Daylight Computer tablet review
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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.
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?
After going through 5 Kindles, I got a Kobo reader a few years ago, and couldn't be happier. It is more expensive than the Kindle because the price isn't subsidized, but the physical design is great, and I haven't broken it yet (I broke 4 Kindles through normal use).
They support loading your own software on without any "jailbreak", and I use Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato), which renders documents significantly faster than the stock reader.
The whole point of getting another eink device for me would be to just read without having it feel like my day job, so I'd hope everything was just click and go, a slick, Steam-like experience. That's the thing that has me worried about the Inkpalm - no Gapps without hacking it, which makes the Palma seem more appealing since at least it's just a normal Android with Gapps. I'd probably still put F-Droid on there because I prefer open source if the option is there, but I don't want to do any kind of messing around like rooting it or pairing it with a computer or setting up a new account to sync with some third-party service just to read books I already bought on Amazon.
You're right about the fragility of Kindles by the way, both of mine eventually got smashed, which is how I ended up doing all my reading on my phone with the Kindle app instead.
Once you've done the initial annoyances of deDRMing your kindle stuff, you can use the kobo account and store. I know that's another account which you understandably don't want.
I've never used a kindle but my kobo is amazing. I do use the store but I do deDRM my books on a computer before putting them on my reader, which is not necessary lol
So I made a list of my requirements for that, as well as general ereader features, and ended up with the PocketBook InkPad Lite.
I have a Kindle Keyboard (k3w) and k4 both going strong (including decent battery life) after a decade of use and abuse by my kids and I.
The jailbreak on kindles that support it (don’t connect your new device to the internet until you have checked) is simple and painless - I prefer koreader to plato but they are both great and an embarrassment to the locked down systems these devices ship with.
Kobo is great but Amazon has better bang for buck (due to subsidy and access to the best eink screens first).
The Kobo that I have has large plastic bezels, so it is easy to hold, lightweight, less likely to be dropped, and when dropped, unlikely to suffer direct impact to the glass surface.
It’s fine for what it is, screen is a little reflective and the system is very sluggish. But it runs KOReader just fine for me, even large epubs and pdfs render ok (eventually).
It’s incredibly light and pocketable but I worry about scratching the screen - it is not iPhone level gorilla glass.
Also the narrow screen takes some getting used to, need to play with then font size to get a decent amount of words on a line without getting tiny.
Eink hasn’t taken off because it’s too expensive. A device like this should be a $20-30 impulse purchase not new-mid-range/used-flagship smartphone price.
Battery life is good as a pure ereader but I mainly use pressreader/Libby through my local library for magazines. I came back to edit this post 30 min later and dropped 6% with wifi and full backlight reading.
I use it for meeting notes and some journaling where it does sound but it also does not like my screen protector with poor touch sensitivity on the bottom half the screen with one on. The boox push software isn't bad either but OneNote struggles so I stopped using it. The resolution/size is just a bit small for pdf textbooks so an iPad or expensive Samsung tablet at the same price point would have served me better.
If someone else wants amber, fine but why not an option?
We went from "avoid blue light after sundown to help keep your natural circadian rhythm" to "blue light bad! Buy this product!"
Now we're too far down that path with customers specifically avoiding devices that give off blue light whether or not they understand why. Companies like that are just taking the safe bet by avoiding blue light
I even recently broke my old Kindle, I'd already heard of daylight computer tablets but the amber light was a main factor and why I just bought another Kindle. I would like high FPS and fully unlocked Android, but all I really needed was some way to read a bunch of digital books. The new Kindle also has an Amber mode, but I keep it off I like the blue light I think green would be better) fall asleep reading just fine.
If I bought this there would inevitably be a patch that blocked the blue backlight functionality as a concession to some nonsense like class action lawsuit over the existence of blue light as an option. or some new manager wants to "simplify". or something else.
I wanted a bigger screen though, and recently got a fairly inexpensive pocketbook inkpad lite with a 9.7" screen. It's actually quite good. No internet connection required, you can just take it out of the box and copy files to it via USB-C. 8gb of storage is plenty, but it also has micro-sd. One nice surprise is that it reads all kinds of formats, including not only pdf and epub, but azw and mobi.
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
and while searching for this review again to post here, I their follow up on this review
I think Patrick is the opposite. He’s a prolific reader. An endorsement from him makes me more convinced I’ll like this product.
patio11 who often posts here in HN
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.
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Kind of makes me want to cancel my order if he got to jump the line.
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.
Please do more business related podcasts. Your indie hacker podcast are some of my favorite all time.
Are you involved at Daylight?
Thanks for the kind words about coderpad, and I am an investor in daylight, surprisingly
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.
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.h...
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!
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?
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.