This customizable smart display is a fun desk accessory in need of a purpose

When the Tidbyt, which its creators describe as a “personal pixel display,” arrived at my house, I loved it before I even knew what to do with it. With its walnut paneling and ultra-pixelated display, it looks like what would happen if you asked someone in 1956 to design the Echo Show for Amazon. It’s 8.2 inches long, 4.4 inches tall, and two inches deep, which is a bit large to place on a nightstand, but it nestles nicely on a bookshelf or on a larger desk. That’s impressively well-done stuff for the company’s first product.

But the thing about the $179 Tidbyt is that it’s never really clear what this device is for. It’s a clock, but not an alarm clock. This is an extremely bad digital photo frame. It doesn’t do anything your phone can’t, and your phone definitely does all of these things better. It’s an excellent system for delivering quick bits of information about the environment, but if it doesn’t mean anything immediately to you, you don’t need Tidbyt. Its charm is real and hasn’t worn off on me yet, but it still feels a little unfinished.

The team behind the Tidbyt started working on it a few years ago and launched the product on Kickstarter in March 2021. A year and a half later, all backers have received their Tidbyts and the device is generally available. Sort of: co-founder Rohan Singh tells me that current supplies are sold out, but “we’ve got more units on the way in a few weeks.” Manufacturing is tough, but Singh is confident that Tidbyt can stay on top of things.

There are plenty of hints that Tidbyt is still new to this. For starters, my device arrived with an Anker-branded charging cable in the box along with a black plug that apparently came out of a bin somewhere in a factory in China. None of these bother me, really – and at least the cable is one of those nice braided ones – but an Apple-like unboxing experience this isn’t.

However, the screen is the main point of Tidbyt and it is very unusual. It’s not so much a screen as a collection of individual LEDs—64 across by 32 down, a total of 2,048 of them—that can be lit and controlled individually. You can control the brightness of the display and it can get seriously bright; I kept the brightness level at about 15 out of 100, and at full power, those 2,048 LEDs were bright enough that the Tidbyt lit up my home office practically by itself.

It’s incredibly low-res by design because it’s not meant to do much. The creators of Tidbyt aren’t trying to create a super fascinating widget, but rather something that can save you from having to look at your phone every time you need a bit of information. Singh says he built the original prototype to quickly know when the subway was coming. “If I go on my phone to check,” he says, “I’ll check Twitter. And I’d check Instagram and stuff, and then I’d just do that for like half an hour. Instead, he hacked something that tapped into the NYC subway API and told him when the next G train was coming in. It looks like a subway status board, because that’s exactly what it is.

There’s a whole genre of gadgets that present themselves this way, of course. “This is the gadget that will free you from your phone” applies to everything from the Apple Watch and Alexa to minimalist smartphones from Palm and others. Tidbyt just takes the idea to the extreme by not letting you interact with the device at all.

To set up Tidbyt, you simply turn it on. It turns on automatically and goes into pairing mode. All the actual work is done in the Tidbyt app, which is available for Android and iOS: you connect to Tidbyt via Bluetooth, then register it on your Wi-Fi network and it’s up and running. The app is where you decide what the Tidbyt will do, how bright it gets and everything else. This sort of defeats the whole “don’t use your phone” idea, but once Tidbyt is set up to your liking, you no longer need the app.

As for getting things in Tidbyt, it happens in the app as well. There’s a store with several dozen different apps, all free, that you can install on your device with a few taps. Most are status boards of some sort: there are lots of different clocks, a bunch of weather apps, ways to track the stock market or the price of bitcoin or the phase of the moon, some sports scores apps that scroll like an ESPN ticker, and lots ways to see when the next subway train is coming. There are also a few goofy apps, like animating Nyan Cat or recreating the bouncing DVD logo, which I’m not ashamed to admit I watched for about 20 straight minutes just to see if it would ever hit a corner. (It did, and it was great.)

More apps are coming to Tidbyt all the time, but it’s still pretty basic. There’s no calendar app that works for Outlook or iCloud, for example, nor is there a way to view most to-do lists other than Todoist or Things. Creating a Tidbyt app is relatively easy—it’s just a bunch of lights, after all, and if you have access to Linux and a basic knowledge of Python, you can write your own pretty easily. And the Tidbyt team told me that eventually they’d like Tidbyt to work more as a no-code platform for anyone to build custom apps. However, this is still a long way off and there are big holes in the app store for now.

It’s easy enough to add apps to your Tidbyt, but I wish I could do more to manage them. By default, Tidbyt cycles through all the apps you have installed, showing each one for 15 seconds at a time. You can drag apps around to determine the order in which they appear, and you can shorten the switching time to five seconds, but you can’t make it longer — and I want it to be longer. More than that, what I want is a way to freeze it in one app, kind of like pressing “hold” on a thermostat to keep it at one temperature instead of running the normal schedule. You can technically schedule when apps run and when they don’t, so you can a kind of reverse engineer this setup, but it’s a lot more work than it should be.

Without this kind of control, you’ll really only want to add apps to Tidbyt that you plan to use all the time. I ride the D.C. subway sometimes, but not every day, and it was annoying to look at the schedule on days I didn’t care. Nyan Cat was fun – but not enough to look at once a minute 24 hours a day.

Throughout the time I’ve been using Tidbyt, I’ve constantly vacillated between appreciating how little it does and wishing it could do a little more. It’s a great looking desk clock and with a speaker would make a great alarm clock, but not me really i want this thing to scream at me all day. It would be nice to be able to scroll through my apps manually, but I also don’t want to turn my Tidbyt into something I have to walk around and interact with.

Here’s where I landed: a button. I wish Tidbyt had one, single, custom button at the top. This button may be fully programmable—both the hardware and software are easy to take apart and work with, which Singh told me is a key part of its purpose—but I’d only use it as a way to stop and start Tidbyt’s rotation of app: one tap to freeze it on whatever app is currently showing so I can show the clock and forecast most of the time, another tap to start cycling between whatever I’m installed.

I don’t think I’ll be getting my button anytime soon, but the Tidbyt team is working on more controls for the software. “It’s definitely limited right now,” says Singh, “but it’s simple. It’s very predictable. There are a lot of things we can do, like add a schedule or let you put an app on hold or change the amount of time an app is displayed – the question is how to do that and give you a user experience that makes sense. The whole point of Tidbyt, he says, is that you don’t have to use to be useful and he doesn’t want to lose it.

The other thing that Tidbyt currently lacks is multi-user support. For a device that is likely to be placed in people’s homes, the fact that you can only control it from a phone is a problem. The team says it’s working on that as well, as well as better controls for homes with multiple Tidbyts.

After a few days of playing with all of Tidbyt’s apps, I ended up keeping just three: one showing the forecast; one shows the next event on my calendar; and one is a delightfully pixelated photo of my two dogs. Tidbyt flips between them every 15 seconds.

As a result, my Tidbyt is basically a superpowered desk clock. Of course, $179 is an awful lot for a super-powerful desk clock, and it doesn’t offer anything you can’t get with a quick glance at your phone. It also offers a lot less than you’d get from a smart display from Google or Amazon, many of which you can find for much less. But I like the idea of ​​these lightweight, bypassing gadgets that have the information I need, but don’t shove it in my face with push notifications or try to lure me into doomscrolling every time I look. I like what Tidbyt stands for even more than I like the device itself. I don’t even want it to do more things! I just want to control it better.

Photo by David Pearce/The Verge