I love my remarkable 2. Bought it before "Connect" was a thing, so I don't have a subscription. But I cannot recommend it to anyone. There are better alternatives out there and MyDeepGuide (youtube) has reviewed them all better than I ever could.
The software is moving too slowly and often in a wrong direction. Especially since they released the keyboard folio most updates were around typing (which is supar on any eink device)... and they generally made my experience as a pen user worse.
I don't care if the new hardware is awesome, whenever mine breaks I will switch to a competitor.
I've owned a rm2 since xmas 2020 and really used to love it. I even brought an old obsidian plugin for it back from the dead. But the power button gave up 13 months in and they were dicks about it, and then when the pen nib holder disintegrated and they insisted it wasn't a known defect, I just gave up and it's been sat on my shelf ever since.
For anyone still into them though, a Lamy EMR pen coupled with the Wacom felt pen nibs (pn ACK22213) is an incredible upgrade which makes it feel like a real fineliner. Similarly, I found the various titanium nibs that you can get off amazon made it feel like a real ballpoint [0].
They absolutely know about this, given that the seemingly reworked markers for this tablet have a redesigned nib holder that doesn't look like it breaks as easily as the old ones.
This is a common enough issue that there are people on ebay selling caps to replace the broken nib holder, but they seem to expensive for what amounts to a piece of 3D-printed plastic; I might just look into your solution with the lamy pen. It's just a shame that reMarkable is handling those issues so badly. They force you to buy a new pen for $130 because a little piece of broken plastic.
Not sure if country of residence makes any difference (I’m in EU), but at least I got a new pen from warranty when the nib holder broke. And I think it was even little over 2 years after the purchase.
I'm typing this on my Boox Note Air 2 Plus. I absolutely love this device. I usually use it without the backlight, but sometimes at night I'll use the backlight and the adjustable blue light filter is an absolute must. This is my fifth or sixth E-Ink device, and probably my favorite. It's an Android device, so everything that I was already using works on it. Notably Firefox when properly configured, and Ankidroid.
As I don't have an Android eink device (I do have an Android phone and a Kobo with KOReader, for the record), I would like to know: have you tried (and what are your opinions on) any apps designed specifically for eink screens?
Thinking about EInkBro [0] as the browser or ReLaunchX [1] as the launcher, even KOReader as document reader.
EInkBro is terrific. I filed a bug last year, the dev fixed it in less than a week. I use the stock launcher, but on an old Nook I used ReLaunchX, it was fine. On that device I only had two applications that I used anyway.
I have not tried KOReader, but I can test it for you. What features do you use?
I'll second EinkBro as an awesome browser. I absolutely cannot stand anything else on my e-book reader: Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, Firefox/Android, Onyx's NeoBrowser (rebranded Chromium), and DDG Privacy Browser installed, I only use those if EinkBro blows up for some reason, which it very rarely does.
I've had a lot of interactions with the developer and the GitHub repo, and he's been quite responsive. Hasn't addressed everything, but several features added and bugs get smashed fast.
- Termux, of course. Linux-on-Android userland. There's a suite of related apps which I also install (e.g., Termux:API and Termux:Styling.) There's a black-on-white theme which works quite well (default is white-on-black, not so much).
- F-Droid. FOSS archive repo, independent of Google Play.
- Aurora Store. Alternative interface to Google Play.
- APK Mirror. Direct access to app installs, though not managed (no updates).
- Hacker's Keyboard. Far preferable to Android or Onyx defaults.
- A podcast app. I'm using AntennaPod (FOSS), have also used PodcastRepublic in the past.
- RSS Feed reader, though I'm finding I don't make much use of this. Feeder seems to be the default.
- Internet Radio player. Transistor is one option. Not something used frequently, but handy to have.
A few others though most are very occasionally used and/or disappointments (e.g., Mozilla's Pocket App, which has been an absolute shitshow, despite potentially filling a critical niche). For the most part I avoid anything that has an account associated with it, largely to avoid distractions. Though also because tablets are shitty generative tools. Adding a Bluetooth keyboard helps slightly, but Android still throws in far too many limitations.
Oh, it was just out of curiosity, as an eInk device with a more accessible platform (compared to my old Kobo with it's old Linux system) is something I love to daydream of. Thank you for your reviews!
As for KOReader, I mostly use the epub reading capabilities, and the FTP client for getting files onto it. I've tried it as an app on my Android phone but it felt a bit cumbersome in a smaller screen, and I think the faster refresh rate of LCD panels doesn't suit it well. I do really love it on my Kobo, though.
Koreader handles the reading part perfectly on my Boox device. For ftp I use the default Boox functionality which works well for me. Einkbro is good but I ultimately stick to Firefox for the sync between devices. No experience with other launchers as I don't use any other apps and the default one doesn't bother me
+1 for Kobo on Boox. +20 for EInkBro (which I use with Bazqux reader for awesome RSS experience).
Some other apps that work (not amazingly but they do work well enough ) are Todoist, readwise reader (hard to use but good to have locally to check excerpts and notes), Syncthing and obsidian (but only to read notes in case to want to check something)
Blinklist (?) audio reader worked too. Outlook too. But most of these apps I just use them to look things up and avoid switching to phone when reading (I leave the phone in my room while at home)
I just worry about using Android… this sort of e-ink device seems somehow even more personal than a laptop or cellphone (which are already quite personal); like a journal or something. I’d love one that had a community developed OS, like Linux or BSD.
Exactly, I'm avoiding them for the same reason, I don't want to use a personal e-ink device running on an OS created by the biggest advertiser in the world.
I was hoping Pocketbook would release something new this year running some Linux distro / with less tracking, and more privacy.
