, and usually has to be on a charger for anywhere from 30 minutes (with super charging) to a few hours daily. Or even being at a laptop/desktop, and at least having to open the relevant app, type/talk into it and then close again to return to primary task. The ring is an instant win for 24/7/365 convenient presence.
> "Years of average use" is great until you realize that it actually means "Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording".
Is that based on anything, or is that just a guess?
Anyway, 12 hours' worth of 30 second recordings is a total of 1440 recordings. I guess three a day for a year does seem a little low?
> Just hate Apple and love e-waste rings? Enlighten me.
What e-waste? You send it in for recycling; they might just replace the battery and send you a your existing ring back.
>Is that based on anything, or is that just a guess?
Fancy enough, it's from the article!
Right under the "How long does the battery last?" heading.
Ah, I see, I didn't ctrl-f far down enough.
That's not what recycling is. If you get it back it's recruitment.
Sorry I meant refurbishment. Not recruitment. DYAC
You have to trust it will actually get recycled though. I struggle to believe they'll be swapping out the batteries and reselling these as reconditioned. (I struggle to believe many people will even send them in for recycling tbh.)
The environmental benefit of sending it in for recycling is probably negated by transporting it all the way back to them for starters. Better to just drop it at the local ewaste collection facility. They'll be less specialised but there isn't a lot of material in it.
I guess there's a market for it and in the scale of things it isn't so bad: you could make 10 disposable vape sticks from the materials in one of these rings. And they're expensive enough that they'll never sell more than 100k or so of them. Relatively speaking it's no measurable impact.
For me it's more a matter of principle though. As a society we frown on disposable gizmos these days and for good reason.
Given the silicone rubber covering over the button, I wouldn't expect the hardware to last much longer anyways.
Why?
It’s easy to make a battery last years if it doesn’t do anything. You can send your devices to Apple as well for recycling.
[flagged]
Personal attacks are not welcome here, so please don't post like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This specific use case is awesome-- I use an integrated AI notetaker in my self-built notes app for my thoughts and I wonder if I could connect the index to it?
More broadly: Invisible wearable microphones are coming for everyone and perfect memory will follow. I'm incredibly excited about this for myself and simultaneously terrified about everyone else having it.
It's coming fast enough that I'm beginning to assume in any decently sized crowd of tech folks /someone/ is recording everything.
> since it’s always with you
Isn't my watch always with me? Why not use that instead of have some new device?
from the article:
> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
I’ve never had that issue with my Apple Watch. Granted, apple are a world-class developer (arguably), so their stuff might be more reliable, but I use raise-to-speak and hey siri with my watch all the time.
Raise to speak is the most unreliable feature for me, I’ve tried it several times and it’s like 30% success rate
I have an ultra 2, and I typically hold it about 5-10cm from my mouth when I try to use raise-to-speak. Maybe that approach will help you?
This is probably also part of the reason that the AW battery lasts so much less time. It's always on the lookout for these events, and over time that ends up having a non-trivial impact on battery. For Pebble users, that would significantly compromise one of the main selling points of the Pebble.
But you have to instruct Siri to record/transcribe/save what you want to say; this does it automatically. It removes friction if you just want to record short notes.
I almost never want to take a note though, I usually want to perform an action.
Recording a note isn’t high friction in my opinion though: “Hey siri make a note XYZ”. Admittedly I don’t create or use notes like this, but I use reminders a lot and I’ve never felt like there was friction: “hey siri remind me to call Dave when I get home”
I do this too, the biggest issue I have is when the shitty voice to text doesn’t get it right, and I look at my shopping list the next day wondering wtf an “ear pig” is.
There are a lot of egg freckles on my shopping list, too.
https://newtonglossary.com/terms/egg-freckles
I use it all the time too, but recording a voice memo doesn’t seem possible without touch (you need to tap to actually record)?
Siri sends your contacts list to Apple with every request. That makes it a nonstarter for me.
Pixel Watch have "raise to talk" to trigger Gemini, so you don't need your other hand.
Other watches detect gestures like pinching fingers on the hand wearing the watch.
Pixel watch is an order of magnitude more powerful and expensive than a Pebble though. Raise to wake is not as simple as it may seem considering most big brand smart watches didn't have a decently working implementation of it until only recently. It seems like the author wanted to keep it within the Pebble realm.
Add $75 (the price of this ring) to the Pebble time and you're almost at the price of a Pixel Watch 4. And you can get a PW3 for cheaper.
The pixel watch can be a nightmare. I've had the version 1 and the version 2 for years and I gave up because of the bugs. Random crashing, randomly dialing 911, just weird stuff that should not happen.
