Practical Daylight DC-1 tablet: an Android tablet with a new type of screen

There is a large piece of paper in the San Francisco offices of Computer in daylight, with a list written in purple ink of all the types of devices the company hopes to one day make. The list is long: Daylight wants to make a phone, a laptop, different types of tablets. Basically, anything you can imagine with a screen, Daylight wants to make it a different, better screen that doesn’t shine brightly into your eyes in a dark room, but feels like paper and works perfectly outdoors.

I should mention another big piece of paper next to the one with product ideas – an equally long list of reasons why Daylight might fail. And as CEO Anjan Katta shows me around the office, the rest of the team is preparing for a launch party for their first device, a tablet called the DC-1, it’s clear he’s worried about how the world will respond to his big idea about the future.

Daylight wants to be more of a lifestyle brand than a gadget maker. In recent months, Katta has been on tour for podcasts It is YouTube Channels preaching the noble gospel of minimalist gadgets, arguing that blue light exposure is killing our sleep and that we need devices that encourage us to use them less and more deliberately, rather than luring us in with bright lights and notifications. Instead of taking inspiration from high-tech suppliers like Apple or Samsung, Katta and Daylight seem to idolize companies like Patagonia, which have both done good things and stand for something. And I suppose if Patagonia can sell vests to VCs, Daylight can sell tablets to tech enthusiasts.

The DC-1 costs $729, which is a lot for an Android tablet, and especially a lot for a tablet that looks a lot like a company’s first product. It’s thick, heavy and powered by old chips. I like the speckled back and clicky buttons, but I can’t stop noticing the slightly misaligned ports or the fact that I can slide my fingernail between the screen and case and literally pull the thing apart. I haven’t had any real hardware issues using the tablet so far, but the lack of manufacturing polish feels like a first attempt.

Katta told me that the DC-1 is not yet finished, especially the software. The device is designed to run software called Sol:OS, a custom version of Android meant to help you keep things minimal and quiet. My test model is currently running a lightly customized version of the popular Niagara Launcher, and at one point, when I factory reset the device, it lost many of the features the team had loaded for me to test. All of which is to say that this device isn’t ready for a full overhaul—we’ll get to that when Sol:OS launches for real, which Katta told me should be this fall.

For now, I just want to talk mainly about the screen. The DC-1 has a 10.5-inch screen and Daylight calls it a “Live Paper” display. Just to be clear: Live Paper is not E Ink. E Ink is the technology you find in Kindle and most other e-readers and it uses real ink. This means it looks great in sunlight and only uses energy when moving the paint. (Technically, E Ink is a brand and “electronic paper” is the technology, but everyone uses them interchangeably. And Ink is Kleenex.) Live Paper was actually designed to solve some of E Ink’s weaknesses – particularly its slow refresh rate and the ghosting that leaves faint impressions of things on the screen for too long.

What Live Paper really is, Katta told me, is an adaptation of a reflective LCD display technology that has been around for a long time. Reflective LCDs are LCD screens without backlighting; they use a mirror at the bottom of the stack to reflect natural light through the pixels. This makes them great and comfortable to use in bright light, means they don’t use a lot of power, and allows them to be cheaper, thinner and lighter. All good things! But there are many disadvantages: RLCDs, as they are known, obviously struggle in poor lighting. They are also difficult to find in full color, large sizes, or high resolutions.

There are already some popular RLCD devices. (O HannsNote2 is a favorite on the r/RLCD subreddit, and the HiSense Q5 received good reviews a few years ago.) Katta says he’s spent the last five years trying to solve RLCD’s problems and improve the entire system. It didn’t solve them all—the DC-1 doesn’t produce color, which Katta told me is technically possible, but causes several other compromises—but the Daylight team managed to make a 10.5-inch reflective LCD that’s almost as pleasing to the eyes. eyes as E Ink and almost as responsive as a typical tablet screen.

I say “almost” because it doesn’t get there in either case. On the E Ink side of the spectrum, the Live Paper is a little brighter, uses a lot more power, and has significantly worse viewing angles than my Kindle. Viewing angles are perhaps the most obvious advantage of E Ink – you’ll always get brightness from an LCD, and while Live Paper is an improvement, it’s still not as bright and sharp in sunlight as an E Ink screen. And Ink looks like paper; Live Paper looks like a canvas.

Meanwhile, compared to an iPad or smartphone, when you quickly scroll through an app, the DC-1 lags a bit (though not as much as any E Ink screen I’ve tried), and you get some of that wavy “jelly” . scroll” that used to plague many devices. I also see a bit of ghosting if I move things quickly; Daylight says the Live Paper screen updates at 60 frames per second, but I definitely notice that it stutters sometimes.

Basically, the DC-1’s screen isn’t as good as a Kindle in ideal Kindle conditions or as good as an iPad in ideal iPad conditions. But it could be argued that Live Paper is actually a jack of all trades in the right way. It’s responsive and fast enough that I can easily type on the DC-1 or even watch a video (albeit in black and white). E Ink generally works well, but you can do much more easily on the DC-1 than on a Kindle or Boox tablet.

The DC-1 is also much easier to look at in bed or in any kind of bright light than something like an iPad. Personally, I’d like this screen better in a slightly smaller form factor – I’m on record loving the Boox Palma as a pocket-sized Android device, and I suspect I’d like it even better with a Live Paper screen – but if you’re the type to use An iPad for reading, web browsing, and maybe journaling and crosswords, the DC-1 does it all very well. It’s just not a good Netflix machine, you know?

As for backlighting, Daylight’s clever idea was to let you control not just the brightness, but also the temperature of the light. (By the way, you can do this on many e-readers too – some recent Kindle models has a “warm light” mode which I like much better than the standard light.) It can go from normal, daytime blue light to a warm, deep amber glow, which is ostensibly better for reading at night without disrupting your circadian rhythm and sleep. The general theory is sound, but whether your phone’s screen has enough light to actually cause major damage is harder to say. But even from a comfort point of view, I really like it; Now I read in bed with the light very low and very warm, and I don’t know if I sleep better, but it’s certainly easier to look in the dark.

The coolest thing is that you can turn off the backlight completely. At the lowest setting, the DC-1 emits no light at all. It relies entirely on ambient light to show what’s on the screen. (A backlit RLCD is also sometimes called a “transflective LCD,” for whatever that’s worth.) Without a light on, though, the DC-1 looks very dark and low-contrast, even in bright sunlight. I almost never turn off the light completely.

Everything in Daylight’s office feels as frantic and new as the DC-1. There’s a guy out there, barefoot, putting pills in grass boxes to give to people at the end of the day. There’s a table full of plush suitcases for the DC-1 and another with Patagonia slings for first-time buyers. There is outdoor art everywhere. This company seems to know exactly what this is about, but perhaps they don’t know exactly what to do about it. After using the tablet for a while, I’m skeptical about the $729 DC-1’s case, but I’m fairly optimistic about what a line of Live Paper devices will look like. Maybe the iPad and Kindle middle ground might exist after all. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, Daylight asks a fun question: what if you simply changed the screen? I think it can change much more than that.