PS. Also: i want a light sensor to automatically adjust brightness/night mode based on lighting conditions (previous Pocketbook models don't have this.)
Can AOSP be installed on the Boox (10.3) though? I thought the bootloader was locked…
In any case, i think going this route might be very finicky, i’m afraid it would become a new hobby just to get it up and running / and keep it updated.
No, it is locked and furthermore DOA because devices don't get version updates after release. E.g. my ultra C comes and dies with Android 13... In late 2023.
By now it is more than proven that devices with community developed OSes never take off to the amount to keep a sustainable business, and then there is the whole FOSS OS distribution politics on top.
I really do love mine too, and support has been rather good. I do worry about it reaching end of life, but only mildly. I do wish that boox would open source their android changes, they are arguably the best in class features for eink, and beat the pants off systems like the Kindle
I actually did love the E-Ink display algorithms, but maybe two months ago an update changed them and it is far worse. Lots of dithering, and I have a hard time configuring the "Enhance dark colours" and "Enhance light colours" settings to display apps as good as they were prior. Don't upgrade the OS!
Every time I look at it I get turned off by Android 11 being so old. I don’t know the Google ecosystem as well, how much longer will that API version be supported? Does it get security updates? Can I unlock it and install something less Googled?
Every single update has made my reMarkable tablet worse. I’ve stopped using it as a result.
I have absolutely no idea why they went all in on keyboard input, when the whole freaking point of the tablet was that you could write on it like paper.
I've been using a reMarkable since the first release and have never experienced what you describe. Yes, the updated focus on typing more recently - but what else can they really do for the writing experience without new hardware? Lots of updates I don't care about, but none that make it "worse".
The Remarkable “community” is full of people like this — especially on Reddit.
99% of the time they have some comically unique workflow that Remarkable “needs” to support or they want to read ebooks on the thing and have it be better than a Kindle (which they also hate) or something else that if they did any research before buying would have (hopefully) dissuaded them.
An eink device not being great at reading books is silly. These devices are especially compelling for academics, but Remarkable has no links to reference managers like Zotero. It also is radically dependent on your computer or phone for getting material on/off, when an integration with Readwise for instance would fit naturally into people’s flow and not require cluttering up the filesysten with temporary material like news articles. Search over handwriting is bad to impossible, and there’s no mechanism to link to another note or another page, a now standard feature on all competitors except the Kindle Scribe that helps solve the “I can’t flip back and forth in my notebook” problem common to all electronic notebooks.
People’s frustration is that it could do radically more that way would really enhance functionality and utility for a lot of people, without hurting its distraction free nature, but they refuse to do so. The thing doesn’t even support comic book archives, and the new one has a great color screen!
I really hate accidentally hitting the text input button when reaching out to change my pen/tool. All other tools I can easily just spam and click through, but the text one is slow and messes up the display with the virtual keyboard. I get the physical keyboard, but the virtual one has so far only annoyed me.
> but what else can they really do for the writing experience without new hardware?
Great handwriting conversion, search in notes and converted text (not just relying tags to find stuff), great pdf annotation (not just highlighting and keywords here and there, but rather space all around the page for note taking), digests with commands, creating and extracting parts of text using parsed annotations, etc. I have a RM2 and I barely use it because it is simply too barebones and lacks precisely these features that I would expect from such a device.
Instead they're focusing on making it into a poor mans laptop.
I imagine a lot of people bought reMarkables, enjoyed the stylus handwriting for a few weeks, and then remembered that they actually prefer typing to writing by hand. So the product shifted to become a keyboard-driven device with an e-ink screen that incidentally offers handwriting as a novelty, rather than a primarily handwriting-driven device.
The update which added all the keyboard features made the writing experience much worse. In particular the hand contact detection was changed in a bad way, so if became very easy to accidentally resize/zoom the display when writing.
100 times this. The hardware is great. The software sucks.
I literally can't believe in 2024 it's still not straight forward to "send a blog post from my phone to my remarkable" without some mangling happening along the way. It was genuinely jawdropping for me, I ended up contacting an employee on LinkedIn to confirm that this wasn't a well supported workflow
Other people in this thread are saying that you can run your own software on it. If that is the case, it should be easy to integrate whatever you want, or am I mistaken?
Friend, like 50% of the content on this website is blog posts. Are there only six of us? Are all these accounts just bots? Are you even real? Am I even real????
I 100% agree with this - hardware is great but the software is terrible and it isn't being improved. They think of themselves as Apple in terms of the design but they forget that Apple also has decent software.
A couple of other things:
- The Connect subscription: you don't need to use it if you use a USB connector to your computer and run the reMarkable app (but it's annoying). Because they use a custom OS they can't have a Dropbox, Google Drive, or One drive app. If they used Android than they could have this.
- They have a document type called Notebook. You can create a Notebook and it comes with different templates for page designs (lined, graph, etc..). The galling thing is that they don't allow you to load your own template. You can do so if you ssh in and modify the OS but then any update destroys everything. I contacted them about this and the answer was basically "we don't give a crap".
I will NEVER buy anything from this company. They like to naval gaze at their hardware and they don't care about the software nor their users.
If anybody else is wondering whether you need a Connect subscription to use the device, it seems the answer is no[1].
I watched the linked video and got kind of excited about buying one, and I was wondering about whether they'd pull the move of making me pay them a subscription to even use the thing I already paid them to own. That would basically make the whole device a non-starter for me.
Somewhere in the midst of this, I realized the actual reason I won't buy it is that I have no real use case for it, even though I think the technology is cool. Your mileage may vary.