And then there's the support which is zero support. Completely frustrating to post a message and then get some volunteer support Tech, hahaha, saying expect improvements! And it's a volunteer saying that. And they have no authority. And There is no support, it all falls through. Random crashing on both versions of the watch. The first version screen was flickering like an old school television trying to tune in a distant UHF broadcast. Display drivers anyone?
So, pixel watches are in the drawer and I've got a Garmin watch on right now. Garmin is clunky but at least it's reliably clunky.
So it feels like a mis comparison, to me who's had the pixel watches.
I used to own the pebble, a couple versions of it, when they were first announced for several years again. And I found them to be very reliable and lightweight and usable.
I wanted a smartwatch that could talk to Google's home ecosystem and so I traded out of Pebble. And it's just been kind of mediocre misery.
Plus I don't know what Google is doing but recharging the pixel watch every 18 hours, or 36 if you're super lucky and your apps on the pixel watch behave themselves correctly, makes me feel like a slave to Google's naive product manager aspirations.
Like, "it can do everything, and we make money off of you because you are the product!" While at the same time making me miserable.
:-P
Economics don't work like that though. Google has the benefits of economies of scale and stable manufacturing partnerships, not to mention probably a lot more of the watch parts are designed in-house. I'd be surprised if Pebble could achieve anything close to the Pixel hardware for even twice the price.
It seems like Pebble is focusing on a niche market and this new product seems completely in line with that. There are plenty of other companies targeting the common folk who have no desire to optimize their life like this.
Niche market seems like an exaggeration, because they're competing against literal monopolies.
Pebble serves those people who want to watch or a ring that doesn't require being a slave to a wall wart, who want the watch to last for a long time. Take a look at Garmin, they do that too and they are a successful company. They are much older than Google and they still have a hard time keeping up with Google and it's billions of dollars of of mystery money advertising revenue.
The pixel hardware is a battery draining nightmare, in my personal experience having pixel watches for years and being a long-term pixel phone user. Even today the pixel phone that I have, after having I think five of these things, drains battery probably 20 to 40% faster than .. the competitor that I would next buy if I weren't feeling like I wanted some of the features that Google has bundled in with their phone and home and other like mnvo and messaging products. So, it seems like a mis comparison there, in my opinion. I don't want a smartwatch that lasts 25 hours and then has to be recharged. Or a smartwatch where the screen turns into a UHF channel just going out of tune and there's no tech support on Earth literally that is willing to help me. Volunteers on Google's support forums are lying to themselves that they have any power or sway with Google. It's a waste of time in my experience.
It looks to me like the big benefit is being able to use just one hand for this. I'd be more likely to use the watch, too, but this would be great for people with one arm, for example.
Do you never take your watch off to charge it? Or to sleep? When showering?
More importantly your phone and notes app is always with you and you can type your thought into it without disturbing people and looking like a schizophrenic Green Lantern.
I've been looking for a solution like this for years. I briefly had an iOS shortcut on my Apple Watch working, but an OS update broke it. Now I'm on Android and I don't even know what I'd use for it. And it's exactly for these random thoughts and reminders that otherwise nag me or I forget them. David Allen (GTD) will love this too.
My only wish is that I hope it preserves the audio file, in case the transcription is wrong, so you don't lose the thought. Google Keep does this well and it's a life saver sometimes, when the transcription comes through as "Eat the cat" or something ridiculous.
Battery decision asid, I love this dude's obsession with making unique hardware
What's unique about this ring that has less features than other "smart" rings?
If you can’t appreciate the value of less is more, this device is not for you.
The part where the battery lasts for years? Did anyone see that coming?
The battery lasts for 12-15 hours and how long you manage to stretch that out to is up to you. The site says "On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage."
So, you can use it for 30 seconds a day to get 2 years of usage. They also mention using it to control your music, the lights in your home and are assuming STT accuracy of 100% using a local model. The fallback of having to manually transcribe it from the audio recording if the STT fails is going to happen often enough that it'll get annoying. You're not going to be sending any messages to people as that will take a lot longer than 30 seconds a day.
I suspect the battery will last about 3 months if you just use it how you'd think it can be used. You would need to really discipline yourself to keep to a limit of 30 seconds of use a day.
I think they will need to end up adding some charging contacts to the surface once they start sending these things out into the wild or sales will be very limited.
How do you know how much time you have left on the ring's battery? Do you have to keep checking the app? Why not just use your phone for notes then.
I've written many variations of my own "quick, take a note!" app, and they all succumb to the same problem: I can't safely write a note when I'm in a car.
Driving by myself and listening to podcasts is when I have so many thoughts I want to write down.
I'll give this a serious consider.
