Sandbar is taking preorders on the Stream Ring. The Verge’s first look puts silver at $249 and gold at $299, U.S. shipping expected summer 2026, iOS only (The Verge, 5 November 2025). The company comes out of CTRL-labs, the neural-interface startup Meta acquired.
The product thesis is the opposite of Bee and Limitless. There is no wake word. The microphone energises while you hold the touchpad and stops when you let go. Sandbar is selling whisper-level dictation at the hand, notes, and an assistant in earbuds or haptics — not a meeting recorder, and not an always-on log. That is a consent design this beat has been asking for from people who kept shipping pendants.
What Sandbar has not published is almost the whole spec sheet: no weight, no battery hours, no storage, no microphone count. “All-day battery life” is a sentence, not a number (Sandbar). A preorder at $249 on unpublished endurance is a worse contract than Pebble will shortly offer on a $75 ring that at least admits its cell is disposable.
Store copy that says “No Subscription Required” next to a Data Plan for unlimited dictation, chat and memory is the other thing to freeze as of today. Free weekly dictation is a limit. The paid plan, as Sandbar describes it, is $10 a month after included preorder months. This desk will encode the $10. The Stream Ring stays unranked until it ships, which is a methodology rule, not a slight.