I excitedly went to that channel. I'm overwhelmed! Can you tell me the top three devices he recommends so I can review those videos? Man, he makes a lot of stuff!
I believe he has said the Supernote A5X is his favourite. There's a newer A5X2 coming out later this year to update it (though it has repeatedly been delayed)
I have a Supernote A5X! It's great! I got it to replace my old rm and never looked back. I also recently bought the Supernote A6X2. Not sure which I prefer size-wise. Sometimes the smaller A6X2 is great, especially for reading. Other times drawing on the A5X is more comfortable.
One thing I don't like about the A6X2 is that there is a noticeable gap between the screen and the pen. This gap isn't there (or maybe is just way smaller) on the A5X. The screen on the A6X2 is also textured, I guess to try to mimic paper, but I grew to like the gel pen feel of the A5X screen.
Looking at the video there is a significant lag in the rendering. Is it noticeable when you're writing? Also looks like there is no pressure sensitivity so all the notes are come out in that ugly fat style. Maybe I'm just spoiled with my Wacom though!
> Looking at the video there is a significant lag in the rendering. Is it noticeable when you're writing?
Speaking from my experience with a remarkable, not on that device.
I think two factors contribute to this. One is that there are different rendering modes, and it uses a very fast one for updating pen strokes so there is less delay than you would guess by looking at larger updates. The other is that the stylus obscures the very end of the line anyways.
I regret buying mine. I like my Sony dpts1 much better which was 13 inches (a great size for reading book pdfs) while managing to be lighter somehow. I also used that to take university notes and do university cs homework.
I just can't recommend an e-book reader that's smaller than a piece of A1 paper if its purpose is to replace A1 sized paper (either books or notebooks)
A4 paper has a diagonal of about 364mm (≈14.3 inches). I've not seen an e-paper e-book reader that big. Several companies lie and claim to have A4 screens when they're considerably smaller.
The kind of ebook reader you open to the crossword puzzle and say "harrumph" an awful lot whilst sitting in your high back wing chair in front of the fireplace where discrete employees refill your brandy snifter. You may occasionally bend down one corner of the ebook reader as you peer askance at the likes of who they are letting in these days. There is a member of staff whose sole job it is to stand nearby with a real news paper and snap the pages to show your displeasure as you return to crossword. Five down, "someone who adds nothing to the conversation beyond pointing out the minor flaws in another's statements." Begins with P... With P... Hmmm...
;-)
I kind of like this A1 ebook idea. Time to get out the wallet.
Last time I shopped for an e-ink device (as a gift for my brother), I considered the remarkable, and even purchased one. Ended up returning it. It's just too limited in too many unnecessary ways.
I got a supernote instead. He couldn't be happier with it.
I believe what you say is true for the average HN reader. I also believe the subscription is kind of ridiculous.
However, I also believe there is a market out there for a device like this that is 1) extremely limited and 2) very focused on a few specific tasks (handwriting and document review workflow)
Sometimes the other stuff is a distraction. My wife owns the remarkable 2 and it is really good for what she wants ("just" a replacement for paper).
There aren't many companies for whom I have love like Remarkable. All I've ever wanted is hardware that isn't needlessly closed or locked down, that is hacker friendly. Remarkable mostly delivered that.
But it feels like they've been increasingly moving away from that, especially where the openness now competes with their cloud subscription.
Given the amount of love the open source community has shown Remarkable, I think they could let the community build some amazing software for them. This would be doubly beneficial because the software is the weak point currently for the Remarkable. If they were to open source the existing software, even with a CLA copyright assignment, I bet there'd be a huge influx of people contributing.
I hope with this new Paper Pro that they are moving in the direction of openness/hackability and not more closed like they did with the Remarkable 2. Would love to hear from people who have tried the Paper Pro about how that is.
Side note: If you haven't gotten the RCU utility application, you definitely should! It's a great tool[1]
Pretty classic enshittification. I expect one response might end up being 'contract' developers who sign a contract of 3 years to develop an application and then after three years they go out and find a new contract.
I reason to this because software in hardware produces revenue only during hardware sales which typically fall off after the initial wave. Without continual revenue your business model goes upside down when you have developers for whom you don't have any work. So we get bullshit work and eventually we get 'RMR' or recurring monthly revenue because well we need to pay these folks.
Of course building an enterprise like that would require retooling your process with massive emphasis on sustainable build tools that are 'done' and similarly libraries. We massive documentation on taking the product firmware out of the archive and re-createing the entire build / test workflow with new developers.
A company like that might have 500 developers during initial product development and first shipments, that then reduces down to 10 or fewer for maintenance needs.
The surprising thing is that a lot of open source is actually kind of like this, a new 'thing' is out there and the number of people making contributions grows, and then it is 'shipped' or 'done' and the number of contributors reduces down to a handful, sometime zero, developers. Growing again when a zero day or CVE needs to be fixed and then back to zero. Because its OSS nobody is paying them, or maybe they are being paid by another company that uses the package and needs a fix, but the whole software development model is going to be completely changed over the next 10 - 20 years.
I think that's an interesting insight. Another model like this is game development, most games are built with an explicit intention to not maintain that code forever, to stop development as soon as possible.
... and a lot of games rely on fans for fixing the remaining (often critical) issues. Not exactly something that should even remotely be acceptable for productivity software.
I have a remarkable 2 but don't use it much anymore, mainly because it doesn't have a backlight.
Oh, and page turning swipes were hit or miss. that was annoying.
I bought it for the same reasons you allude to - open, not locked down, cannot enshittify something you don't have to update. I didn't really buy it for the pen.