From Pebble watch to inspector gadget
Couldn't you, like, build this into the Pebble Watch? I think I might be interested in this but I fundamentally don't want to wear a ring on my finger.
(Also, I do really want an excuse to switch from my Apple Watch to a new Pebble.)
The blog post says:
> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
I don't understand how the ring makes any of this better.
Yeah, hopefully they add the same functionality to the watch for people who don't want the ring. Might boost sales for the ring as well, if people use the feature on the watch a lot and really like it.
> I don't understand how the ring makes any of this better.
You press the button with your thumb on the same hand.
Oh, okay. That makes sense. I still want this on my watch though (because wearing a ring is a nonstarter for me).
It's one handed? The hand with the ring is the same hand that uses the thumb to hit the button?
I think I'm as interested in it from a pure "button that's always with me" perspective. I already have my original Amazfit Bip watch configured to send a "track back" signal to Snipd via Gadgetbridge to snip podcast notes while I'm driving or washing dishes or whatever. And I've configured a basic Bluetooth remote camera shutter to turn pages forward and backward in KOReader on my Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color so I can read it on a stand while riding a stationary bike under my desk.
In other words, I am apparently exactly the kind of weirdo who would use the heck out of something like this!
How are there this many different comments? What is there to say other than a one time use recording product in 2026 is insane!
I'd be willing to pay around $100 for a rechargeable version with a battery life of around 24 hours and 2–3 minutes of usage. However, a single-use battery would only be acceptable to me at a much lower price point, such as $30–$40.
I'd love to have a ring that incorporates Yubikey like NFC functionality, I was worried it could allow login when I didn't intend it, but the idea of a switch might work. Having a USD dongle for hardware that doesn't support NFC but can negotiate the handshake between my ring and the device could work.
I'd buy a ring with just authentication, if it was rechargeable and did a few other things (pulse, sleep monitoring, etc.) even better, but the bare bones would be amazing so I could have something I wear for my authentication.
Any Oura people reading this? That would warrant a 50$ to 75$ up sale , at least.
I would buy that oura-security ring in a heartbeat.
I'll be honest, after seeing a nightmare situation where a smartring battery inflated and cut off circulation to a finger, I will never ever buy a ring with a battery in it.
I’d be interested to see a battery-less ring that uses the mechanical energy of the press to power a BLE transmitter to trigger voice input on a watch. I feel like it’s much safer, plus it has no fixed lifespan.
How will a single press provide that much energy?
Piezo
It's a single press, which has to power the microphone for several seconds, and wireless connection to communicate with the sync device, even later if it isn't immediately available. In what way would piezo generate that much energy?
Mentioned elsewhere: this is why they didn't go with a rechargeable battery.
I suppose it would be possible to design the ring so that any pillowing would occur only in outwards expansion.
I posted it as a comment as well - but even just giving the opportunity of a diy, at-home battery replacements would be great for a lot of people. I think the disposability aspect is very counter to the kind of people who use a Pebble Steel for half a decade (or more!)
just got my RePebble 2 Duo yesterday, wearing it right now :) was looking forward to the new device, but a voice-memo ring really isn't something i care about. oh well!
I'm not sure what other people's hands are like, but mine are pretty big and I can just barely push my thumb against the part of my index finger where I would wear a ring, and doing so renders my thumb useless for any of the opposable things that I usually use my hand for. It's also extremely uncomfortable for my hand and thumb. I've managed to press buttons on my watch with my hands full, but it would literally be impossible to activate this thing with my hands full.
I've worn rings, and they can rotate in place on the hand if they're not perfectly sized, and there aren't any half sizes here, so this would definitely rotate on my finger, making no guarantee that I can even reach the button without adjusting the ring with my other hand, or maybe awkwardly spinning it with my thumb until the button is in reach again.
And it only lasts for 10-15 hours of recording time. And there looks to be a cloud services upsell for better STT than the open source offering on device.
This seems like an early alpha version of something that might be a good idea, but as it is I can't imagine buying one.
I figured the button went on the side of your finger nearest the thumb, and you curled your hand into a loose fist to press it
maybe wear the button on the underside of your finger?
And activate it by pressing it into the tip of my nose?
it's easier for me to touch my thumb to the bottom of my finger (palm side) than the other way around, and you could also press it into whatever you're holding potentially.
might mean more accidental presses though
This is competing with “Hey [voice assistant] remind me of…” or an automation you can assign to the quick action button of your phone.
Open source hardware is very cool but phones have already taken most of our portable needs. It needs to be extremely compelling to justify another thing to carry, charge, update, etc.
