There’s a new company in the race to make a less distracting, more minimalist and generally sanity-saving kind of computer. It’s called Daylight Computer, and today it’s releasing its first device: the DC1, a 10.5-inch tablet with some interesting ideas for gadget design.
The main hook of the DC1 is its display. Daylight calls it a “LivePaper” screen and says it looks like E Ink, but is as smooth and responsive as traditional LCD. It’s… otherwise not something that exists, at least not yet, and generally anyone who promises an E Ink-like LCD screen is seriously overstating their product. But Daylight believes it has invented something truly new and better. If so, that would be a pretty exciting combination of iPad and Kindle. We will see!
The tablet also has a blue-free backlight, which means the DC1 will glow in an amber color. Daylight jumps in favor of blue blockers here, based on the popular notion that exposure to blue light can be harmful to your sleep and cause eye strain. (There is some evidence for this part of sleep, although eliminating blue light is only part of the technology-sleep dilemma; there is much less of a real connection between blue light and eye fatigue.)
The device otherwise sounds like a pretty 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 focus.” (It’s based on Android 13.) It has a MediaTek Helio G99 processor, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, comes with a Wacom passive stylus, and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole thing weighs 1.2 pounds It seems to have all the standard Android apps and services; Daylight’s bet seems to be that just changing the hardware can also change your software experience.
Daylight CEO Anjan Kata said he founded the company to help fight eye fatigue and distraction, and to try to redefine our relationship with gadgets entirely. He’s been very poetic in recent months – especially on crypto-friendly podcasts; Kata is clearly a big fan of Bitcoin – about the problems with modern devices. “The thing I like to think about is,” he told the Healthier technology podcast last year, “what would have happened to Tolstoy if he grew up like this. What would happen to Maya Angelou if she had a distracting phone that emitted blue light? Would he still be able to write the poetry he was doing?’
It’s all a little hair-raising at times, but Daylight asks 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 technical answers to technical problems, rather than just encouraging everyone to throw their phones in the sea and move to the woods. “It is impossible to escape from technology. It’s not even realistic,” Kata said on this podcast. Instead, he argues, we need to rethink the computer.
Listening to Katta’s podcast tour, it sounds like Daylight is more of a display company than a tablet company. He mentioned he wants to make monitors, laptops, clocks, alarm clocks and other devices, but said he believes the LivePaper-equipped foldable phone is ultimately “how we change the world.”
The DC1 is still in the pre-order phase — the company says it’s already sold out of the first batch, which requires a $100 deposit to reserve — and costs $799. It’s supposed to ship for real in June, when we’ll see if it’s possible to build a screen that’s both easy to use and easy to take down.
