8 ms·

Daylight Computer tablet review

63 points by akanet 2y ago

pfd1986 2y ago
Looks cool. Near $800 tag price is sharp but a welcome competition to kindle, remarkable, and the like. https://daylightcomputer.com/ https://daylightcomputer.com/
JadeNB 2y ago
Does anyone know about the writing experience? Specifically, I've been looking at a Supernote, but the A5 X2 seems perpetually delayed, and I'm wondering if it's worth going for this now.
- akanet 2y ago
  The tablet is Wacom enabled and has a nice surface finish for the tactile experience of writing
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    Thank you. Do you know anything about the latency? Note-taking tablets are an area where tiny differences in latency can make huge differences to usability, or at least to "pleasant-to-use"ability.
    - avhon1 2y ago
      The display is a (reflective) LCD, so the display latency should be low.
    - gcr 2y ago
      For comparison, Boox's EPD (display firmware) has a custom mode that enables very low-latency refresh of a small localized area. This is used exclusively to speed up stylus drawing. The latency of pen/pencil sketches on Boox devices is near nonexistent, similar to or better than iPad latency but theirs is handled in the display controller hardware without traveling through the OS interrupt handler stack. It's really good. With their scratchy matte screen protector and a LAMY body around the wacom nib, it's really like writing on paper. If DC can pull something like that off, I'll be really impressed!
    - akanet 2y ago
      There is no detectable latency. My girlfriend painted a landscape scene in the stock drawing app, came out pretty well on her first try.
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    Has anyone worked with Wacom hardware. How difficult is it to integrate it with a new product?
phaedrus 2y ago
I bought a Boox color e-ink tablet last year. I wanted something different enough from phone and laptop that I could read books without feeling like I am staring at screens every waking hour. I also liked that it ran full Android so I can put whatever app on it. While the color screen is a neat trick, in practice, in an e-reader, for this purpose, I have to conclude the colors (which are faint) were not worth the sacrifice of grayer screen background, less resolution, and slower/more complicated refresh. All that is to say, my experience with the Boox tablet makes me feel like this Daylight Computer is on the right track with its design choices. While I don't quite have the disposable income to turn around and purchase another tablet so soon after spending my money on a different tablet, if I could do things over (or if my current e-ink tablet broke), I'd definitely buy this Daylight Computer. Hopefully the company that makes this is successful and continues to expand and support the device. That's the other issue with the Boox tablet; I read on Reddit that there will not be new Android versions for it because the company is part of a culture of moving on to new hardware and abandoning support for deployed hardware quickly.
- avhon1 2y ago
  Just to be clear, the daylight computer does not use e-ink. They call it an e-paper display, and it's basically a reflective LCD.
  - jacknews 2y ago
    If I understand some of the videos correctly, their innovation seems to be in the diffusion layer, which makes the LCD appear paper-like. One video mentions quite a few technical details in this area (sub-wavelength nanoparticles, dichroic dyes, etc), so much so that I can't decide if I'm impressed, or that it's just moat-signaling technobabble. But the devices look great in either case.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  It seems like all of these eink devices are designed that way. I really soured on the Kindle experience when I bought a second one years after my first and discovered you still had to jailbreak it just to set a wallpaper. I think they might finally have fixed that, 10 years later, but not before losing one customer of the devices who still buys books but now reads them painfully on a phone screen instead. Nowadays the hip devices for eink nerds seem to be the Hisense range, which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, and you need to root them, and install your own ROM, just to get a recent Android. It's hopeless. All that said, recently I've been tempted to try again by picking up the cheapy Inkpalm device, which is stuck on Android 8 but it's cheap enough that perhaps the antiquity won't annoy me? I don't understand why eink has never taken off. I just want a small, cheap, light device that I can use to read novels - sure - but also mostly-text online content like HN, newspapers, blogs and email newsletters. Hey, let's do my Anki flash cards on it at the same time. I spend at least a couple hours doing all that stuff every single day and surely doing it on eink would be better for my eyesight than a phone screen. Much better battery usage too. I can't be the only one?
LorenDB 2y ago
Previous discussion of this tablet: Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834)
grogenaut 2y ago
twitter is throwing now 7 captchas at me, this must have hit some detector. anyone got an archive link?