Could this record like a morse code(ish) like clicks instead of speaking? I can find a number of use cases for it:
1. Distress/Emergency makes you Unable to speak.
2. While doing vipassana meditation to record how strong the feeling attached to a thought was.
3. Repeat previous action.
Not sure how I feel about it being a throwaway device for $100. I get they say you can send it back to be recycled, but this feels like you’re just proactively creating e-waste.
Not even an attempt to make a replaceable or chargeable battery?
Also they point out oura rings need to be charged every few days, but that’s because they’re constantly chewing through battery monitoring your health stats. I’m willing to bet if they were in a constant state of deep sleep and only woken up to record short audio clips they’d also last for months at a time.
I know folks around here love pebble, but this feels like a miss to me.
Their Oura comparison really didn't sit well with me because of that. The device clearly uses a fraction of the power that the Oura is using. If it had a rechargeable battery you would not have to charge it that frequently.
Agreed. Brave to launch disposable tech with the current environmental awareness. e-waste in 12-15hours, when people are pushing for more and more for repairable devices just feels very out of touch.
I know exactly how I feel: I'll never buy a disposable electronic device.
> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
That's a pretty long life, TBF. I appreciate your concerns, though, and do wonder if there was a better middle ground (maybe a micro sterling engine leveraging the heat gradient from my finger to ambient, ha!).
People are buying Fitbit charge6 products today and those probably have an 18 shelf life and cost more.. so maybe it's not totally left field - although the charge6 isn't advertised to fail so soon lol.
That lifespan is based on the user recording for 12 to 15 hours over those two years. It's a $100 device that can record 12 hours of audio and then you throw it away. You could expend the battery on your first day by holding down the button.
Honestly I can see a niche use but this device strikes me as quite weird and I'm not sure why it isn't a button on their new watch.
this is a device that would potentially last years though, not months — if you're in the niche of needing something like this you're paying less than $10 a month (maybe as low as $5)... doesn't net out too terribly in exchange for not charging
We did it guys, we made physical devices usable only if you treat them as a SaaS otherwise you're sol when battery runs out
that's a pretty lame take, all I did was break down the cost to the lifespan of the device
it's useful to think of a lot of things this way, I also justify clothing purchases on a rough estimate of cost per wear
Right, and an Oura would be usable for a decade because it has a rechargeable battery.
sure but the Oura does a bunch of unrelated stuff specific to health and also has to be charged twice a week? they're not even comparable products
The ring weighs approximately 1/1000th what a MacBook pro does. If it really lasts for years it's a tiny, tiny amount of e-waste.
Every company should be responsible for the lifecycle of their product, big or small. You can't just point fingers at others.
How much of it is even recyclable?
For me, I'd rather use my Pebble to do this.
> Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff.
I guess I don't bicycle or carry stuff enough for this to matter. And often when my hands are full, I have my AirPods in and can just ask Siri (and cross my fingers that she'll understand).
This seems neat, but I try to keep my life as simple as possible, which means not having a ring when I can use my watch/earbuds to do the same thing about 99% of the time.
A perfect simulation of a ring that would appear in a RPG, when the duration goes to 0, you permanently lose it.
Original title: Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain
It's a memo recorder in ring form. Neat idea that seems really obvious but somehow I haven't seen it before
Edit: ah. "No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling." Planned obsolescence
This is 80% of the reason I have an apple watch. I whisper to it for reminders, timers, calendar stuff all day.
I imagine a partial rebate for the returned device to lessen the burden but this does feel like a $5 subscription just for the device.
I generally like the idea. I use my Apple Watch for Siri and needing the other hand to hold Siri is not ideal. I do use “hey siri” a lot but it doesn’t always work, though pretty reliable.
I don’t dislike the forever battery and the value proposition, however voice memos never appealed to me?
The obvious voice commands that work only half of the time, can’t voice memo in bed with your parters, in the office, or in public. That leaves very limited opportunities for this to be useful.
At only ~12 hours of recording per device, this wouldn't replace other forms of notetaking where you can afford the necessary interaction cost (e.g. taking out your phone). It reduces the number of times that you're unable to take notes (due to ergonomics/physical factors or otherwise).
It increases the surface area of your day where "I am able to take a note right now (because I don't have anything stopping me)" is a true statement.
I'd be more worried that a replacement product wouldn't be available after 2 years of use. 2 years seems quite good for a small product.
As a tangential question, how do people find the new pebbles? I prefer a smartwatch that lasts more than a couple of days between charges. And want one with a screen that stays on. The Fitbit Charge 3 I had never detected raising my arm.
Oh this is fantastic. Amazon made one but didn’t go beyond limited trials. I loved being able to dictate thought and tasks and even ask Alexa questions and get answers.
