Daylight DC1: a new tablet with a better screen and without blue backlight

There’s a new company in the race to create a less distracting, more minimalist, and generally more sane type of computer. It’s called Daylight Computer, and today it’s launching its first device: the DC1, a 10.5-inch tablet with some interesting ideas about gadget design.

The main attraction of the DC1 is its screen. Daylight calls it a “LivePaper” display and says it looks like E Ink but is smooth and responsive like a traditional LCD display. It’s… not a thing that exists otherwise, at least not yet, and in general anyone who promises an “E Ink” type LCD is seriously overselling their product. But Daylight thinks it has invented something truly new and better. If so, it would be a pretty exciting combination of iPad and Kindle. We will see!

The tablet also features a blue-free backlight, which means the DC1 will glow an amber color. Daylight is jumping on the blue blocker bandwagon here, based on the popular idea that exposure to blue light can harm your sleep and cause eye strain. (There is some evidence for the sleep part, although eliminating blue light is only part of the technology-sleep dilemma; there is much less of an actual link between blue light and eye strain .)

Otherwise, the device looks like a fairly normal 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 concentration.” (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 pen, and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole thing weighs 1.2 pounds. It appears to have all the standard Android apps and services; Daylight’s bet seems to be that simply changing hardware can also change your experience of the software.

Daylight CEO Anjan Katta said he started the company both to help combat eye strain and distraction, as well as to try to completely redefine our relationship with gadgets. In recent months, he has been very poetic, particularly on crypto-friendly podcasts; Katta is obviously a big fan of Bitcoin – when it comes to issues with modern devices. “The thing I like to think about is,” he said on the Healthier technology podcast last year, “What would have happened to Tolstoy if he had grown up like this. What would have happened to Maya Angelou if she had a distracting blue light emitting phone? Would she still have been able to write the poetry she wrote?

This is all a bit cringe-worthy at times, but Daylight raises a really interesting question: are smartphones really the right idea? Companies like Light and Humane ask the same question in different ways, but all try to find technical answers to technical problems rather than just encouraging everyone to throw their phones in the sea and move to the woods. “There is no escaping technology. It’s not even realistic,” Katta said on this 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, watches, alarm clocks and other devices, but said he thought a LivePaper-equipped foldable phone was ultimately “the way we change the world.” world “.

The DC1 is still in the pre-order stage – the company says it has already sold the first batch, which required a $100 deposit to reserve – and costs $799. It’s supposed to ship for real in June, at which point we’ll see if it’s possible to build a display that’s both easy to use and put down.