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of. I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions: The DC-1 has a whiff of magic to it, comparable to the first time using a Kindle. (Other people profess to have this feeling from the iPhone/iPad the first time. I honestly don't remember those as being "my life now has a before and an after" moments. Kindle was that.) The Kindle is a substitute for paper, via eInk. It's the best available way to buy books, a somewhat mediocre reading experience which acts like an inferior substitute for paper, and an absolutely gobsmackingly frustrating software/hardware artifact to use. I love mine to death. The DC-1... I don't know if I can put this into words. My brain reads it as interacting with paper. Not like a crafty technological emulation of paper via eInk with less eyestrain than a typical computer screen. No, my brain screams "this is paper." I've only read about a book and a half on it so far, and it's pretty clear it will be the way I read the next few dozen books until they make a successor device that displaces it. The size/weight is just a little too big, and I largely read at night, and "drop on face" is real. And when using the Kindle app on it with the default settings, the physical width of a line is just a tad wider than comfortable for reading for me without needing to seek to the sides. But it feels like reading paper. Underneath the hood it's an Android something or other. I don't anticipate ever using it for much other than reading, and so the combination of Kindle (the app) and Chrome is probably the most technical work I'll ever do on it. It's snappy and responsive, like a tablet. In particular, I found myself taking many more notes on the books I was reading than I typically do, because t 300ms h 300ms e 300ms 300ms e 300ms xperience of typing on a Kindle is absolutely maddening and misinputs screw up enough highlights/notes to not be worth aggravation. It also works in direct sunlight, better than any screen I've ever used. There are a pair of sliders you can trivially adjust for brightness and color warmth, in case you don't like bright white lights when you're reading at night. I typically dial mine in to look like paper. Oh it is quite remarkable, like you're seeing a live action version of the Daily Prophet rendering in real time in real life, when you have a video of a human talking playing on a screen that your brain is screaming "That's paper, paper moves now, what is happening to the world." So, capsule summary: I thoroughly enjoy it.
smusamashah 2y ago
This review felt biased only highlighting positive aspects. I saw this detailed review recently which talks about some negative things i.e. low contrast, viewing angles and some marketing bits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHeIw9rXzUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHeIw9rXzUQ and while searching for this review again to post here, I their follow up on this review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ac-qtk2lmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ac-qtk2lmk
- _nkl1 2y ago
  I actually think the opposite is true. The review(s) you linked and a recent one by Mr. Mobile just showed me that these folks don’t really get the product. Likely because they’re not in the target demographic for this. Mr. Mobile admitted that much. I think Patrick is the opposite. He’s a prolific reader. An endorsement from him makes me more convinced I’ll like this product.
- al_borland 2y ago
  I wouldn’t call the original post here a review, it’s more of a first impression. It seems to make a good first impression on someone who is in the target market.
- ofcourseyoudo 2y ago
  Definitely some healthy skepticism needed, considering this was posted by an investor in the company who lent a preproduction model to the person in the video.
  - _nkl1 2y ago
    the person in the video and the person tweeting it… are the same person patio11 who often posts here in HN
paulcole 2y ago
How did he buy and get one so fast? Haven’t they been preselling batches that weren’t supposed to ship for months? Did he just get moved to the front of the list because he’s notable? Or was getting moved ahead in line a trade for a review?
- akanet 2y ago
  I lent him my preproduction model
tiffanyh 2y ago
> Two weeks ago … I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively How did he get it so fast. I bought one in May and won’t get it until August. Website says current waitlist ETA is November. —- Kind of makes me want to cancel my order if he got to jump the line.
- akanet 2y ago
  he's actually using a preproduction model I lent hin
  - tiffanyh 2y ago
    Oh wow. Loved coderpad prior to the sale. Just not the same since. Please do more business related podcasts. Your indie hacker podcast are some of my favorite all time. Are you involved at Daylight?
    - akanet 2y ago
      I actually recorded an interview with Patrick a couple weeks back, I'll get around to posting it sooner or later. Thanks for the kind words about coderpad, and I am an investor in daylight, surprisingly
    - huhkerrf 2y ago
      That's funny, I've been much more inclined to use Coderpad since the sale. The creator's behaviour towards my colleagues when he would write in to get support was overly aggressive and borderline abusive, and I committed to not using any product he was a part of. Using a throwaway for an obvious reason not to out the company, but it was bad. Once he left, it once again became an option.
      - akanet 2y ago
        lmao
- al_borland 2y ago
  Where are you seeing that info? Are you basing it on the current order page? I also pre-ordered in May and when I login to check my status, it seems the only way to do that is to download the Shop app. It’s seems unreasonable that I should need to download an app from a 3rd party to track an order. I find it ironic that a company like Daylight, trying to break people’s screen addictions, is forcing them to an app to track an order. I can see there being a lot of overlap in the Daylight and Light Phone markets, but a Light Phone user would have no way to track their order.
freitasm 2y ago
Checked again, only available in some countries.
techburnerme 2y ago
[dead]
gcanyon 2y ago
Edit to say -- watched one of the reviews, and it's not eInk. This thing boggles my mind. How did Amazon produce kindles for 16 years and the refresh rate today is pretty much the same as it was in 2008, and then these guys come along and say "1hz is too slow, let's do 60!"
leephillips 2y ago
Clever marketing strategy. The website makes it frustrating to find details about the technology. It does contain the debunked claim that the “blue light” emitted by less enlightened competing devices disrupts our circadian rhythms. This claim, endlessly repeated by legions of journalists, never withstood a moment of thought, and has recently been shown, empirically, to be false. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216173654.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216173654.h...

