Rabbit R1 improved, Plaud One pitches an eSIM: can an AI pendant replace your phone yet?

At a glance

Best for: hands-full moments such as booking a meeting, where a pendant could cut screen interruptions.

Skip it if: you need a pendant to replace a camera, private screen, payment device or login method.

Status: Plaud One's company claims await independent long-term tests; its October 12 page said preorders had ended.

Booking a meeting while your hands are full, or finding a fact from yesterday's conversation, is the appealing future for a wearable assistant, and the attraction is fewer interruptions from a screen. To replace a phone, a pendant would have to do those jobs reliably, show enough information to catch mistakes and cope when speaking aloud is inconvenient. The challenge is keeping your ability to inspect and control what happens after the request.

Humane's early attempt showed why the ability to check matters. In his April 2024 WIRED Ai Pin test, Julian Chokkattu struggled with a palm projection that was unreadable in daylight, including during passcode entry. It identified a coffee shop but couldn't navigate him there, and restaurant photographs were unusable. Those are launch findings on historical software, yet the jobs still apply: communicate clearly, deliver a useful result and let the person check it.[1]

Rabbit R1 chased a related idea in a handheld instead of a pendant, and in Mark Spoonauer's May 2024 Tom's Guide review the first response was the easy part: an Uber attempt reached a confirmation PIN before failing ahead of checkout, a spreadsheet had wrong totals, and battery was often below half by 2pm during testing.[2]

Updates can move that story on. Jason England's February 2025 R1 follow-up found improved responsiveness and endurance, and he used its browser agent for research such as flight searches, though the process stayed slow. He chose not to provide login details or authorise purchases, which reflects his own boundary and was no security audit, so his account separates finding an option from trusting the device to carry out the transaction.[3]

Plaud's October 2026 pitch extends the idea to One, an earbuds-and-case system with eSIM connectivity and connected-service actions. An eSIM provides mobile-network access without a removable SIM card, which removes one dependency and leaves the quality of each action to prove. The Explorer Edition page checked October 12 said preorders had ended and offered a waitlist, and the company's October 6 announcement described condition-triggered routines using Plaud Credits. Both come from the company, with regional and feature conditions, so they stand as claims awaiting independent long-term tests.[4] [5]

Omi's October 12 site advertised calendar and task updates, plus offline recording and transcription on the phone, so the phone is still needed. Fieldy's September personal-service policy describes requested calendar changes and outside transcription and AI processors. Neither account shows a replacement for a camera, private screen, payment device or login method, and connecting more services makes your ability to grant, inspect and withdraw permissions matter more.[6] [7]

A decisive demo would be wonderfully mundane: arrange the right meeting, check its participants privately, change the time and confirm the result without reaching for a phone, then repeat it when connectivity is poor or speaking aloud is inappropriate. One ordinary task completed would say more about progress than an extraordinary range of commands. Until then, fewer phone interactions is the more plausible near-term benefit, and a pendant paired with another device for visual checks may be a useful outcome in its own right.