I've probably spent far more than 8000 bucks over the years for devices like this, only to have to throw them away eventually because their software got abandoned and they've been so proprietary that they can only function as an expensive brick on the shelf.
If the software is closed source, I'd recommend everyone to stay away from any product like this. It is a deal breaker for me now, and it took a lot of cash and hype to realize it.
Products like this are not a mainstream product, which makes them high risk for their investors. And you have to minimize risk by demanding open source.
Of course this all changes if you plan to watch videos or whatever on it - but for me personally the value proposition of an e-paper tablet is not about being able to consume that kind of stuff.
Just one little thing: I think you're killing your conversions.
The website is janky even on my M1 Macbook Air. Not sure the scroll hijacking stuff is really needed to get your point across either.
(Check it yourself https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis?url=daylightcomputer.com)
What makes the Remarkable great is that it's functionality (while limited) makes for an excellent experience.
Any more details on what apps will be built in and designed for the device? (not just 3rd party Android apps that will feel like any other tablet).
Also - I would order this immediately to support more e-ink devices, but the display is too small for me - at least 13" to display full page documents.
But then I saw the price tag, and that it’s only 190 ppi. That killed it immediately for me. I hated the first few generations of Kindle because of the low resolution display. I think it’s unbearable in an e-ink display. And the price is a bit outrageous for what it offers..
Still, the tablet looks exciting, especially since it's based on Android. I'm curious as to how they overcame the refresh rate issue that plagues so many similar displays.
Typing this from my Magic Keyboard at 120fps 264ppi in warm monochrome.
I do wish I could get a graphite tip for the Pencil Pro to use on the textured screen.
Will this perform well or just be another underpowered tablet for $800?
I wish Daylight success, but at their price, its not a compelling offer for me.
It might be too late for this model, but enabling the tablet to be used as a USB monitor, with all tablet functionality / storage hidden from the PC OS, or as a wi-di monitor, would easily justify a large chunk of the cost for some of us, and provide the tablet a useful life long past its last android os update.
I bought a remarkable and while it works well the price is the most remarkable thing about it.
Remarkable is also remarkably unfriendly toward their user base to be built on so much open source tech.
They recently had a IP watchgroup file takedowns for template building materials on figma. Really onerous move given it is perfectly valid nominative fair use to say a template is made for the remarkable 2 the same as you would say something is made for an ipad.
This seems right up my alley. Although, $800 seems steep.
The new Supernote A5X2 is due this year... at probably half the price? Granted it doesn't have the 60fps display, but it definitely has a bunch of other features. Is the 60fps worth $400 more?
The flashing is much more rapid than shows up in my screen recording.
(Firefox 126.0 on Windows 11)
Put money in supporting mainline linux distributions and I will buy this in a heartbeat. Many would.
It feels like a leap forward in an area of tech that has totally stagnated (e-ink). I think this device is tackling a few hard problems all at once. Well done and I wish you luck.
For these tasks I use my iPad Air, but the eye strain problem is real if you’re reading for hours at a time. Since I bought a small laptop, I exclusively use my iPad for reading and writing. The writing experience could be better, with the surface feeling a little too glassy.
My big worries are the app support. I use notability to write notes, which has OCR and allows syncing to my laptop and phone. My bookmarks sync across browsers. My reading list syncs with Instapaper and my citations with Zotero. Can I get a similar syncing system?
Another perennial problem with such devices is the stylus. I’ve lost 2 apple pencils at conferences. It’s horrible - you now can’t write anything until you get a replacement. At least with an Apple Pencil you can walk into any store and pay the exorbitant $120 to buy a new one (imagine if you could never borrow a pen from anyone ever again and each pen cost over $100 - that’s what it feels like). How will I get a replacement pencil for this device if it falls down in an airport or out of my bag in some conference center far from home?
But as others have said, the iPad is a tried and tested device. It has a powerful ecosystem and great resolution. The base model comes with 128GB of on device storage. And it’s $600, significantly cheaper than this device. I find the price tag hard to justify in comparison .
Glad they are making a comeback. They were nice. I still use an SJ20 to read ebooks for this very reason. Plus, they can be had for $10 on eBay.
