A spec sheet is a claim with a date on it

Researching the ten devices on this site turned up five cases where a manufacturer’s account of its own product could not be reconciled with another account by the same manufacturer. Not a teardown disagreeing with a spec sheet — the company disagreeing with itself, by factors of four, five and sixteen. None of it was announced, and no page carries a correction. In one case the earlier claim is no longer on the internet at all, and neither is the company’s website.

This is the reason for a set of habits that otherwise look like fussiness. Every device page here records the date it was scored, cites a source for each specification, and leaves a field empty rather than filling it from a third-party teardown.

Limitless: one hundred hours became one day

When Limitless announced the Pendant in April 2024, The Verge reported the battery figure it was given: “Siroker says its battery lasts 100 hours” (The Verge, 15 April 2024).

Limitless’s current help centre answers the same question differently. “The pendant will get you through a full day of continuous recording. We recommend charging every night to ensure you don’t miss out on capturing any of life’s moments” (Limitless Pendant FAQ, read 16 September 2026).

A full day of continuous recording is twenty-four hours read generously. The launch figure was four times that. There is no correction, no revision note and no acknowledgement that the number moved; the second answer simply occupies the place where the first one stood. Limitless stopped selling the Pendant on 5 December 2025 after Meta acquired the company (Limitless), so the question will not now be settled.

The consequence for this site is the battery row below. The Pendant’s page publishes no battery figure, because there are two manufacturer figures and no basis for choosing between them.

Omi: three days became ten to fourteen hours

Reporting from CES 2025 after an interview with Based Hardware’s founder, WIRED wrote of Omi: “Its battery lasts for three days” (WIRED, 8 January 2025). Based Hardware’s current specification page for the same device says 10 to 14 hours (Omi product FAQ).

Seventy-two hours against fourteen is a factor of five, and that is taking the generous end of the current number. Against the lower end it is a factor of seven. The gap is the difference between a device you charge on Sunday and a device you charge every night, which is most of what a buyer wants the number for.

Omi’s battery axis here is scored against the specification sheet rather than the interview, and the note printed beside that score says so.

Plaud: the same 64 GB, sixteen times apart

Plaud’s support site and Plaud’s own blog disagree about how much audio 64 GB of storage holds.

The support article comparing the Note and the Note Pro says: “On Note Pro, the 64GB storage holds about 30 hours in Enhance mode or about 50 hours in Endurance mode. Endurance mode uses more efficient settings, so the same storage fits more hours. Plaud Note records about 30 hours on its 64GB storage” (Plaud support). A Plaud article about the same device says the opposite: “With 64GB of onboard storage, the PLAUD Note can store up to 480 hours of recordings” (Plaud blog).

Both pages are live. They are sixteen times apart, and the support figures have a tell: 30 hours for the Note, 30 in Enhance mode and 50 in Endurance mode for the Note Pro are exactly that hardware’s published battery figures. A question about storage appears to have been answered with the battery number, and 480 hours is the figure that survives arithmetic — a 64 GB card does not fill up in a day and a half of speech.

Three devices in this ranking carry that 64 GB: the Plaud Note, the Plaud Note Pro and the Plaud NotePin (Plaud hardware comparison). None of their pages publishes a storage figure, because there is no figure to stand behind. This one is worth saying in prose, because it is the omission you cannot see: where a manufacturer publishes no microphone count, no weight or no battery life, the specification table prints “Not published” and the gap is visible. Storage simply drops out of the table instead.

Bee: a change in the wearer’s favour, still unannounced

Not all of this runs one way, which matters for reading the pattern correctly.

At CES 2025, WIRED wore a Bee Pioneer for a day and described the indicator: “When the mic is muted, there’s a red LED. When it’s recording, you’d think the green LED would be lit up, but there’s nothing to indicate that this wearable is picking up everything around you.” Bee’s reason, in the same piece: a green LED burning constantly would cost some of the seven-day battery life (WIRED, 8 January 2025).

Bee’s homepage now states the opposite behaviour: “Your device’s LED will be green when Bee is capturing and off when it is not” (bee.computer). Amazon, which acquired Bee, documents the same green indicator (About Amazon).

That is a straightforward improvement, and a bystander is better off for it. It is still a silent change to the one behaviour that tells other people they are being recorded. Anyone holding notes from the CES demo is now wrong in the direction of describing the device as more covert than it is, which is the same failure as the other four with the sign flipped.

Humane: the source itself is gone

The AI Pin is the end state. Checked on 16 September 2026, humane.com resolves to no address at all: the domain still has name servers and mail records, but no A or AAAA record, so nothing a browser can reach. support.humane.com returns NXDOMAIN — the name does not exist. The shutdown notice Humane posted for its own customers is gone with them, and so is the specification page.

Every figure on the AI Pin’s page here is therefore cited to Humane’s launch release on a wire service or to contemporaneous reviews, and the page marks which is which. Its battery figure of around four hours is labelled as reviewer-measured rather than as a Humane specification, because there is no longer any way to obtain a Humane specification. There is no correction to check against and no source to appeal to at any price.

Numbers that are true and still misleading

Separate from contradiction, there is the claim that holds only under conditions the headline figure omits.

The Plaud Note Pro advertises 50 hours. That is real, and it is measured in Endurance mode, which drops the microphone pickup range from 5 m to 3 m — surrendering the reason to buy the Pro over the cheaper Note. At full microphone performance it records for 30 hours, the same as its sibling (Plaud EU, Note Pro). Both numbers are honest; only one of them is the answer to the question a reader is asking.

The Pebble Index 01 quotes 12 to 15 hours of recording (Pebble). Those hours are not a charge cycle. The cells are not rechargeable, so that is the ring’s entire service life, after which you order a replacement. Same unit, same order of magnitude as a competitor’s daily figure, completely different meaning. The device schema here carries a dedicated batteryNote field for exactly this case, because a battery figure stripped of its condition is worse than no figure.

The Sandbar Stream Ring is the opposite problem. Sandbar publishes no weight, no battery life in hours, no storage capacity and no microphone count; its battery claim is the words “all-day battery life” (Sandbar). Four fields on its page here are empty. Nothing there can contradict itself, and nothing there can be checked either.

The Vocci Ring claims 5 m of pickup from its single microphone (Vocci). The device page grants that for a quiet table and says plainly that it does not hold at the far end of a conference room. A manufacturer claim gets the same treatment here: cited, bounded, and left checkable.

What follows from it

Four rules on this site follow from the five cases above.

Every device records the date it was scored, and the ranking’s modified date is the newest of those dates rather than the build timestamp. A specification is only ever true as of a date, and a site whose value is being accurate about numbers cannot bluff about when it last looked.

Every specification is cited, and the sources render at the bottom of the page where you can click them. This is also how rot gets caught: the cited URLs are re-checked on a schedule, a check that exists because the AI Pin shipped in this roster citing a support domain that had already stopped resolving.

A specification the manufacturer does not publish, or publishes twice with different values, is left out. “Not published” is a fact about the manufacturer and gets printed as one. Filling the gap from a teardown would produce a complete-looking table nobody could check.

Figures quoted inside articles resolve from the device data at build time rather than being typed into the prose, so a correction lands everywhere it was quoted instead of aging quietly in an archive.

A spec sheet is not a description of a device. It is a claim by an interested party, accurate as of a date, revisable without notice and removable entirely. The five cases above, covering seven of the ten devices on this site, have already demonstrated the last two.