Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
e-ink is a specific technology, daylight isn't using it. e-ink is owned by the E Ink Corporation. It's fundamentally different from an LCD, it uses electricity to flip microcapsules onto and off the back of a transparent surface. Some of these microcapsules are black and some are white. This is what gives the image such a crisp paper-feel, it's not emitting light like an LCD, it's actually static material that reflects light. Every image is basically etched into the tablet. It's also why draw times are so slow and there tends to be a "ghosting" problem. Recently developers figured how to get this process to simulate color, which seems like it's reaching almost good-enough.
Daylight isn't using e-ink, they're using what's called "transflective LCD". It's an LCD with an extra reflective layer underneath so that light from the environment reflects onto the image. This article has some more in-depth explanations:
https://newhavendisplay.com/blog/transmissive-vs-reflective-vs-transflective-displays/
Using LCD is how daylight solved the screen refresh rate and ghosting and other latency. It seems like they're basically the first mover to try this approach for paper-like tablets instead of using e-ink. I'm very curious to see how it looks, especially because the amber backlight seems like a huge plus. In the few videos I can find online it looks fine. But e-ink looks incredible to me and I'm not sure I want to give that up.
I also miss the kindle keyboard. I think that was a phenomenal product and a genuine step forward in man's history with technology. It wowed me. Everything looked good, it was a computer made human, it was a better experience than reading a physical book. Buttons were mechanically simple and simpler than turning a page. I could carry 100 books in my pocket. Instant dictionary. It was great. I never got over the switch to touchscreens, which ruined the user interface (I have to put my hand between my eyes and what I'm reading). The kindle keyboard seemed to disappear from Amazon's service page, they've stopped supporting it, I have no idea why, maybe some patent trolling. I think it's a shame that trendline in technology was abandoned. We give kids in schools these junky laptops that only distract them when we have all the technology for making incredible learning devices ready-to-hand. I can't overstate my enthusiasm about this. We have all the technology to make ultimate reading-learning devices, we have the technology to make something that is well-tuned to the human experience, more well-tuned than anything we have ever made before. Instead of designing new computers for better features that we passively let alter our day-to-day, we could be making superdevices that progressively advance our future with technology. And we basically stopped that whole technological line so we could stream Netflix on everything, and we put touchscreens where they don't belong, and now the supervisionaries are chasing crazy boondoggles like neuralink. Gahjhhjhhhh
I really want daylight to be good, the amber backlight alone is exciting, but I need to see how it compares to e-ink before I can commit to one.
Yeah, e-ink is a great technology and it looks amazing. I haven't used a laptop in years, so I took the plunge with the daylight on a whim, but my old kindle keyboards have died on me and I'm stuck with newer, but still old, models. I still resent the touch screens. I hold the damn thing with my hands, it can't start flipping pages every time my thumb brushes the screen.
When I get the daylight, I'll have to make a post about how I like it.
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Pebble somehow managed to go bankrupt.
Their products were far and away superior to anything Apple (to say nothing of Google, who gobbled up Fitbit, who owns all the old Pebble IP) offers today in terms of responsiveness, software quality, and battery life; they were even working on a Raspberry-Pi-fication of their watch.
I still believe that an open (as in, "not restricted to what the app store pushes") wearable computer connected to the cell network combined with a watch would have been the next frontier of personal computing had they survived. Sadly, it was not to be.
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