Straight answers, including the unflattering ones

A leather belt that talks to your phone, so you can get directions, take a call or confirm something without taking the phone out.

No. There is no finished hardware yet. The waitlist is how you hear first when that changes, and it costs nothing to join.

Yes to both, with one condition. Every setting lives in the companion app, on iPhone and on Android: which contacts are allowed to reach you, what a left or right tap means, how strong the pulses are, what the button does in each app, and switching any feature off completely. Nothing is configured on the belt itself. The condition is that we will build the apps if enough people want the product. It is a few months of work plus long-term support, and we are not going to pretend it is already underway. Joining the waitlist is what tells us it is worth starting.

The industrial design and the product spec are done and modelled to real dimensions. The electronics are not built. No prototype has been worn. We publish the current stage on the design page rather than implying more.

It works with your phone rather than replacing it, and that is what keeps it thin, light and free of a second data plan or a second thing to charge every night. Your phone is already in your pocket and already excellent at maps and voice, so the belt does the part a phone is bad at: reaching you without a screen. Losing signal is not the same as losing the phone — the taps and the button keep working over Bluetooth even with no connection at all.

There is no microphone in the belt at all, and no speaker. It has no way to hear you. What it senses is the tension in its own strap, the movement of your body and its own temperature — nothing that carries a conversation.

It adjusts on a ratchet rather than on holes. The free end feeds through the buckle and a pawl inside catches a toothed track on the inside face of the strap, giving 103 mm of range in 5 mm steps: twenty positions, where a punched belt gives you about five. A lever under the buckle releases it. There are two reasons it is not holes. A conductive antenna runs the length of the strap just under the liner, and punching through it would both cut the antenna and start a fatigue crack in the one part carrying the load. And 5 mm steps are the difference between close enough and actually comfortable after a meal. From the outside there is nothing to see: the teeth face inward and a 9 mm keeper holds the tail flat. Sizing across the whole range of waists is still an open question, and we expect to need more than one strap length.

A belt has room. There is space along the back for a battery that would never fit on a wrist, the hips are a good place to feel a left or right cue, and most people already put one on without thinking about it.

iPhone and Android, and the belt itself is identical either way. The button, the haptics, the briefing, navigation, timers, media, home control and capture all work on both. There is one difference under the hood: on Android the app can read notifications system-wide, while on iPhone it works from the accounts and services you connect to it, plus Focus modes. For calls, messages, mail and calendar the result is the same. For an obscure app you would connect it directly on iPhone rather than have it picked up automatically.

Nothing. No payment, no obligation, and one email at a time when there is something real to report.