I tried a 6" kobo klara 2E for a while. You can mount it as a USB device, but you have to hack it somewhat to get "sideloading" of books to work. Nice device, but 6" was a little smaller than I wanted.
But then I found the Pocketbook Inkpad Lite.
It is my primary reader now. 9.7" screen with backlight.
No account, no subscription, no hacking to get it to work.
Out of the box, just hook to usb, transfer yoru files, start reading.
Also, it will read most file formats directly - so if you want to use .mobi instead of .epub, that works. It also says .azw, but I haven't tried it.
What did you find hard about sideloading on the Kobo? I've had a Clara and now a Libra, sideloading books is as easy as plugging in a USB cable and clicking and dragging files onto it like it's a usb stick.
It's optional, but you can use Calibre with an extension to convert epub to kepub as well.
So according to the "deep guide" video review, this uses E Ink's "Gallery 3" e-paper screen. Which, unlike conventional displays, doesn't use additive subpixel color mixing.
Instead it uses subtractive color mixing inside each pixel: It layers transparent cyan, magenta and yellow, and opaque white pigments, over each other. Which creates cyan, magenta, yellow and white as primary colors, and red, green, blue and black as secondary colors. Other shades are then created via dithering those eight base colors. So it works very similar to an inkjet printer.
Since it doesn't use subpixels, the screen seems to have a similar brightness to greyscale E Ink displays, which is reasonably close to printed paper. However, the color saturation is clearly still not quite on the level of actual printed paper.
And of course the reaction times are not as fast as LCD/OLED. As is well known, E Ink uses electrophoresis e-paper screens, where solid electrically charged pigments are moved around in a liquid, which is a slow process. It also still requires a "deghosting" refresh once the screen changes, but interestingly those refreshs are now only applied to the parts of the screen which actually have changed pixel values, which looks significantly less distracting in my opinion.
Japan Display Inc showcased e-paper like LCD 11 years ago. It even has e-paper features like retained pixel at low power consumption. With further work notetaking will be possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=mdXu9jmTI2A
Some 10 to 15 years ago many companies worked on reflective screens, but most all seem to have been abandoned following the dominance of E Ink's monochrome electrophoresis displays.
This makes you wonder if they are hitting some sort of physical limit regarding e-ink technology and color representation. If they are forced to dither them like they are doing now, will we ever get good saturation with e-ink?
I had a reMarkable 2 and gave up it almost solely because it didn't support USB mass storage (like Kobo devices do), making it really annoying to transfer files. Also, their software update made the reader worse, since I went from being able to manually crop the page to fit the viewport to having to carefully pinch-zoom with a bunch of latency and really weird sensitivity. And they seem oddly insistent they're not a reading device anyways; if they supported ePub 3 (particularly ePub 3 fixed layout - again, Kobo supports this) that would have made it a nice comics machine, but no. (And their weird web interface choked if you tried to transfer "large" books.)
100K JPY too, which is in the range of an iPad Air. I hope some of these software issues get ironed out and maybe I'll consider it again...
> Remarkable 2 and gave up it almost solely because it didn't support USB mass storage, making it really annoying to transfer files
We had hoped to buy these for all our paperless office employees, and gave it up almost solely because it was far too easy to transfer files.
If they deliver a device with on-device encryption (as this claims) and sync or manual transfer tied (and locked) to company-owned storage, we'd buy them for all our Pro(fessionals).
To your point, instead we give our professionals iPad Air with Paperlike™ for pencil-feel and a keyboard for on-the-go use. We'd rather (for reasons) give them Remarkable Pros if it was capable of meeting Professional data-loss-prevention (DLP) needs.
There are jobs where producing a paper notebook is the primary deliverable. Fewer than there were, due to y'know, computers. But it still happens.
It's odd to describe that as confiscation. A lab notebook belongs to the lab, not the researcher, this is understood by both parties. They may or may not have permission to leave the lab with it, but making personal copies of the pages would be espionage.
It's perfectly reasonable to want comparable properties in a paper-replacing device. I can see where you might find that jarring if you haven't been exposed to work conditions where it's normal and expected.
I worked at company that required all paper notebooks to be handed in and destroyed. There are entire companies based on destroying sensitive paper documents.
If you can transfer gigabytes of data with a paper notebook then I’m really impressed! But seriously this is similar to banning usb flash drives and the like, it’s not that unusual.
I used to work at a federal contractor. Any paper you bring to the building /never/ leaves again. I liked to keep notes in a legal pad and would just shred them.
As you see in sibling replies, in many industries where a given hand writable concept has intellectual property value readily assessed in the millions to billions, and/or the deliverable itself may be in written or sketch form, it's quite often true that:
(a) employees aren't allowed to have/use their own paper notebooks in the first place
(b) if they do, then, yes, the notebooks don't leave unless Security reviews (if removal is even allowed)
However, any number of such traditional approaches stop working when remote work is a thing.
Technologies are needed if a firm wishes to retain the same level of awareness of what's happening to its IP while allowing employee flexibility (which, hopefully, firms are learning they should strive to allow).
Not the OP, but eInk tablets are banned at our work for the same reason, and paper notebooks don't get destroyed.
I one of the reasons is it's easier for a malignant actor to get access to notes without you knowing when it's electronic. At least with a paper notebook you can tell if it's missing.
Similar experiences with the reMarkable 1. The USB interface really bugs me. It's nice for annotating and highlighting PDFs, but pretty bad for reading. Great for taking notes, but awful at extracting them, unless you get an expensive subscription to their "cloud" garbage, which feels extortionate considering how expensive the device is.
But, afaik, they keep an index and some extra files in their own format to track them [0], so you can't "just" upload the files. You need a tool to do that additional work.
