Adding an additional comment here for a little extra visibility. I would absolutely love, like really love, a USB-C portrait monitor version of this. If I could just plug this in to my existing laptop and use it for reading specs, technical docs, …etc that would be amazing.
Android tablet is a tough sell for my employer due to compliance, security, and such. So buying one of those for work use would take like a year minimum gathering all the necessary approvals and likely would still get denied by someone. But, a dumb monitor with no real OS I can expense that without approval. just a heads up to my boss really to say I am buying this and here is why.
I know you are a small company so have to pick your battles. But, maybe something to consider down the road.
EDIt: forgot to say, congrats on the launch. Looks like a great product.
I second this. I really enjoy reading and writing on an Onyx e-ink tab, and I like the full Android functionality, but I can never use it for work or even for personal email logins, because I don't trust their custom Android build.
I would be somewhat more inclined to trust Daylight than Onyx, but any custom OS is too potentially vulnerable to backdoors for my use cases.
Something like this that you could load your own Linux flavor onto, or simply this tech as a monitor / drawing pad, I would drop the money in a heartbeat.
As long as the bootloader isn't locked, porting mainline Linux shouldn't be as bad as with E-ink devices. Here's a Ubuntu Touch port to another Helios G99 device [1]; I really hope the RLCD doesn't require host driver support.
You need USB-C DisplayPort (DP Alt Mode). Unfortunately it's not a software limitation oftentimes, most of the times it's a hardware design limitation. I guess Onyx figured that they can have two different product lines and milk both, as opposed to what they used to have, which was an HDMI port on the higher end models.
Best would be DP alt mode. However software to send video over regular USB data lines is fairly common and reportedly works okay so long as you have drivers (which generally are not supported to the next Windows release) and are not trying something too heavy - not good enough for games but often good enough for the office type work the OP is asking for.
Is there such a thing as a tablet that accepts video input? In other words, use it as a tablet, then connect a mini hdmi or whatever and it turns into a monitor. Disconnect, and it's a tablet again.
Though he is using a Boox product and I'm wary of them over the GPL violation thing: as well as the general “they'd piss & moan and send the lawyers round if someone took their stuff and used it unlicensed” hypocrisy, the paranoid cynic in me thinks there is something they want to hide in their customisations (hooks for calling home or some such).
Also, those clips are a few years old now so some of the problems he was having may have been ironed out in newer devices & software updates.
Another option is running a VMC client on any tablet that isn't walled off so that you can't: there are a number of VNC servers that create a hidden virtual screen and mirror that so the connecting client because the extra screen.
Same here. I use degoogled Onyx Boox for notes, reading books, sheet music, sketching... Barely connect to internet, beacuse I don't trust their OS and apps. Apps are actually quite good (NeoReader).
Fundamentally, my opinion is all these things trying to move electrophoretic ink fast are misguided. You end up using so much energy trying to move particles that are inherently designed to be bistable. If you want to play a video, you're better off using material physics that was intended to be fast from the start, not trying to force a material that's intended to be slow to fight itself.
Stuff like "We need 50,000 people interested in being a part of creating an open-hardware e-ink ecosystem". This seems like trying to drum up a kickstarter. The modos founder, Alex Soto, what's his track record? Googling seems to show him making ridiculous claims like "To make matters worse, the E Ink Corporation holds the patents for its e-ink technology and only licenses its technology to large manufacturers making availability or mass adoption difficult."
I would love to see him explain that in detail with concrete facts.
Note tha its production was put to stop (last year IIRC) with reserve to possibly start it again.
AFAICT market reception was lukewarm at best and it was not financially viable.
I would have loved one, but I guess leaving the development of a proper OS to the community is not going to land mass adoption.
Average Joe needs a device to buy and use, not to buy and tinker with.
"Market reception" is never going to be very good when you never sell the product. What Pine Notes they made were only sold on a beg-us-for-an-invite basis.
When plugged in to a computer, it would be cool if it reverts to being a smart display with touch screen. It could still charge and transfer files too maybe? I don’t know enough about USB-C, but I really wish devices could do dual function like this.
It's feasible: a couple of Lenovo Yoga Tabs do this* running Android 13+ until plugged in by an HDMI out (which I believe works with an adapter to USB-C).
Ex: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/tablets/android-tablets/lenov...
*(Not touch-enabled in display mode, I believe.)
I have a Yoga Tab 13 (the more interesting sibling of the P-series) I regularly use as a standalone tablet and external laptop monitor - usually lives in the same bag. It's been perfectly seamless for me whether using a PC or a smartphone (surprisingly so). (I believe it shipped w Android 12.)
Of course, it's not epaper - but it is technically feasible.