I've wanted exactly this since I first saw spider's note-recorder in the first issue of Transmetropolitan (before the fancy glasses.) Just something with exactly one button, positive confirmation that it's recording, a decent pipeline into my private infosphere, and safe to use while driving.
But in 2025, the disposable aspect is a crime... and wouldn't you be able to use the body of the ring to interface with an inductive charger?
I wonder why they added this to the finger rather than adding this capability to the watches they are already making? One handed operation is one reason, though I'd think a UX could be designed to make this an app on the watch, rather than a stand-alone device.
Seems like overkill, particularly when other rings do bio-metric tracking, so is this focused on a big enough problem to want to solve?
They explicitly address this in the article:
"Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff."
This interacts directly with the Pebble App, so I would be shocked if the watches never get an equivalent app.
Wait.. if you need to push a button and then have to get it somewhat close to your mouth to record an audio clip, why not just have a watch app? Pressing the button is still a two-hand thing. Or did I miss something?
You put the ring on your index finger (and likely have it rotated so that the button is pointing to your thumb) and then press the button using the thumb on your same hand. That allows it to be one-handed.
No way this made it out of internal vetting without a recharchable battery.
Man, if I even suggested this over lunch with my old Sparkfun colleagues, I would have been shot down before I finished chewing my bite of open-faced turkey sandwich.
> When your phone is in range, the recording is streamed to the Pebble app. It’s converted to text on-device, then processed by an on-device large language model (LLM) which selects an action to take (create note, add to reminders, etc).
So does this mean that my lists have to be managed within the Pebble app? Or can the Pebble app interact with my Notes and Reminders apps? If I'm limited to the Pebble app's features, that would be more limiting. But I can't see how it would be able to break out and give instructions to other apps (at least beyond a preset list, via programmed Shortcuts).
Actions: [...] you can also ask it to do things like ’Send a Beeper message to my wife - running late’ or answer simple questions that could be answered by searching the web. You can configure button clicks to control your music [...] play/pause or skip tracks [...] where to save your notes and reminders (I have it set to add to Notion) [...] Add your own voice actions via MCP. Or route the audio recordings directly to your own app or server!
Yeah I saw that, but didn't know if it was Android-only (the Beeper reference made me wonder). Can anyone weigh in on what it can do, or how it does it?
I hope it is as open source as the new pebble watches. A button on my finger seems like it could be useful and fun to play with.
Especially if you tie it to a wrist mounted laser gun.
Oh I love this. I am going to contextually switch the instructions from this to my home trained instruction fine tuned LLM for doing a multitude of things.
Couldn't the same flow be achieved on a Pebble watch by utilizing something like the "double tap"-gesture Apple Watches Series 9 and upwards have?
This seems like a gadget just for the sake of having another gadget...
The double-tap gesture is something I was very excited about and have completely forgotten about since getting my watch. The caveats around what it takes to activate it (screen activated and facing vertically) are just so great, you wonder if anyone at Apple actually tried this and found it to be a better alternative to interacting with the screen. Their demo video actually does a perfect job of capturing just how ridiculously theatrical you have to be to get it to work: https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/use-double-tap-for-com...
I was also excited about it, until I tried it and discovered it has pretty poor usability. It's not always clear what the double tap will do. Maybe it will scroll, maybe it will clear the item you are looking at, and maybe it won't do anything.
About the only thing I use it for is stopping a timer - it’s great for that.
Interesting idea, but those gestures only work on AW when not in low-power mode, meaning they take a non-trivial amount of battery. It would probably dampen Pebble's battery life significantly, and might not even be possible with the chip that it has.
The idea (fta) is to have activation require only the one free hand.
yup that's what the Apple Watch double tap gesture does. On the hand wearing the watch you tap your thumb and index finger together 2 times in quick succession and the watch recognizes that unique motion pattern on your arm and does [something].
This could be such a delightful upgrade for my hybrid digital/analog personal task management system. Right now I use an apple watch to capture tasks which then hackily route through a series of apps/endpoints to get to a thermal label printer, but that's just about the only thing I use the apple watch for.
Having an affordable single purpose device like this could be much better -- how straightforward will it be to post transcriptions of the recorded messages to a webhook via the Index 01?
Update, answer is in the video at 20:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArxhS4SQaP0&t=1230
Sounds like the device will natively support sending the audio or transcription to any service you like.
Huh, I think this is a problem that almost every HN reader solved in their life one way or other.