I've switched to exclusively using SSH on my Kobo, because I find it less effortful. The connection procedure consists of enabling wifi on the Kobo and clicking on the sftp bookmark in my file browser.
What's wrong with the USB web interface of the remarkable, though? It is quite spartan, but I haven't updated mine in ages, so I imagine they have improved it.
The workflow is plug -> web browser -> remarkable IP -> drag and drop.
What does the customer gain from having a web interface you have to navigate to by IP rather than a simple external storage device that shows up like a flash drive?
I think one reason for the web interface is that the device stays usable. If it would export a block device then it would need to unmount the file system on itself or at least block changes. If I remember correctly in the old days before MTP, all Android did this, making storage on the device itself unavailable while making it available via USB.
That's still quite a bit more than just plug -> drag and drop, also especially because sometimes I had to manually bring up the interface, and remember some IP that I might only use every week or two at most. (I guess I could set up a bookmark, sure.) Also, it chokes on large-ish files (it would just never upload, no indication in the UI), so I had to split up books.
Anyways, I think I could have dealt with it if it handled large books fine.
I love my Remarkable, it forces me to stay in creativity mode without jumping to the internet since it doesn't have a browser. That being said, the inability to simply put your own templates in the machine and have them persist through and update is so close to being a showstopper for me that I am not sure I would consider buying a new one.
The RM2 template manager is great, but you have to update your templates after every firmware update and I hate that with a passion!
I have scripted this (well, installation of some systemd units, but the workflow is the same). So I just plug my tablet into my laptop and run my script every time it updates.
It’s not ideal, but not super tedious either.
I’ve been planning to start charging via a raspberry pi so that the pi can automatically tend to the device whenever it’s connected, but haven’t gotten there yet.
Why not script it over ssh (wifi), preference or is not as simple as I imagine? (never used one but the ability to get shell and be able to rsync files is one of the reasons I consider a remarkable).
I could be misinformed though, haven't researched it a lot.
Firmware updates blow away any customizations. So you need to bootstrap things again after each update.
Updates can be deferred, so the process isn’t too disruptive.
Edit: oh, yeah I see what you’re getting at. That direction could work, and I used to do that years ago, as it turns out, but these days I am frequently not on a familiar WiFi network when I’m using the tablet, so cabling has been more practical.
IME IP addresses handed out by my phone’s tethering mode aren’t stable, so it’s sorta more of a hassle than just fishing out the little cable and letting my script run. (The device assigns itself a stable IP address on the USB interface.)
Although I haven’t looked at those addresses in some time; perhaps they are more stable now than they used to be.
It’s easier than that with the remarkable tablet — the device documents its current ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. But it’s several taps away, and then typing on the laptop keyboard, whereas USB is just a connector away. Plus, you need to charge anyways.
Many rM owners (myself included) work around the template limitations by using pdfs as "templates" and writing on them. This covers probably 95% of my use of the device, their notebooks feel very limited by comparison
If you do it this way, can you move pages around within the notebook, across different notebooks, add additional pages, delete pages, change the template for a specific page, etc? Seems like a rather crude workaround
On the reMarkable at least, you can:
* move pages around in the pdf
* add or duplicate pages
* delete pages
You can't:
* move a page to another notebook
* change the template for a page (though you can duplicate a page with that template, and then move it to where the first page was)
I had an iPad Air, which I changed for a reMarkable 2 and I couldn't be happier! I see a lot of people here commenting about the limitations of it, and I get it. For me personally those limitations are features.
My needs are mostly note taking and reading technical PDFs, and for that the reMarkable is fantastic. I used it extensively while taking Calculus, which, it was great to use as many pages as I needed and to write as big as I wanted without worrying about "wasting" paper.
I miss background light from time to time, which I think is a great addition.
I'm not super familiar with alternatives so I can't say that is better than X or Y, but I personally have been moving as much as I can to single purpose electronic devices. That allows me to be more focus and not fight my device wanting to distract me. That takes out every eInk table that has android for me, I don't want a yet another multipurpose device that I need to develop discipline to use it!
On that line, I love my kindle, but that spends about 90% of the time in airplane mode, because, again, the kindle is for readin, the reMarkable for taking notes and reading Datasheets and such...
> My needs are mostly note taking and reading technical PDFs, and for that the reMarkable is fantastic.
I do both of those and I dislike the RM2. There's little space for notes above and below the PDF page, no infinite canvas. I have more space on the back of a printed PDF (to the left of the current text page) than in the RM2. So, all note taking in a PDF for me is just keywords, while I would much prefer to put text and drawing,s graphs, etc. all around the PDF page.
So, for the last few months I have barely used the RM2 and have gone back to pen and paper.
Try checking for software updates? My RM2 got infinite canvas in an update some time ago.
That said, I don't really use that feature and find it annoying when I accidentally move the canvas instead of turning to the next page.
This whole paper tablet space looks like a place full of tradeoffs where it's hard to please everyone... IMHO overall remarkable is doing that balancing act quite well.
Yes, in notes themselves there's an infinite canvas towards the bottom. I meant a canvas around a PDF to take notes alongside the paper - which is 50% of my use case.
I don't feel it balances the features well, just today they released another update for their keyboard support. For me, that's setting false priorities for a device that's designed for handwriting.
My RM2 is sitting in a drawer. I really wanted to like it and build it into my daily workflow, but the software never made me feel I was being productive. Scrolling through notes is incredibly slow, so any attempt to reference a past note was just met with frustration and yearning for a paper notebook.
