Daylight DC1: a new tablet with a better screen and no blue backlight

There’s a new company in the race to create a type of computer that’s less distracting, more minimalist, and overall sanity-preserving. Is called Computer in daylightand is launching its first device today: the DC1, a 10.5-inch tablet with some interesting ideas about gadget design.

The main hook of the DC1 is its display. Daylight calls it a “LivePaper” display and says it looks like E Ink, but is smooth and responsive like a traditional LCD. This isn’t something that exists, at least not yet, and in general, anyone promising an “E Ink-like” LCD screen is seriously overselling their product. But Daylight believes it has invented something genuinely new and better. In this case, it would be a very interesting combination of iPad and Kindle. We’ll see!

The tablet also has blue-free backlighting, meaning the DC1 will glow amber. Daylight is joining the blue blocker bandwagon here, based on the popular notion that exposure to blue light can be harmful to sleep and cause eye strain. (There is some evidence for the sleep part, although eliminating blue light is only part of the technology and sleep dilemma; there is much less real connection between blue light and eye fatigue.)

Otherwise, the device looks like a pretty standard Android tablet. Well no exactly Android: It runs an operating system called SolOS, which Daylight describes as “a custom Android-based operating system designed to facilitate deep focus.” (It’s based on Android 13.) It has a MediaTek Helio G99 processor, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, comes with a passive Wacom stylus, and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole thing weighs 1.2 pounds. It appears to have all the stock Android apps and services; Daylight’s bet seems to be that just changing the hardware can also change your experience with the software.

Daylight CEO Anjan Katta said he founded the company to help himself combat eye strain and distraction, as well as to try to completely redefine our relationship with gadgets. In recent months, he has become very poetic – especially in encryption-friendly podcasts; Katta is evidently a big fan of Bitcoin – about the problems of modern devices. “What I like to think is,” he said in Healthier technology podcast last year, “what would have happened to Tolstoy if he had grown up like that. What would have happened to Maya Angelou if she had a distracting blue light-emitting phone? Would she still be able to write the poetry she wrote?

Sometimes it’s all a little scary, but Daylight is raising a really interesting question: are smartphones really the right idea? Companies like Light and Humane are asking the same thing in different ways, but they’re all trying to find technological answers to technological problems, rather than just encouraging everyone to throw their phones overboard and head into the woods. “It is impossible to escape technology. It’s not even realistic,” Katta said on that podcast. Instead, he argued, we should rethink the computer.

Listening to Katta’s podcast tour, it seems like Daylight is more of a display company than a tablet company. He mentioned wanting to make monitors, laptops, clocks, alarm clocks and other devices, but said he believes a LivePaper-equipped foldable phone is ultimately “how we change the world.”

The DC1 is still in the pre-order phase — the company says it has already sold out of the first batch, which required a $100 deposit to reserve — and costs $799. It should actually launch in June, when we’ll see if It’s possible to build a screen that’s easy to use and easy to put down.