When venturing into the file transfer territory, a lot of employers are going to veto the device over security concerns. Just like they wouldn’t want employees plugging in random USB drives found on the street.
Or USB drives period. My former employer didn't allow cell phones or really any device that could connect things from the outside. We had the Internet, but it all had to go through their own managed pipes.
Totally fine to bring in a monitor though. Not sure if that would still be true today, given the connectivity of things. I bet you could still bring in a monitor, but you'd risk needing to prove that there was no way it could do anything other than be a monitor.
I think there would be better luck with a dedicated monitor port (HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA), rather than a USB-C monitor, depending on how hard things are locked down.
I was about to write the same comment but you expressed it much better. I would also be happy if it could be both an android tablet but have a monitor mode where it just becomes a monitor.
Plus one on this. Would be amazing if there was a display mode possible or just a variant with a usb to edp board inside without the android tablet bits / battery (even if it meant losing the wacom digitizer in the process)
You can use VNC to make an android tablet into a 2nd monitor. The latency isnt good enough for playing games or anything but for web pages and documents it works great.
I've recently been using a piece of software called RustDesk, which so far feels pretty performant, better than VNC, RDP, TeamViewer, RealVNC etc.: https://rustdesk.com/
You can host a relay inside of a Docker container if you need it as well and it even supports AV1. There's also password auth for each device and permission control.
They have a mobile app too, though I haven't used it as much as the desktop variety, might be worth a shot.
This doesn't scratch the employer itch, but I think you could use an android VNC viewer app and then run a VNC server targeting a small vertical monitor attached to your workstation.
I imagine pulling up the document that I want to read, putting it on the correct monitor, and then grabbing the tablet and taking it to my hammock for some heads down reading time.
Any update on that? There's a comment there that suggests a simple legal "you better not do that" letter is all it takes. Obviously, I am not a lawyer, but I was looking at Boox tablets
Thanks for the link. I am actually just starting my research into that one and options from Dasung.
This is one of those things that I didn’t know I needed/wanted until this HN post. But, I get bad headaches from eye strain and a have a heavy text based workflow so definitely in that target market.
If you did this; would it be at all possible to push a software update so we could use the Daylight tablet as a monitor? Or are there hardware limitations?
Re monitors, you might want to have a look at the Modos’s Glider[1] that was also mentioned here recently[2]? Don’t know if they support a portrait mount out of the box.
> I would absolutely love, like really love, a USB-C portrait monitor version of this.
Would this not be better solved with some remote desktop protocol (RDP or VNC) than with USB? Then you can use it with wifi and just walk off with the device.
I agree with the sentiment, but it is harder and harder to find truly "dumb" devices anymore. USB has a complicated (and vulnerable) firmware stack. Monitors have hackable on screen display controllers. Unless you want to go back to VGA... Just saying...
In this context, I think of two things: hackable spying and data exfiltration.
If a device runs processes that can be hacked so that it can report on your activities. Capturing the display or keyboard input would be examples. This generally requires an active network connection, but not always. Because this device runs a version of Android, it’s potentially hackable (I’m not saying it isn’t secure, just that it would have to be validated).
Second, if a device can store or transfer data, it would be possible to send confidential documents out the door without knowing about it. Because this has on-board storage (and is small), it has this issue too.
A monitor, even if its OSD/firmware was hacked, is much less likely to be able to do either of these things.
There are industries that have real concerns about data privacy and security. In these cases, the dumber a device, generally the better.
Dumb devices can have smarts; they just need to be incapable of shenanigans. Maybe a monitor can be reprogrammed to capture screen shots, but without storage or a network connection, that isn't useful.
What about a firmware flash that nukes the Android part and makes it behave as a display, which hopefully you can flash back to your OS if policy or usecase changes?
I would think the main thing would be no network hardware and ideally no network stack. After that, a minimum of local storage- nothing persistent outside of firmware, and certainly nothing that would provide any type of file system visible to the host computer.
I have an M1 MacBook Pro. But, it is centrally managed, provisioned, monitored, …etc.
It isn’t that it is Android. It is that they would have to sort out all of those things on this Android tablet for just me. So, it is that it isn’t their device within their standardized catalog that is the issue.
Folks in my group can choose from Mac, Windows, and Linux options but we have to choose from the set of standardized options or risk approval hell.
Android tablet is a tough sell for my employer due to compliance, security, and such. So buying one of those for work use would take like a year minimum gathering all the necessary approvals and likely would still get denied by someone. But, a dumb monitor with no real OS I can expense that without approval. just a heads up to my boss really to say I am buying this and here is why.
I know you are a small company so have to pick your battles. But, maybe something to consider down the road.
EDIt: forgot to say, congrats on the launch. Looks like a great product.