63 points by akanet 2y ago

pfd1986 2y ago

Looks cool. Near $800 tag price is sharp but a welcome competition to kindle, remarkable, and the like. https://daylightcomputer.com/ https://daylightcomputer.com/

JadeNB 2y ago

Does anyone know about the writing experience? Specifically, I've been looking at a Supernote, but the A5 X2 seems perpetually delayed, and I'm wondering if it's worth going for this now.

akanet 2y ago
The tablet is Wacom enabled and has a nice surface finish for the tactile experience of writing
- JadeNB 2y ago
  Thank you. Do you know anything about the latency? Note-taking tablets are an area where tiny differences in latency can make huge differences to usability, or at least to "pleasant-to-use"ability.
  - avhon1 2y ago
    The display is a (reflective) LCD, so the display latency should be low.
  - gcr 2y ago
    For comparison, Boox's EPD (display firmware) has a custom mode that enables very low-latency refresh of a small localized area. This is used exclusively to speed up stylus drawing. The latency of pen/pencil sketches on Boox devices is near nonexistent, similar to or better than iPad latency but theirs is handled in the display controller hardware without traveling through the OS interrupt handler stack. It's really good. With their scratchy matte screen protector and a LAMY body around the wacom nib, it's really like writing on paper. If DC can pull something like that off, I'll be really impressed!
  - akanet 2y ago
    There is no detectable latency. My girlfriend painted a landscape scene in the stock drawing app, came out pretty well on her first try.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Has anyone worked with Wacom hardware. How difficult is it to integrate it with a new product?