(Not speaking of the usability of this: if voice works for you, this can still be great for you, however)
Why not just make the electronics removable through a topside opening to have battery replaced at a watch shop? I don't get why the "jewel" part of this has to be resin molded. Normally you do this because smart rings are made by affixing a flexible PCB with somewhat-bendable battery inside a ring and then molding the entire inner part of the ring using clear resin, but the ring part for this one appears to be just a dead ring.
The concept is interesting but without charging it’s a non-starter for me. Also it’s a bit awkward and I’d prefer to use my phone or watch instead of adding a ring.
This looks fantastic, I've always wanted something like it
Water resistant, like how water resistant? Wearing in the shower OK? That's where I have all my best ideas!
Yup! Can wear in shower - great for shower thoughts
That’s the bummer for me. The primary place I’d like to use this is surfing. Too much time to think, and too few practical ways to record those thoughts.
We have built a new device. The device is a ring with a button and a microphone. Pressing the button initiates recording of your voice captures voice via the built in microphone and saves it on your phone.
I think it would take a lot of heavy software to process and index the voice notes for the claim "Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain" is honest
Pebble: No software subscription Also Pebble: here is the "hardware subscription" you must buy a new one every ~2 years when the battery dies.
I'd be curious what happens if you're the kind of person who wears a ring a bit more loosely and/or has slippery skin.
That button isn't always going to be facing your thumb. Maybe you rotate it back with your thumb? Or you need to use your other hand anyway to rotate it?
As someone who is a female size 3, will "8 US ring sizes: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13" fit at all?
I think I would use this. I am the kind of person who needs to write things down immediately when they come into my head or I will forget them. I picture wearing it on my ring finger, button down, and use my thumb to press the button, is that realistic or would it be uncomfortable that way?
Eventually going to end up in a landfill because no part is replaceable or repairable. And if the app/software support ends, it becomes an useless piece of plastic. No thanks.
I wish there was a device that just recorded and transcribed all the time and sent it to my phone, with time stamps, and then you could take action on that.
Would love to have these go to my Tana or another PKM. Will that be possible or will it have to go to the Pebble app?
In the notes it says you can configure where it goes.
Someone will make a killing on a rechargeable version of this. The ergonomics are a good idea.
12-15 hours of recording is maybe 2 weeks usage for heavy users. It would've been perfect if it could connect to computers and had a rechargeable battery. Oh well, hope someone else takes inspiration and makes the same thing but can recharge.
> It would've been perfect if it could connect to computers
If their goal truly is "New Pebble", then surely something that could connect to a phone could connect to a computer, granted you have the available radios connected to your computer. Seems to be BT in this case.
> and had a rechargeable battery
Yeah, seems like a weird thing to do, but I guess trying to solve this would make the device a lot harder. Hoping at least there will be a DIY route to replace the batteries, I don't have the will to be sending back an electrical device every second month because the battery died, and then waiting for a new device to arrive in the mail.
Edit: I was just about to ask if you think they'll send the replacement device before you've sent in the one that had the expired battery, but now I realize it isn't even clear if they expect us to buy a brand new device when the battery runs out, or if they provide a replacement? The former would be an absolutely bananas proposition.
It's very clear that you have to buy a new one.
> Before the battery runs out, the Pebble app notifies and asks if you’d like to order another ring.
Yeah, that changed my outlook to slightly above neutral to kind of disgusted if so. It's a disposable dictation ring?
That would be a minute of recording for every 22-28 minutes. That is some seriously heavy use. Especially considering that doesn't include sleep.
Take my money!
Literally take it, I just ordered.
I have been imagining this exact device existing and now it does, yay, thank you!
I.... I kinda love this. Non-rechargeable battery and all. I don't need something else to charge. I understand this is a "luxury" but seamlessly recording "thoughts" is my personal computing holy grail.
Oh it's not even rechargeable???? That vastly changes my opinion of this.
Does anyone know how open the software and hardware of this thing will be? The announcement doesn't give me a lot of hope.
There are dozens of different watch batteries in various sizes available everywhere. Why not make the ring slightly larger and allow for battery replacement?
Could we have the same functionality on the pebble watch instead, please?
already exists, here's one example: https://apps.repebble.com/en_US/application/56205296ece6340e...
or a search for 'voice': https://apps.repebble.com/en_US/search/watchapps/1?query=Voi...
it's just a button and a mic, which both the watch have, so seems like it would be trivial to implement even if they don't do it officially
Something like this isn't very practical for me. I just pull out my phone and dictate or type when I need to take notes. If I can't pull out my phone, I probably have gloves on or am in a loud environment.
A gesture on the watch that just starts the recorder seems a lot more practical, this ring just adds an unnecessary complication. Plus, $100 is a lot for something that they don't want you to service.
