Daylight Computer tablet review (opens in new tab)

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?

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.

I regret getting my boox enough to pipe in to ward others off. I bought into the hype but the colors are very muted as a gimmick and the device is essentially DOA planned obsolescence eewaste with minimal software upgrades planned and no major Android versions.

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.

But why the hate for blue light? When you look at this on the manufacturer's web page they advertise that like preference wouldn't be nice. ”100% amber”, "blue free!”, gross! I won't be doing that for any reason.

If someone else wants amber, fine but why not an option?

I got a kobo (6") and liked it a lot. You can set sideloaded=True and never hook it to the internet. It has dark mode.

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.

Before you get too much buyers remorse it's worth appreciating the Boox will have a much greater battery life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

he's actually using a preproduction model I lent hin

The tablet is Wacom enabled and has a nice surface finish for the tactile experience of writing

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.

I lent him my preproduction model