Nothing, a London-based tech company, has released new wireless earbuds called the Ear (3a) for $99. You can buy them now from the company's website.

The big feature here is the ability to record phone calls. Instead of digging through menus to find a record button, you just pinch the earbuds to start recording. The earbuds also let you capture whatever music or audio you're listening to at that moment—again, just by pinching them. When you pinch, the recording includes a few seconds of audio that happened before you pinched, so you don't miss the beginning. All your recordings show up in an app where you can listen to them again, share them, or have them turned into text.

There's a practical limit to how much you can record. The earbuds have very limited storage—only enough to hold about two hours of phone calls total. After that, the storage is full. This isn't a choice Nothing made in the software; it's because storing audio takes up a lot of space on tiny hardware like earbuds, and packing in more storage would make these $99 earbuds more expensive.

For sound quality, Nothing put in larger speakers (12mm drivers, if you want the technical term) that produce stronger bass. The earbuds can block outside noise when you turn on active noise cancellation. The battery lasts about 10 hours if you just use the earbuds alone, or 42 hours if you count the charging case. With noise cancellation on, you get about 25 hours total.

The earbuds come in pink, black, white, and yellow. Nothing also included a smaller ear tip size for people with smaller ear canals.

Singing group Charli xcx is the company's brand ambassador and owner of some Nothing stock.

Putting an easy record button on earbuds you wear on your face is clever product design. Recording features like this have appeared on some smartglasses and premium earbuds before, but it's new to see it on something this cheap and easy to use. Recording from your ear used to be a feature only rich people with fancy gadgets could access.

Here's something important most people should know about: in many US states, you cannot legally record someone's phone call without telling them first and getting them to agree. This is called "two-party consent." If you live in one of these states and record a call without the other person knowing, you could break the law. Because these earbuds make recording so easy—just a pinch—people might record calls without realizing they need permission from everyone on the call. Nothing's website doesn't make this legal issue very obvious to people buying the earbuds.

There's also a question about what happens to your recordings. We don't know for sure whether the earbuds turn the audio into text by themselves, or whether they send the audio to Nothing's computers in the cloud to do it. When you're recording phone calls with private information, it matters a lot whether that information stays in your earbuds or travels through the internet to a company's server.

This situation—new hardware that can record before the legal rules catch up—has happened before in tech. Smartphones could do things the law hadn't accounted for yet. The difference now is that the Ear (3a) costs $99. When expensive devices first get a feature like this, the people buying them tend to be tech enthusiasts who read the instructions and understand the rules. At $99, these earbuds are aimed at anyone. That changes the risk.

Nothing is trying to compete with much bigger companies like Apple and Samsung by selling stylish earbuds packed with useful software at lower prices. The call recording feature might become a reason people choose Nothing over cheaper brands—or it might become a problem if people run into legal or privacy trouble. That outcome depends on how clearly Nothing explains the rules to people actually using the feature.