Daylight DC-1
If the Daylight DC-1 proves to look as good in real life as it does in their launch video then it’s going to be a seriously tempting proposition.
Give me a touch-responsive monochrome E-Ink screen that refreshes at 60 frames per second and I can live without it displaying those images in colour.1 Granted the operating system is a tweaked version of Android, which is not ideal,2 but it’s also not that big a deal.
Part of me would prefer that the launch of the DC-1 was followed shortly after by the launch of a DC-1 Mini, matching that screen with the immensely more practical form factor of my beloved iPad Minis, but I’ve learned by now not to expect the tablet market to follow my little whims on that front.
[Via Daring Fireball]
SInce I saw this video yesterday I’ve switched on the Greyscale colour filter on my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air just so I could get a sense of how unimportant colour is to much of what I do with my computer over the course of a typical day. The best bit is that even with greyscale mode on on my MacBook Air if I send the content via AirPlay to my Apple TV the greyscale falls away and the video I’m playing is presented in colour as normal. (Edited to add: of course I recognise that iPad Mini’s Greyscale filter isn’t quite doing what an the DC-1’s E-Ink screen is trying. The thing is, I wanted to pick up a general sense of how web content looks when you lose a degree of differentiation between areas of the user interface. Looking pretty good has been the short answer. I’m pretty sure I could cope with an E-Ink tablet screen that looked that good.)↩︎
Given how much of any tablet’s functionality is based around running apps that are essentially a gateway to a web service I suspect that 90-95% of what I do on my iPad Mini today could be done on a DC-1 quite happily. Assuming that the Android Obsidian app runs under Sol:OS, you can push that up to 95%. There would be some friction as I got used to using a different Markdown editor to draft text, or a different RSS client to grab my feeds from Feedbin, but these bumps in the road would recede into the rear-view mirror after a few weeks. The other 5% I mention are tasks that I already split between iPadOS and MacOS because it’s easier to capture content on the iPad Mini and then drop it somewhere that my MacBook Air can see it. I suspect having an Android-based system would make aspects of that sort of process easier still. If I had to substitute using Dropbox or Google Drive or NextCloud as cloud storage instead of iCloud I reckon I could live with that.↩︎