Daylight DC-1 Hands-On: An Android Tablet with a New Type of Screen

There is a large piece of paper in the San Francisco offices. Day computerThe company has published a list, written in purple ink, of all the types of devices it hopes to one day make. The list is long: Daylight wants to make a phone, a laptop, and various types of tablets. In short, Daylight wants to make anything you can think of with a screen—but a better, different screen, one that doesn’t glare at you in a dark room, but looks like paper and works great outdoors.

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

Daylight wants to be more of a lifestyle brand than a gadget maker. In recent months, Katta has been touring Podcast And YouTube channels Preaching High level gospel Kata and Daylight are among those who argue that blue light kills our sleep and that we need devices that motivate us to use them less and more intentionally, rather than beckon us with bright lights and notifications. Rather than emulating high-tech companies like Apple or Samsung, Kata and Daylight seem to idolize companies like Patagonia, which make good things and stand for something. I suppose if Patagonia can sell VCs vests, Daylight can sell tablets to tech enthusiasts.

The DC-1 is priced at $729, which is a steep price for an Android tablet, and it’s especially steep for a tablet that looks a lot like the company’s first product. It’s thick, heavy, and runs on old chips. I love the speckled back and the squeaky buttons, but I can’t help but notice the slightly misaligned ports or the fact that I can slide my fingernail between the screen and the cover and literally pry the device apart. I haven’t had any real hardware issues with the tablet so far, but the lack of finish from the build feels like a first attempt.

Kata tells me that the DC-1 isn’t finished yet, especially the software. The device is meant to run software called Sol:OS, a custom version of Android that aims to help you keep things minimal and quiet. Right now, my test model is running a slightly customized version of the popular Niagara Launcher, and at one point, when I factory reset the device, it lost a lot of the features the team had loaded up for me to test. All of this means that this device isn’t ready for a full review — we’ll get to that when Sol:OS actually launches, which Kata tells me should be this fall.

For now, I just want to talk about the display. The DC-1 has a 10.5-inch screen, which Daylight calls a “Live Paper” display. Just to be clear: Live Paper is not E Ink. E Ink is the technology you find in the Kindle and most other e-readers that uses actual ink. That means it looks really good in sunlight and only uses power when the ink is moving. (Technically, E Ink is a brand and “e-paper” is the technology, but everyone uses them interchangeably. E Ink is Kleenex.) Live Paper is actually designed to solve some of the weaknesses of E Ink — namely its slow refresh rate and ghosting, which leaves a faint impression of things on the screen for too long.

In fact, Kata tells me that Live Paper displays are a tweak to the long-standing reflective LCD technology. Reflective LCDs are LCDs without a backlight; they use a mirror at the bottom of the array to reflect natural light across the pixels. This makes them great and comfortable to use in bright light, which means they don’t use as much power, and allows them to be cheaper, thinner, and lighter. All good things! But there are also a number of downsides: RLCDs, as they’re known, suffer significantly in poor lighting. They’re also hard to find in color, in large sizes, or in high resolution.

There are some really popular RLCDs out there. ( Hans Note 2 It’s a favorite on the subreddit r/RLCD, and HiSense Q5 Kata says he’s spent the past five years or so trying to solve the RLCD’s problems and improve the entire system. He hasn’t been able to solve all of them—the DC-1 doesn’t do color, something Kata tells me is technically possible but causes a bunch of other compromises—but the Daylight team has managed to make a 10.5-inch transflective LCD that’s almost as easy on the eyes as E Ink and almost as responsive as a typical tablet screen.

I say “almost” because it’s not quite the same either way. On the E Ink side of the spectrum, the Live Paper is a bit brighter, uses a lot more power, and has much worse viewing angles than my Kindle. Viewing angles are perhaps the most obvious advantage of E Ink — you’ll always be exposed to glare on the LCD screen, and while the Live Paper is an improvement, it’s still not as clear and crisp as the E Ink screen in sunlight. E Ink feels like paper; Live Paper feels like a screen.

Meanwhile, compared to an iPad or smartphone, when you’re scrolling quickly in an app, the DC-1 lags a bit (though not as much as any E Ink screen I’ve tried), and you get a bit of that wavy “jelly scrolling” that’s been a bummer on a lot of devices. I also see a bit of ghosting if I’m moving things around quickly; Daylight says the Live Paper’s screen refreshes at 60 frames per second, but I definitely notice it stuttering at times.

Essentially, the DC-1’s screen isn’t as good as a Kindle’s under ideal Kindle conditions or an iPad’s under ideal iPad conditions. But there’s a case to be made that the Live Paper is actually a multitasker the right way. It’s responsive and fast enough that I could easily type on the DC-1 or even watch a video (albeit in black and white). E-ink is usually fine in emergencies, but you can get more done seamlessly on the DC-1 than you can on a Kindle or a Boox tablet.

The DC-1 is also much easier to look at in bed or in any kind of bright light than something like the iPad. Personally, I’d like it to be a little smaller — I like the Boox Palma as a pocketable Android device, and I think I’d like it even more with the Live Paper display — but if you’re the type of person who uses an iPad for reading, browsing the web, and maybe journaling and doing crossword puzzles, the DC-1 does all of that really well. It’s not a great device for watching Netflix, is it?

As for the backlight, Daylight’s clever idea was to let you control not only the brightness but also the temperature of the light. (You can do this on many e-readers too, by the way—some recent Kindle models are You have a “warm light” mode. I much prefer the default light.) It can switch from natural blue light to a deep, warm 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 screen contains enough light to really cause significant harm is anyone’s guess. It’s hard to say.But even from a comfort perspective, I really like it; I now read in bed with the light on very low and warm, and I don’t know if I sleep better, but it’s definitely easier to look at in the dark.

The great thing is that you can turn off the backlight entirely. At its lowest setting, the DC-1 emits no light at all. It relies entirely on ambient light to display what’s on the screen. (A backlit RLCD is sometimes called a “transflective LCD,” whatever that means.) But without the light on, the DC-1’s screen looks very dim and low-contrast even in bright sunlight. I rarely turn the light off entirely.

Everything in Daylight’s office feels as hectic and new as the DC-1. There’s a barefoot guy outside putting tablets into little grass boxes to give to people later in the day. There’s a table full of fancy DC-1 cases and another full of Patagonia bags for early buyers. There’s outdoor-focused artwork everywhere. This company seems to know exactly what its mission is, but perhaps not exactly what to do about it. After using the tablet for a while, I’m a little skeptical about the $729 DC-1, but I’m pretty optimistic about what the Live Paper lineup will look like. Maybe there’s a middle ground between an iPad and a Kindle after all. In a world increasingly dominated by screens, Daylight raises an interesting question: What if you change the screen? I think it could change a lot more than that.