Same story with my reMarkable 2. It's one purchase I still regret years later. I take a lot of handwritten notes and bought the reMarkable to keep them organized and indexed for full-text search. Well, the writing recognition turned out to be too imprecise and clunky to use, with many manual steps required and nothing even close to transparent background indexing that lets you search handwritten notes (okay, expecting that is a failure of expectations and product research on my part, but still, it felt like an obvious feature to go with the sync subscription...). Worse, having to put up with e-ink latency when typing out a search query quickly proved to be too tedious, and the software doesn't help, as you can't even do text search across all notebooks, only within a single one (what's the point of having directory and notebook hierarchies, then?) And that's the core functionality, secondary stuff like reading ebooks is even worse. It kind of exists, but the experience compared to say the recent Kindles is absolutely subpar. It's not just software though, I also couldn't get used to the feel of the pen, it's too taxing to use for any non-trivial note taking and the lag, while impressively short for an e-ink device, is still there. Honestly, I regret getting swayed by all the positive reviews I'd seen on HN. I'm sure there are use cases where the reMarkable works better, maybe PDF annotation or sketching, but I don't feel it measurably improves on the paper note taking experience, and I don't feel it justifies the steep price if that's what you buy it for.
> I'm sure there are use cases where the reMarkable works better, maybe PDF annotation
I can tell you right now that taking handwritten notes and annotating PDFs are my primary use cases and my RM2 has not been in use for several months now. It's just not as good as even pen and paper, let alone a Supernote, for example. Few features, imprecise screen, no search, etc. It took them one a half years after I bought it to introduce drawing of straight lines, and besides that they're apparently focusing on their keyboard - for an expensive device that should primarily be used for handwritten notes, instead of trying to be a laptop.
Reminds me of my old livescribe pen i had as an undergrad. It was a ballpoint-pen with a little computer inside and a camera pointing down the tip of the pen. You'd use it with special notebooks that had very small dot-patterns printed on the paper, and the computer could decode that to get its position on the page. Then you'd plug it into your PC's USB port to upload a digital copy of your notes. There was surprisingly-good OCR to make it searchable and also the pen had a microphone that recorded what your professor was saying during any given penstroke. And that's in addition to having the physical notebook the ballpoint pen wrote on.
Looks like they still exist but they haven't done much in the last 15 years. They used to make these high-quality leather-bound notebooks but now it seems they only have cheap spiral-bound ones. Worse, the pen still costs about $200 so it's not in anyway competitive with remarkable.
I'm contemplating going to grad school and I might try to dig up my old livescribe pen if I can find it (I think I saw it a year or two ago in some box of assorted odds and ends) but the lack of high-quality journals is a disappointment and if I can't find my old livescribe pen I'd rather try out remarkable than spend 10x as much on a nearly-dead product that had far more potential but seems to be on life-support.
Wish livescribe would at least open-source their software if they no longer care about it.
I had one of those. It also had some audio transcription capability, so you could take notes aligned with a lecture and then tap a letter on the page to play the audio that was recorded when you wrote it.
I never used it extensively but I remember it also had a nice integration with EverNote. That was truly a bygone era of productivity tools that are now zombie companies…
looks great and, at the same time, it seems they didn't address the single biggest problem I (and many, many, many other people) reported over the years :-( I even wrote about it here on HN in 2021 and nothing has really changed on that front.
I have a Remarkable 2 and the device is great, software is improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those notes later on is next to impossible.
OCR is very bad and basically makes indexing and full-text searching impossible (and off device)
It's funny, I would have thought that OCR on handwriting on a tablet would be great, because they can capture each individual stroke, rather than just the final pixelated product. In other words, because you're witnessing it being written, there's a lot more information. In fact I wouldn't even call it OCR because it's not "optical", but rather "stroke" -- SCR?
Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet tries to do and fails? Or is it only trying to OCR after-the-fact, in which case I'm not surprised it's terrible.
there is no OCR on device fullstop, which in itself would be fine if it happened async in the background.
You can use the OCR feature only in the companion desktop app, explicitly selecting pages you want to run the process on. The result is better than it used to be but still not great and, importantly, it does NOT seem they make any difference if you later on do a search on the device
This is the biggest issue for me as well.
Seems that the OCR has to be triggered manually, for each page of each notebook. Which of course I don't remember to do and now there are too many.
The search doesn't appear to search across notebooks either.
The experience that I would want (expect) is that OCR happens in the background, all the time, no need to trigger and that I can then search for a word/string and find all the notes on that topic.
I've fallen back to tags and dates in filenames to have any chance of tracking down old meeting notes.
Well, you can do OCR while using the device but... it's not on device. The device has to be connected to the Internet for OCR to work. I've never checked where does it connect to do it, as I never use it...
Apple newton did it. They required you to stroke your letters in a pedantically correct way because it used the stroke path, not the end pixel appearance, to detect letters.
I genuinely liked the Palm Graffiti. It took a couple of days of playing Giraffe to get used to it, but afterwards the speed and precision was quite decent. Of course it's nothing compared to modern swipe keyboards but still.
Agreed, I often miss Palm's Graffiti input, I don't remember it well at all at this point I think I tried a similar input on android and went back to gesture keyboard. Of course, I kind of miss even developing for Palm as well, which was far simpler an experience than what Android and iOS are today.
That got a lot better w/ v2 of Rosetta (also known as Calligrapher).
Recognition for me was about perfect, and I took notes on my Newton MessagePad using a 3rd party outliner in almost all of my college classes (art history was the exception --- used the main Newton app for that, along w/ little sketches and reference folios to the text which I then faxed to the fax machine in the Art Department's office for a student who had a learning disability which prevented his taking notes --- turns out that he then shared them with everyone in the dorms, which I found out about after the course was over when the professor noted how much better everyone's grades were that year and how she had found out when asking other students.
