Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain

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.)

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Happy to answer any questions you have!

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.

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.)

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.

Apple hire this man.

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.

Isn't my watch always with me? Why not use that instead of have some new device?

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!

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

In other words, I am apparently exactly the kind of weirdo who would use the heck out of something like this!

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Seems like overkill, particularly when other rings do bio-metric tracking, so is this focused on a big enough problem to want to solve?

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?

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).

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?

This seems like a gadget just for the sake of having another gadget...

(Not speaking of the usability of this: if voice works for you, this can still be great for you, however)

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

Water resistant, like how water resistant? Wearing in the shower OK? That's where I have all my best ideas!

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?

Literally take it, I just ordered.

I have been imagining this exact device existing and now it does, yay, thank you!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I would actually prefer a device that's twice as expensive but with a battery that you can charge or replace.

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.

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.

Take the phone, open app, done.

Also,

>Wait, it’s single use?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But don't say "Privacy," then "data sent to your phone."

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.

This must be a joke.