- Humane's wearable AI pin became available nationwide today.
- Early reviews are out. Many of them say the device has potential but isn't really useful yet.
A hotly anticipated new AI smart device is out nationwide, but early reviews largely agree you shouldn't be in any rush to get your hands on it — at least not yet.
Humane says its wearable AI Pin, which it hopes will one day replace your smartphone, can do everything from making phone calls to projecting information onto the palm of your hand.
While reviewers had some positive thoughts on the Pin, they largely said its potential isn't yet worth the $699 price tag. The Verge and Wired, for example, both scored the device as a 4 out of 10.
The Verge's David Pierce wrote that they "look and feel much better than your average first-gen hardware product." But he concluded that "there are too many basic things it can't do, too many things it doesn't do well enough, and too many things it does well but only sometimes that I'm hard-pressed to name a single thing it's genuinely good at."
Wired's Julian Chokkattu said the device "worked fairly well" translating Spanish into English and was easy to take photos and videos with, though the image quality left something to be desired. He noted the Pin doesn't let you access prior texts you've already sent with it for security purposes, and it "moderates what you say in a message." In his case, the Pin refused to send a messaging jokingly saying, "You're dumb," citing "offensive language."
Inverse's Raymond Wong wrote that the Pin "feels substantially premium, like a Swiss-made mechanical watch or a piece of jewelry" and found the device useful for note-taking and getting recommendations for places to go.
But he said the "photos look like they were taken with an iPhone 4 with poor dynamic range, no shadow detail, and overall bad sharpness."
"Murphy's law states that 'anything that can go wrong will go wrong.' That pretty much sums up my first three days with Humane's AI Pin," he wrote.
Chris Velazco of The Washington Post wrote that "interacting with a device like this feels surprisingly natural" and that the Pin's ability to turn your hand into a display by projecting information was "pretty neat."
He did, however, note there were pain points with texting ("the Pin has this weird tendency to truncate some messages and pretend swear words don't exist") and that the Pin's AI-generated answers were "far from helpful."
All four reviews also mentioned the Pin could overheat and feel uncomfortably warm. The consensus seems that Humane's AI Pin is nowhere near replacing your smartphone, but it has potential.
Humane did not immediately respond to a request for comment.