I'd rather much have a lot of big programmable buttons on the watch itself and have a smaller display or a separate BLE remote with lots of buttons.
"No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling."
This is terrible. This is literally e-waste. They are literally asking people to buy a product that is discardable.
Besides, why not just put a dedicated button on the pebble to do exactly this? I don't even get the purpose of this device when the device they ideally want it to live with, could do exactly the same thing but much better in every way without carrying a ring around: At least in some cultures, men don't usually wear rings without a clear significance.
I like the idea and would use it. Though I would put it in place of my wedding band, and still access it via thumb.
Oh look it's a Humane AI Pin without the AI, or rechargeable battery, or ...
It's an app. It's an app that will run on somebody else's platform. Putting that in a ring has so marginal benefits (you can't find a phone or computer or notepad or... to record ideas and do it better) and has so many limitations. It's a non-starter.
I mean, this is a textbook over-simplifaction to devalue an idea. Hell, with that logic, you could call all kinds of things a non-starter.
"Why buy a watch, it just shows the time on my phone" "Why buy a car, I can just use uber" "Why buy headphones? My phone has speakers."
The context of where something is changes the idea of what it is. Just become something tells the time, for example, doesn't mean it is the same thing as a watch.
No it's text-book pointing out the bloody obvious. It's a voice memo app sitting in an ring with limited functionality/usefulness. You can tart that idea up however you want but it's an obvious limited value idea itself at it's core and it is exactly the type of thing that will do better as an app on somebody else' platform.
"What kind of battery is inside?
Index 01 uses silver-oxide batteries.
Why can’t it be recharged?
We considered this but decided not to for several reasons:
You’d probably lose the charger before the battery runs out! Adding charge circuitry and including a charger would make the product larger and more expensive. You send it back to us to recycle. Wait, it’s single use?
Yes. We know this sounds a bit odd, but in this particular circumstance we believe it’s the best solution to the given set of constraints. Other smart rings like Oura cost $250+ and need to be charged every few days. We didn’t want to build a device like that. Before the battery runs out, the Pebble app notifies and asks if you’d like to order another ring."
Uhhh... Huh... Ok. Welp, that's a nope from me then.
The choice release a non-rechargeable/non-serviceable product feels like something that shouldn't be dismissed with "...lasts for years..." and "...you''d probably lose the charger..." This language feels patronizing to me. Even the "...[it] asks if you’d like to order another ring," begs the question: at what cost?? 99$, I presume.
The target market might not be exclusively other engineers and tinkerers, but as an engineer and tinkerer, I'm eager for more details about the testing, verification, construction, etc., of such a solution.
On the other hand, cool!
> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
I shared your concerns but I read this bit and I think it's all pretty reasonable if you ask me. They're open and upfront about it, and you can very quickly choose not to buy one.
Who's recycling their Oura battery anyway? Probably nobody.
They didn't when my ring died, but now Oura now has a recycling program:
https://support.ouraring.com/hc/en-us/articles/4441437053313...
I can't comment if it's worth the effort to send six grams worth of e-waste across the country and how much actual material can be recovered from it.
So in a way it is similar to Subscription ?
More like buying a 99$ “12 to 15 hour recording” pack. Also created real tangible waste, I’m failing to see how recycling a bunch (what are they expecting to sell, hundreds-of-thousands order of magnitude?) of 99$ rings after two years will be worth it (how much material, and for what worth, can they really exctract?).
> the Pebble app notifies and asks if you’d like to order another ring
This comes across much more dystopian than I imagine the author intended.
Is it just a Bluetooth mic in a form of a ring? Or is there something more to this device?
Yes it says it can store 5 minutes of audio
I think that this is different than the products we had before like bee. Because it's more only when you really need it and not the whole time.
I use my Apple Watch the same way
This seems like one of those devices that seems like "meh" at a glance but grows on you once you used it. In fact just the Bluetooth button feature alone is warranted a second take let alone a mic embedded in to the ring with a crazy battery life. If there's a way to hack the device and pipe the mic features to other apps I think i might get this thing. edit: never mind i just noticed 15 hours recording time with no recharging. yeah bud that's a no go.
I really don't see the benefit of this over, say, pixel buds.
Goooshhh, just f.. give me a watch that a) last at least a month b) visible in a daylight Also accurate Hr activity and sleep tracking wouldn’t hurt.
That’s it.
Nobody gives a single bit about your fancy ai-blockhain-voodoo features. How blind are you to real demands of normal people?
Even if the battery lasts "years", it still seems wildly irresponsible to make this a single use device. I suspect this thing will get very few sales because it's single use.