If I hadn't bought a Kindle Scribe just 5 months ago, I'd have picked this up right away - if I come into some funds in the next little while, I just might anyway. Lots of opportunity for improvement over the kindle.
I'd love to see a deep-dive on your screen tech and understand how you built it. I love clever engineering. Hopefully you'll be public on some of that stuff. I'm assuming you have patents, so it's out there somewhere, but hearing from you about the process of creation I think would be really interesting.
On your website the "Who we are - A more caring computer company" doesn't link to anywhere. I think you're missing a great opportunity to tell us more about you.
Looking forward to your success!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/1bk294i/comment/kvx17...
Everyone uses tablets + Navionics, but glass tablets absolutely suck in bright daylight. It will be nice to find an ePaper device that I trust enough to use for charts.
"About" section has 5 (five) words of waffle in it, their ToS is buried and doesn't give any indication of what this company is, except the name, phone number and governing jurisdiction (CA).
Their "founder" in comments here is a newly registered HN account.
Looks like a really interesting device! I have one question about one of the taglines on the home page "A distraction free space". What are the things inherent to the OS that make it distraction free? Is it Android with notifications ripped out?
I bought an Oasis entirely because of the buttons. Once again Amazon has killed their only reader with buttons.
They clearly don’t care much about Kindles in general, they’ve had software issues like missing features forever that Amazon doesn’t care about fixing.
This lacks ghosting, the screen and CPU are fast enough not to be obnoxious when doing literally anything (low bar, but Kindle). It’s USB-C, and since it runs Android apps it runs the Kindle app.
But no page turn buttons. I get those don’t matter for a normal tablet, but to me their do for an e-reader. I guess it’s just as well, they probably wouldn’t work in the Kindle app anyway.
I can't wait to run this as a thin client to my Lenovo P920 ML workstation.
In general, I dislike Android on eink devices but I have to admit I am talking about classic eink tablets. The main concern would be the battery life, that is usually always reduced in respect of custom linux based OS.
Pioneering new electronic paper technology is extremely underrated and important, kudos to you all for this!
Now for a crazy question: does the Daylight Computer support an external full color display via a usb-c dock? Color when you need it… epaper when you don’t.
I currently own and use a reMarkable 2 daily, and then transcribe notes to Standard Notes when I'm near my computer. Would love something that lets me skip the transcription step with the advantages of e-ink / writing with a stylus.
One would have to hold it in ones hand first.
…very cool looking project though.
Please bring this display technology to larger formats if it ever makes sense economically, this is like the dream for a wall calendar.
As far as I understand it, e-ink has essentially a "finite" albeit a very large number of refreshes available, when moving the "nodules" to display different images.
Has the issue been solved? E.g. will users be able to get at least 5-7 years of heavy usage out of this device? Or will this become e-waste after 2-3 years?
A work day without eye strain afterward would be gold. A work day on the balcony in the sun... Omg i am looking forward to the future!
It mentions it runs Android 13 - which was released based in 2022. Android 15 is meant to be released soon.
Do you know if it’s possible to update this to more modern Android releases? How involved is it?
Or would it be tied to the older Android release for some time?
However it's a nice idea and perhaps one that can become more mainstream and thus affordable. It's something I would buy if the price were right.
I did buy in though. I have a reMarkable 2 and it's a great device, but the software is super subpar. I'm cautiously optimistic about this device running Android, because that means I can run anything on it.
Hopefully I can get one for September.
Also, being on HN and all, how tinkerer friendly is it ? Already the fact that it's android and not a custom locked down os is great but, can I unlock it's bootloader and sideload custom roms for example ?
Looks beautiful though (and I found the website to be nice too!)
No glare, but with a backlight and excellent battery life make this a great option for Engineering. The only thing that's missing here is a rear camera. Fingers crossed this is considered in the future!
The Daylight DC-1 is a 'healthier' tablet that mimics e-ink without the lag:
It's unfortunate it's twice the price of others in the field like remarkable, it's a little bit beyond what I'd buy for "that seems cool, I might use it from time to time"
I'm glad they admitted its provenance instead of hiding it like Rivian and Rabbit.
