I bought a Boox color e-ink tablet last year. I wanted something different enough from phone and laptop that I could read books without feeling like I am staring at screens every waking hour. I also liked that it ran full Android so I can put whatever app on it.
While the color screen is a neat trick, in practice, in an e-reader, for this purpose, I have to conclude the colors (which are faint) were not worth the sacrifice of grayer screen background, less resolution, and slower/more complicated refresh.
All that is to say, my experience with the Boox tablet makes me feel like this Daylight Computer is on the right track with its design choices. While I don't quite have the disposable income to turn around and purchase another tablet so soon after spending my money on a different tablet, if I could do things over (or if my current e-ink tablet broke), I'd definitely buy this Daylight Computer.
Hopefully the company that makes this is successful and continues to expand and support the device. That's the other issue with the Boox tablet; I read on Reddit that there will not be new Android versions for it because the company is part of a culture of moving on to new hardware and abandoning support for deployed hardware quickly.
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?
>> It seems like all of these eink devices are designed that way.
After going through 5 Kindles, I got a Kobo reader a few years ago, and couldn't be happier. It is more expensive than the Kindle because the price isn't subsidized, but the physical design is great, and I haven't broken it yet (I broke 4 Kindles through normal use).
They support loading your own software on without any "jailbreak", and I use Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato), which renders documents significantly faster than the stock reader.
I bought the 5.8” inkpalm recently in the regular aliexpress sale, was just over $100. Ask me anything. Which Anki apk do you like? I’ll see if it can be coaxed to install it.
It’s fine for what it is, screen is a little reflective and the system is very sluggish. But it runs KOReader just fine for me, even large epubs and pdfs render ok (eventually).
It’s incredibly light and pocketable but I worry about scratching the screen - it is not iPhone level gorilla glass.
Also the narrow screen takes some getting used to, need to play with then font size to get a decent amount of words on a line without getting tiny.
Eink hasn’t taken off because it’s too expensive. A device like this should be a $20-30 impulse purchase not new-mid-range/used-flagship smartphone price.
If I understand some of the videos correctly, their innovation seems to be in the diffusion layer, which makes the LCD appear paper-like. One video mentions quite a few technical details in this area (sub-wavelength nanoparticles, dichroic dyes, etc), so much so that I can't decide if I'm impressed, or that it's just moat-signaling technobabble. But the devices look great in either case.
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?
It's a misinterpretation of the work underpinning f.lux.
We went from "avoid blue light after sundown to help keep your natural circadian rhythm" to "blue light bad! Buy this product!"
Now we're too far down that path with customers specifically avoiding devices that give off blue light whether or not they understand why. Companies like that are just taking the safe bet by avoiding blue light
The device does have white LEDs too. So you can adjust the color temperature. It is just that most of the marketing materials are done to highlight the amber display feature.
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.
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.
The website makes it frustrating to find details about the technology. It does contain the debunked claim that the “blue light” emitted by less enlightened competing devices disrupts our circadian rhythms. This claim, endlessly repeated by legions of journalists, never withstood a moment of thought, and has recently been shown, empirically, to be false.
Does anyone know about the writing experience? Specifically, I've been looking at a Supernote, but the A5 X2 seems perpetually delayed, and I'm wondering if it's worth going for this now.
Thank you. Do you know anything about the latency? Note-taking tablets are an area where tiny differences in latency can make huge differences to usability, or at least to "pleasant-to-use"ability.
Edit to say -- watched one of the reviews, and it's not eInk. This thing boggles my mind. How did Amazon produce kindles for 16 years and the refresh rate today is pretty much the same as it was in 2008, and then these guys come along and say "1hz is too slow, let's do 60!"
Readit News
While the color screen is a neat trick, in practice, in an e-reader, for this purpose, I have to conclude the colors (which are faint) were not worth the sacrifice of grayer screen background, less resolution, and slower/more complicated refresh.
All that is to say, my experience with the Boox tablet makes me feel like this Daylight Computer is on the right track with its design choices. While I don't quite have the disposable income to turn around and purchase another tablet so soon after spending my money on a different tablet, if I could do things over (or if my current e-ink tablet broke), I'd definitely buy this Daylight Computer.
Hopefully the company that makes this is successful and continues to expand and support the device. That's the other issue with the Boox tablet; I read on Reddit that there will not be new Android versions for it because the company is part of a culture of moving on to new hardware and abandoning support for deployed hardware quickly.
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?
After going through 5 Kindles, I got a Kobo reader a few years ago, and couldn't be happier. It is more expensive than the Kindle because the price isn't subsidized, but the physical design is great, and I haven't broken it yet (I broke 4 Kindles through normal use).
They support loading your own software on without any "jailbreak", and I use Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato), which renders documents significantly faster than the stock reader.
It’s fine for what it is, screen is a little reflective and the system is very sluggish. But it runs KOReader just fine for me, even large epubs and pdfs render ok (eventually).
It’s incredibly light and pocketable but I worry about scratching the screen - it is not iPhone level gorilla glass.
Also the narrow screen takes some getting used to, need to play with then font size to get a decent amount of words on a line without getting tiny.
Eink hasn’t taken off because it’s too expensive. A device like this should be a $20-30 impulse purchase not new-mid-range/used-flagship smartphone price.
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.
If someone else wants amber, fine but why not an option?
We went from "avoid blue light after sundown to help keep your natural circadian rhythm" to "blue light bad! Buy this product!"
Now we're too far down that path with customers specifically avoiding devices that give off blue light whether or not they understand why. Companies like that are just taking the safe bet by avoiding blue light
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.
I saw this detailed review recently which talks about some negative things i.e. low contrast, viewing angles and some marketing bits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHeIw9rXzUQ
and while searching for this review again to post here, I their follow up on this review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ac-qtk2lmk
I think Patrick is the opposite. He’s a prolific reader. An endorsement from him makes me more convinced I’ll like this product.
patio11 who often posts here in HN
https://daylightcomputer.com/
How did he get it so fast.
I bought one in May and won’t get it until August.
Website says current waitlist ETA is November.
—-
Kind of makes me want to cancel my order if he got to jump the line.
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.
Please do more business related podcasts. Your indie hacker podcast are some of my favorite all time.
Are you involved at Daylight?
The website makes it frustrating to find details about the technology. It does contain the debunked claim that the “blue light” emitted by less enlightened competing devices disrupts our circadian rhythms. This claim, endlessly repeated by legions of journalists, never withstood a moment of thought, and has recently been shown, empirically, to be false.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216173654.h...