The phrase "single use" applies better to condoms than to wearables that you use every day for 500-1000 days, IMO.
how often do you replace your phone? in terms of weight/waste this is probably in the area of about 1/50th of one... you could wear these for ~100 years and produce the maybe the equivalent waste of 2 phones.
I was extremely excited for this until I got to the party about the battery. I have wanted something exactly like this for ages.
But I wont pay you $75 for a product I can’t use anymore when the battery dies. I’d pay twice as much if I could change the battery myself, but this consumer-hostile, anti-ownership design is not something I will support.
Gonna give this a shot. I pre-ordered.
Isn't that a spying device
Now this is cool. Combined with localLLMs and some nice Obsidian integration of some sort, all away from Google and other Big Tech - this is the future of tech I want to see - not some centralized bullshit from Google or Meta.
E-waste is still e-waste, no matter how small it may be. Shame.
I really like a lot of this but I have to agree with the other comments that are complaining about the non-rechargable, non-replaceable battery.
I would actually prefer a device that's twice as expensive but with a battery that you can charge or replace.
Wait what ? Why can't they add a feature to the watch that is already there on the wrist and especially already bought that will start recording the thought after a hand shake (that triggers the mic) plus magic keyword ?
This thing seems to stand alone though? As in - I don't have to have a watch, nor, it sounds like, do I have to have my phone within pairing range when I record something.
It's unlocked though, so maybe a software toggle will let you turn off the mic and just have it activate your watch's mic. This would presumably extend the battery, which seems to be a focus of discussion.
An interesting idea, but I look at it as yet another thing to make my life more complicated than it needs to be. A pen and paper, plus a mechanical watch have served me well so far.
Honestly a button on the watch seems like the way to go for me.
Any know if there are plans to make a new pebble watch that includes both Barometer/Compass plus Heart Rate Monitor in one device? This looks like a useful UI mode, but I'm holding out for a Pebble that doesn't require choosing between two basic (these days) watch sensors.
Pebble Time 2 has a compass sensor and HRM. https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-time-2-design-reveal#final-...
Unless you specifically are after a barometer, in which case I don't think the PT2 has that.
i am also waiting for this so i can order a pebble.
Wow, uh, it’s kind of astounding how poorly Eric is reading the room there.
A weird disposable(!) voice recorder ring seems to go against pretty much all of the “open and repairable” image that the Pebble brand has been cultivating.
This product should probably have been “Core” branded and kept on a different website entirely. Its very existence seems kind of toxic to the Pebble brand, IMO.
I am SO close to switch to Android to buy and properly use a Pebble watch. I love the hacker attitude, the retro tech, the quirkyness.
Seeing them introducing One More Thing on the other side of the spectrum, deep in big-corp, locked down, consumerist throwaway territory makes me reevaluate that.
I guess they might overestimate the fanboyness of their clientele. I hope enough people find this as laughable as I do and ignore this.
I mean, I'll probably ditch the LLM - after all, it's open source so I can just build my own app to receive the messages - but it seems like a neat bit of kit.
Some harsh comments here. The idea is interesting and the miniaturisation impressive. Successful or not, it's good to see these ideas realised.
>Hold the button, whisper your thought, and it’s sent to your phone. It’s added to your notes, set as a reminder, or saved for later review.
Take the phone, open app, done.
Title change please: "Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain"
Also,
>Wait, it’s single use?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
the "tech bro independently discovers and creates an existing product" cycle is so fast that we're seeing it happen to tiktok scrolling rings now
Voice recording on pre-smart phones was my jam forever, and this is right up my alley.
But don't say "Privacy," then "data sent to your phone."
Modern smartphones are very private, featuring full disk encryption, sandboxed app data storage, and mandatory lock screens. Why do you think the data stored on your phone isn't private?
> Here’s the best part: the battery lasts for years
I wonder how many years?
> The battery lasts for up to years of average use.
...how many?
> a battery that lasts for years
How many years does the battery last?
> That’s up to 2 years of usage.
Ah.
I guess "2" is the absolute minimum that you could describe as "years".
It's a shame because it does look like an interesting proposition. It might be more compelling if it was "send your ring back to us for recycling - and we'll send you a new one". I doubt the economics would work at this price point though.
I really don’t want to wear a battery in that form factor.
Sure a phone or watch can burst into flames, but at least you’ve got a chance of dropping it or taking it off.
I also don’t see the bother of talking to your wrist rather than your hand.
Given it's doing nothing when not activated, I would imagine it heavily depends on how often you're using it. Still would be nice to be able to say "1,000 hours of recording" or something like that
It says 12-15 hours of recording in the article.
FTA
>No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
> After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
this is ridiculous...
> The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.
This must be a joke.