phaedrus 2y ago

I bought a Boox color e-ink tablet last year. I wanted something different enough from phone and laptop that I could read books without feeling like I am staring at screens every waking hour. I also liked that it ran full Android so I can put whatever app on it. While the color screen is a neat trick, in practice, in an e-reader, for this purpose, I have to conclude the colors (which are faint) were not worth the sacrifice of grayer screen background, less resolution, and slower/more complicated refresh. All that is to say, my experience with the Boox tablet makes me feel like this Daylight Computer is on the right track with its design choices. While I don't quite have the disposable income to turn around and purchase another tablet so soon after spending my money on a different tablet, if I could do things over (or if my current e-ink tablet broke), I'd definitely buy this Daylight Computer. Hopefully the company that makes this is successful and continues to expand and support the device. That's the other issue with the Boox tablet; I read on Reddit that there will not be new Android versions for it because the company is part of a culture of moving on to new hardware and abandoning support for deployed hardware quickly.

avhon1 2y ago
Just to be clear, the daylight computer does not use e-ink. They call it an e-paper display, and it's basically a reflective LCD.
- jacknews 2y ago
  If I understand some of the videos correctly, their innovation seems to be in the diffusion layer, which makes the LCD appear paper-like. One video mentions quite a few technical details in this area (sub-wavelength nanoparticles, dichroic dyes, etc), so much so that I can't decide if I'm impressed, or that it's just moat-signaling technobabble. But the devices look great in either case.
alisonatwork 2y ago
It seems like all of these eink devices are designed that way. I really soured on the Kindle experience when I bought a second one years after my first and discovered you still had to jailbreak it just to set a wallpaper. I think they might finally have fixed that, 10 years later, but not before losing one customer of the devices who still buys books but now reads them painfully on a phone screen instead. Nowadays the hip devices for eink nerds seem to be the Hisense range, which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, and you need to root them, and install your own ROM, just to get a recent Android. It's hopeless. All that said, recently I've been tempted to try again by picking up the cheapy Inkpalm device, which is stuck on Android 8 but it's cheap enough that perhaps the antiquity won't annoy me? I don't understand why eink has never taken off. I just want a small, cheap, light device that I can use to read novels - sure - but also mostly-text online content like HN, newspapers, blogs and email newsletters. Hey, let's do my Anki flash cards on it at the same time. I spend at least a couple hours doing all that stuff every single day and surely doing it on eink would be better for my eyesight than a phone screen. Much better battery usage too. I can't be the only one?

LorenDB 2y ago

Previous discussion of this tablet: Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456834)

grogenaut 2y ago

twitter is throwing now 7 captchas at me, this must have hit some detector. anyone got an archive link?

abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of. I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions: The DC-1 has a whiff of magic to it, comparable to the first time using a Kindle. (Other people profess to have this feeling from the iPhone/iPad the first time. I honestly don't remember those as being "my life now has a before and an after" moments. Kindle was that.) The Kindle is a substitute for paper, via eInk. It's the best available way to buy books, a somewhat mediocre reading experience which acts like an inferior substitute for paper, and an absolutely gobsmackingly frustrating software/hardware artifact to use. I love mine to death. The DC-1... I don't know if I can put this into words. My brain reads it as interacting with paper. Not like a crafty technological emulation of paper via eInk with less eyestrain than a typical computer screen. No, my brain screams "this is paper." I've only read about a book and a half on it so far, and it's pretty clear it will be the way I read the next few dozen books until they make a successor device that displaces it. The size/weight is just a little too big, and I largely read at night, and "drop on face" is real. And when using the Kindle app on it with the default settings, the physical width of a line is just a tad wider than comfortable for reading for me without needing to seek to the sides. But it feels like reading paper. Underneath the hood it's an Android something or other. I don't anticipate ever using it for much other than reading, and so the combination of Kindle (the app) and Chrome is probably the most technical work I'll ever do on it. It's snappy and responsive, like a tablet. In particular, I found myself taking many more notes on the books I was reading than I typically do, because t 300ms h 300ms e 300ms 300ms e 300ms xperience of typing on a Kindle is absolutely maddening and misinputs screw up enough highlights/notes to not be worth aggravation. It also works in direct sunlight, better than any screen I've ever used. There are a pair of sliders you can trivially adjust for brightness and color warmth, in case you don't like bright white lights when you're reading at night. I typically dial mine in to look like paper. Oh it is quite remarkable, like you're seeing a live action version of the Daily Prophet rendering in real time in real life, when you have a video of a human talking playing on a screen that your brain is screaming "That's paper, paper moves now, what is happening to the world." So, capsule summary: I thoroughly enjoy it.

