The device does have white LEDs too. So you can adjust the color temperature. It is just that most of the marketing materials are done to highlight the amber display feature.
Source: I was the chief hw engineer for this device.
The colors do not invert when the backlight is on, which is great because you can turn on only a slight amount of backlight if you need it, and have it blend to the ambient lighting.
Source: I was the chief hardware engineer for this device.
The problem with eink tablets is that they must use front light, and not backlight due to how eink works. This means there is an extra layer in front of the layer where the pixels are, which causes parallax effects which makes writing feel fake. This is (likely) why remarkable deleted the frontlight from their product.
Whereas with the daylight tablet, we have a trans reflective display and a backlight. Since the backlight layer is behind the layer where the pixels are, the parallax does not suffer.
I find the experience of writing with a Wacom EMR pen on mine very pleasing :)
Source: I was the chief hardware engineer for this project.
Thanks for your comment! I grew up using a Palm III that was already super old when I had it in high school. But years later, my fond memories of the sense of focus I had using it became a major inspiration for deciding to join Anjan’s team for this project :)
Source: I was the chief hardware engineer for this device.
Anjan can comment further to see if the team these days has any further optimizations in store, but with my personal Daylight tablet anecdotally, these days I am charging it every other week, and using it for 1-2 hours a day to browse the web and read PDFs. I usually have a low backlight setting on it.
You are not wrong overall, but I am not sure if the opportunity is huge, at least IMO not enough to sustain a VC-backed company (or perhaps barely). As a benchmark, Altium has a market cap of 6B. The fundamental problem is that there aren't that many HW engineers out there (compared to SWEs and SWE adjacents like DevOps etc). And the existing players are super entrenched into existing companies doing HW design.
There are some interesting companies out there that I am watching, like flux.io. The problem there is that none of these companies are working on creating open-source tooling, so their endgame seems to be getting acquired by Altium, Cadence et al.
I fear a future where doing even regular PCB designs will be gatekept by the Cadences and Synopysyes of the world, akin to how IC design is today. At least we have KiCad right now, which is getting really powerful and is fantastic for doing PCB development work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
US FDA however was skeptical of the safety of the drug and never approved it for sale in US.