I had a Sony-Erickson phone with a resistive touch screen and full keyboard and a stylus. Very futuristic for the aughts! They also forced writing letters in a very specific way, in order to trigger OCR.
In the old Palm Pilot days the way the OCR worked is you had to do the strokes in a special software approved manner, your natural stroke motion wasn't acceptable, you were expected to learn to write in a special shorthand system called Graffiti.
I'd imagine going by stroke order would be a bit tricky since a lot of people don't write the way their teachers taught them to write. (Think anybody with bad handwriting).
I'm absolutely fine without OCR and searching if they can give us working links. All I want to do is to be able to doodle a star on a page, or a word, and have that work as a link off to another page in another notebook. That's all you need for a zettelkasten-style system to hold your notes in but I've not seen anyone do it.
Supernote has links, as does Boox. There is a specific Star based system for Supernote but I never quite got the hang of that, but I use the linking features extensively to link to pages of PDFs for more extended notes about them, and to serve as a sort of directory / tree structure for notes and subjects. I keep my notes structure fairly flat for that reason, there aren’t many folders.
I’d’ve shelled out $800 first thing this morning for an RM Pro if they added linking across the system.
Seems like they've improved the processor (at least the latency is lower) and that might help to add new features or improve pdf responsiveness, but they're still lacking on the software side, and even simple QOL features like the ones that rmhacks adds aren't available by default.
I feel like it falls short on the reading side (not searching, dictionary, note management...), and short on the notes side (simple drawing tools, no dashed lines, no shapes, and I think you can't even position text on the wherever you like on the page).
I really liked the initial hackability, as you have SSH access to the Linux inside the device, and people was building software to run on it, but seems like due to some changes since v3.4 of the firmware, it's either very difficult (or not possible) to do it, and the ideas I had for using it aren't feasible right now.
The price for the color model is (at least in Europe) already higher than a Boox Note Air3C, that's a full fledged Android tablet. Of course, the battery won't last as long even with all the optimizations, but is a bit lighter, has more resolution, and you can put whatever software you like that runs in Android. I haven't tested the software, though...
I was hoping rM3 will be about improved OCR, and ideally a GPT chat app with integrated pen - just use GPT4v or something. Their AI integrations are shit.
Yeah... New product looks fantastic, but finding your notes will still be a pain. You have to be diligently organized with folders and notebooks to find anything.
Agreed. I got the RM2 because I thought it’d be “a notebook I can search.” No. I regret every piece of writing that has ended up locked up inside that device vs on paper notebooks.
In ambient light the contrast is worse on the Daylight than the RM2 - the screen background is quite significantly darker.
However, the Daylight has a backlight which increases the contrast enormously. And it’s usable in the dark which the RM2 is not. The much faster refresh rate also gives it a more fluid feel.
What I didn’t anticipate is the difference the screen makes in how I use and perceive them:
As the RM2 is so simple and static it feels more like a notebook or book reader that happens to be battery powered, whereas the Daylight is definitely a gadget.
I’m more likely to use the RM2 to take notes or do some thinking and the Daylight as something to tinker with.
The remarkable is a lot more like paper and has that simple feel.
Daylight was created for the express purpose of being a portable computer you can use in direct sunlight. It can also just be your notebook but it does so much more than take notes.
I may be a little bit biased but I'd personally prefer a non-laggy device with a little bit worse contrast.
The Daylight screen is _amazing_ for reading technical books. The pen isn't anything special, and I don't like it's thickness, but good enough to get the job done.
Afaik we put the same kind of high polling rate Wacom digitizer that remarkable uses.
Any quirks you notice between it and the daylight would be fascinating to note! Wacom is the most fluid digital pen system on the market from what we could find, especially compared to Ntrig, USI and other approaches.
Also you can use other pens other than the one we included in the box
> Any quirks you notice between it and the daylight would be fascinating to note!
Okay, my Remarkable 2 is currently broken (screen breaks more than I wish. They don't have Apple's level of reliability yet .3rd replacement), so I can't test directly at the moment.
> Also you can use other pens other than the one we included in the box
Oh cool! The pen in box is good enough for me, but now I'm going to look into getting a thin one. Thanks!
The reMarkable has better contrast, viewing angle, and resolution, the Daylight has a far better refresh rate. There are other tradeoffs between them of course, but display-wise, those are the main ones
Depends what your reference is. E-ink displays without a lot of layers (especially Carta 1250) have pretty good contrast, on par with matte paper. Some devices with a thick frontlight layer and a Wacom layer and a touch layer are less impressive.
My Onyx BOOX has at best a background comparable to very dirty newsprint.
I find myself reading with the frontlight on under most indoors circumstances, unless I'm in direct sunlight. With the frontlight, it's fine. Text may be somewhat more washed out, but that bothers me less than a darkish background.
Under sunlight the contrast is actually about perfect, as white paper tends to be too blindingly bright.
My tablet has several layers: capacitive touch, Wacom, and frontlight, all of which probably contribute to the lower contrast.
Mind: I'm addressing your "bad contrast" question. I find the trade-offs reasonable, and for reading ebooks (as opposed to Web browsing or other app use), the frontlight battery consumption is quite reasonable.
If I'm just using the device casually (e.g., listening to podcasts or checking something quickly) it's fine to use w/o the frontlight, but for immersive reading I'll either have a strong reading light, frontlight, or head for a convenient sunbeam.