smusamashah 2y ago

This review felt biased only highlighting positive aspects. I saw this detailed review recently which talks about some negative things i.e. low contrast, viewing angles and some marketing bits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHeIw9rXzUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHeIw9rXzUQ and while searching for this review again to post here, I their follow up on this review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ac-qtk2lmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ac-qtk2lmk

_nkl1 2y ago
I actually think the opposite is true. The review(s) you linked and a recent one by Mr. Mobile just showed me that these folks don’t really get the product. Likely because they’re not in the target demographic for this. Mr. Mobile admitted that much. I think Patrick is the opposite. He’s a prolific reader. An endorsement from him makes me more convinced I’ll like this product.
al_borland 2y ago
I wouldn’t call the original post here a review, it’s more of a first impression. It seems to make a good first impression on someone who is in the target market.
ofcourseyoudo 2y ago
Definitely some healthy skepticism needed, considering this was posted by an investor in the company who lent a preproduction model to the person in the video.
- _nkl1 2y ago
  the person in the video and the person tweeting it… are the same person patio11 who often posts here in HN

paulcole 2y ago

How did he buy and get one so fast? Haven’t they been preselling batches that weren’t supposed to ship for months? Did he just get moved to the front of the list because he’s notable? Or was getting moved ahead in line a trade for a review?

akanet 2y ago
I lent him my preproduction model

tiffanyh 2y ago

> Two weeks ago … I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively How did he get it so fast. I bought one in May and won’t get it until August. Website says current waitlist ETA is November. —- Kind of makes me want to cancel my order if he got to jump the line.

akanet 2y ago
he's actually using a preproduction model I lent hin
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  Oh wow. Loved coderpad prior to the sale. Just not the same since. Please do more business related podcasts. Your indie hacker podcast are some of my favorite all time. Are you involved at Daylight?
  - akanet 2y ago
    I actually recorded an interview with Patrick a couple weeks back, I'll get around to posting it sooner or later. Thanks for the kind words about coderpad, and I am an investor in daylight, surprisingly
  - huhkerrf 2y ago
    That's funny, I've been much more inclined to use Coderpad since the sale. The creator's behaviour towards my colleagues when he would write in to get support was overly aggressive and borderline abusive, and I committed to not using any product he was a part of. Using a throwaway for an obvious reason not to out the company, but it was bad. Once he left, it once again became an option.
    - akanet 2y ago
      lmao
al_borland 2y ago
Where are you seeing that info? Are you basing it on the current order page? I also pre-ordered in May and when I login to check my status, it seems the only way to do that is to download the Shop app. It’s seems unreasonable that I should need to download an app from a 3rd party to track an order. I find it ironic that a company like Daylight, trying to break people’s screen addictions, is forcing them to an app to track an order. I can see there being a lot of overlap in the Daylight and Light Phone markets, but a Light Phone user would have no way to track their order.

freitasm 2y ago

Checked again, only available in some countries.

techburnerme 2y ago

[dead]

gcanyon 2y ago

Edit to say -- watched one of the reviews, and it's not eInk. This thing boggles my mind. How did Amazon produce kindles for 16 years and the refresh rate today is pretty much the same as it was in 2008, and then these guys come along and say "1hz is too slow, let's do 60!"

leephillips 2y ago

Clever marketing strategy. The website makes it frustrating to find details about the technology. It does contain the debunked claim that the “blue light” emitted by less enlightened competing devices disrupts our circadian rhythms. This claim, endlessly repeated by legions of journalists, never withstood a moment of thought, and has recently been shown, empirically, to be false. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216173654.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216173654.h...