Pebble announced the Index 01, a stainless-steel ring with a microphone and a button, preorder $75 until shipping, then $99. The Verge, MacRumors and Pebble’s own blog all date the reveal to 9 December 2025, with March 2026 as the then-current ship window (The Verge; Pebble).
Eric Migicovsky’s pitch is speed-to-note, not meetings. Hold the button, speak, release. Audio buffers on the ring and syncs over encrypted Bluetooth. Speech recognition and the language model run on the phone. Pebble is publishing the companion app’s source. There is no charger: silver-oxide cells, 12–15 hours of recording across the life of the ring, then you buy another.
That last sentence is the one that will be misread. Twelve hours looks like a day class next to Plaud. It is the entire service life. Pebble’s testers’ “about a minute a day” arithmetic is how they get to years; anyone dictating meetings will consume the ring like a cartridge.
The microphone range is 5–20 cm. Pebble states it is not designed for meetings or ambient audio. Put next to Sandbar’s still-unshipped Stream Ring and the forthcoming meeting-oriented rings, the Index 01 is a different object that happens to share a finger. The Index 01 page will score capture as a failure at the job this ranking is for, and privacy as the highest structural claim here, because airplane mode still works.