I have a Boox tablet from a few years ago that I'm still using sporadically, and can't quite justify replacing yet, but if I was in the market this would be very, very appealing. Congrats to the team on the launch! :)
Would pay top dollar for something like that.
Looks interesting but I'd like to see it before dropping $729.
Also can it work as an external monitor? I suppose there's Android app for it of course, but "natively"?
Tiny bit of feedback: the cart doesn't make it clear what the founder's edition is
I think it’s a little too big for me, but I’m tempted.
Literally under that:
>All your content in one place - with icons showing kindle spotify, edge
Heh.
it's a great personal device, but every lawyer and analyst who wants to use one for company data will be blocked by IT until they get some specs. Android is not allowed in a lot of environments because it's so fragmented and impossible to lock down.
A physical notebook & a pen :)
Is it possible to fasten the stylus to the tablet/cover such that the stylus doesn't get lost easily?
If the stylus gets lost, is it possible to purchase a new one?
not an ipad (or any apple) fan, but not a great way to instill confidence
But checkout with Bitcoin Lightning :O
If you want to copy Apple & Co on this, please remember to also bring the tech specs.
Like: Operation System, Ram, Storage, Battery Life, Format Factor, Weight, I/O.
My assumption: you have a less crappy display with a outdated compute unit, made from leftover Shenzhen parts.
Sorry, but every year hundreds of startups fail with a "big promise bad product" strategy.
It is nothing against this product, i just have trust issues if a company cannot even create a basic webpage that delivers relevant information.
A tablet that has similar screen properties to eink but with a backlight and 60fps would be much more usable, especially at night.
Do they plan to apply Apple's style of asking for an arm for extra stuff that the rest of hardware vendors include by default? I wish good luck to them with that then. Hard pass
Plain html never killed anybody.
I want to actually do work from outdoors.
I was scrolling and everything on the hardware looked great (although I was looking for how the tech is different from e-ink, not how better its properties are).
Then I reached "Introducing Sol:OS" and stopped right there. Didn't look further and closed the tab. I'm skeptical when it comes to custom OS. Not a lot of startups can handle a hardware+software company. Hardware is hard enough. Software is second class citizen and doesn't get regular updates after a few years.
Congrats on the launch, but this is kind of a kick in the nuts.
Mild edit: I checked a UK address and it turns out you can put it in a DHL box with a different country's name on it, you just can't print the word Australia on the box. Nice. If this is because the device can't stand up to kangaroo rides, can I have one if I assure you that I won't take it with me when I hop to the shops?
Happy to answer any questions you have. Long time lurker, so this is pretty cool to finally take part :)
I made this because I wanted the eye-strain free and minimalist qualities of my kindle/Eink applied to so much more of what I do on a computer.
Lack of speed and ghosting felt like it made traditional Eink impossible to do most computing tasks. So we focused on making the most Paperlike epaper display that has no ghosting and high refresh rate - 60 to 120fps. We started working on this in 2018.
We developed our own custom epaper display tech we call LivePaper. We focused on solving the tradeoffs RLCDs traditionally have - around reflectance %, metallic-look / not Paperlike enough, viewing angle, white state, rainbow mura, parallax, resolution, size, lack of quality backlight, etc.
First proof of concept in late 2021, and then it took us 2.5 years to get it into production.
And we built a whole android tablet around it.
It’s essentially our attempt at making a remarkable tablet on steroids / kindle on steroids. Definitely some trade offs, but on the whole we think it’s worth it. (& on twitter a bunch of early customers seem to think so too)
Note: it’s 60fps epaper, not off the shelf Eink. We spent years developing what we think is the best epaper display in the world and it’s exclusively manufactured by our display factory in Japan.
There’s still many cases where traditional Eink is going to be better (bistability, viewing angle, white state color, etc), but we feel for more general purpose computers you can code on and do google docs on and do fast multitouch amongst a thousand other things, the speed and lack of ghosting totally makes it worth it.
Think of it as a Godzilla sized pebble watch with a decade of improvement
Or think of it as a gameboy advanced, advanced