Do you need a dedicated customizable screen that can display various information throughout the day? Probably not, considering you can use your phone, laptop, and other devices to check, pretty much, anything you want. However, you can also see the time of day using all those devices, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a wall clock remains pretty handy for timekeeping. That’s why, we have a feeling the Tidbyt can find genuine utility among a lot of people.
A dedicated, customizable screen, you can use it to display any basic information you want, from calendars and weather updates to stock prices and real-time game scores. Except, instead of coming with an LCD screen like an Echo Show or a Lenovo Smart Clock, it uses a 64 x 32 pixel RGB LED panel, so you can show all those information using a pixelated layout, giving it a retro feel that just looks all sorts of charming.
The Tidbyt is a small display about the size of a desk clock, which you can use to display any kind of information that will fit across its 64 x 32 pixel screen. Heck, it even looks like a desk clock, complete with a solid walnut enclosure. It has adjustable brightness, so you can turn it up very bright during daytime and lower it to a softer glow at night, complete with an auto-dimming that can automatically adjust the brightness with the exact time of day. There’s also a Night Mode setting that you can activate, which will lower it to a very dim but reasonably legible glow.
You can fiddle with the settings via the companion app, which allows you to manually switch among over 150 information layouts. The available layouts include time and weather displays, calendars, transport schedules, stock prices, news headlines, real-time game scores, retro animations, Twitter updates, social media follower counts, message tickers, and more. They also have an API and SDK available, which you can use to code your own layouts. According to the outfit, coding should be simple enough that you can literally create new layouts in minutes, so you can customize it according to your specific needs.
The Tidbyt is available now, priced at $179.