It's not really a scam but rather a technology that's still in its infancy. I think of it more like the Palm Treo and Blackberry: they're not great but hopefully we're progressing towards the iPhone. I wouldn't buy one at the moment, though.
We are talking about e-ink without added edge lighting. I found that if I have to crank up the internal lighting of an e-reader to get adequate contrast, then I may as well use a tablet, because it isn’t reflective illumination anymore to the eye.
When will someone else make a device with this display? (I'm looking at you Amazon)
Could we get this display in a larger size on a general-purpose tablet w/ stylus? (I still haven't found a replacement for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 and its daylight viewable transflective display)
A smaller size for a cell phone? (with a stylus please)
How about a dual-screen device like to the Lenovo Yogabook which had an e-ink display for the lower half which would toggle between keyboard and other uses?
I'm paying $2.99/month. Got mine last year, and used it, then didn't, and started again earlier this year - was using it daily for about 4-5 months. My daily routines changed and I've not used it as much, but will be picking it up again shortly. Was more for daily journaling and planning, but not as much 'in the workday' use. I think $29/year is an annual plan (looks like a new offering) - I may switch to that.
A feature I was using some is the 'desktop connect' thing - drawing on it is synced to the desktop app pretty much live (<1s delay, ime). Doing a screen share and letting people watch me draw using it has been useful, but not something I need a lot. But... considering some of the discussions I've been having lately, perhaps I do need it more. Trying to get data relationship concepts across to people seems to do better with pictures for some folks.
EDIT: Works fine without it and paid account. I think you even get a small amount of 'sync' data for free if you create an account (5meg or something?). I seem to remember I still had some stuff synced between desktop and device even before paying. I used it for months just as a standalone device with no issues.
The OCR stuff does send the data out to the cloud, and my experience is it's not that great, but my penmanship stinks, so it's more me than it.
It sounds like they might have fixed the nibs. The rest of it is up in the air. I think infinite pages might be workable if the update rate is better, but it's also got bad ergonomics. It's far too easy to accidentally trigger a scroll. It was bad enough when all you could do was accidentally zoom, but the infinite pages update really messed with it.
This is pretty much all of my concerns as well. The top like 2/3rds of mine is pretty accurate on the tip of the pencil when writing, but on the bottom 1/3rd it's off by about 2mm and it's freaking obnoxious. It makes me hate writing on it to the point where I've gone back to real paper. I do occasionally use it for reading papers and other page-sized PDFs, but it's really not worth the cost for writing.
Pen accuracy uniformity has always been one of the bigger issues with the RM2 in comparison to its e-ink competitors. It's beyond annoying to pick up the pen to dot an "i" and see the dot appear a mm away from the rest of the letter, especially if you're writing along the right edge of the device. This is probably one of the motivations why they're ditching EMR pens in this new device.
If the new pens fix the issue, that alone is worth an upgrade, but I think it's too late for me. 1 RM Pro vs a nice notebook, pencil, eraser, lead, and iPad Air for about the same cost is just... not happening. I'm not falling for it again.
Mine actually usually has okay uniformity everywhere except about an inch from the right edge (particularly 1/3rd of the way from the top) and the magnet trick doesn't fix it for me there.
Same. I can draw a straight line down my screen, and the drawn path deviates noticeably in certain areas, despite the pen moving in a straight path. Makes writing difficult. Have to sort of trust your hand movement, rather than watching your markings on the screen. Adjusting to the drawn marks will just lead you off slanted.
I use mine mostly for drawing diagrams and sketches, and the fact that I can barely predict the start point, end point, or route that a line I'm drawing will take means that it's rough sketches at best. Enough to capture an idea but I'm reminded how far from heaven we are when I go back to a propelling pencil on sketch paper.
The addition of infinite pages made my RM2 unusable. It's far too easy to accidentally scroll, and hugely disruptive. I checked for tuning improvements for a couple of software updates, then set it aside permanently. That such a "simple" change could doom the device made me decide to go back to real paper, in all likelihood forever.
My wife has reMarkable 2, pre-ordered it before the release. If you are writing a lot or working on a text file to take notes etc. it's a great product. If you're connecting a keyboard to an e-ink device, you're doing something wrong. That's my take after seeing her using it for the last few years.
I also agree with other comments here regarding the software being too slow to develop and some dark patterns (such as subscription stuff for the new users). Feels more and more like the makes are not sure what to do and trying to shoot in every direction sometimes. You have a very good product, just make it great and that's it.
Pro tip (no pun intended): get a Lamy al-star emr pen for a better writing experience, if you are not comfortable with the default pen being too thin.
I have a cheap foldable split Bluetooth keyboard that I connect to my e-ink Boox often enough. Why not? The device has a large enough screen to be a laptop and it's very easy on the eyes. I really don't care what the typing latency is, I don't look at the keyboard nor the screen while typing.
Well, it's your device, and you can do whatever you want with it (within legal limits). But it feels like buying a 72-inch and using it as a monitor. Just because you can do something, it doesn't always mean you should do them.
(and just like that, I also made enemies with 72-inch tv people)
Self-correction: I guess that's also the direction reMarkable team wants to go with Type Folio anyways. Who am I to judge, right?
> If you are writing a lot or working on a text file to take notes etc. it's a great product.
Even for this intended purpose, I am disappointed. The screen is imprecise up to 1 mm, no search in notes, etc. I went back to paper, which is certainly not what I expected.
My first-gen Remarkable is still working fine although the software and display speed feel painfully slow these days. I even have a free "for life" Connect plan because I was an early customer...and it does work well for the most part like you would expect any cloud syncing service to do.
But I am interested in replacing it with something newer...and while years ago I was pining for color e-ink - I am not so sure it's something I need/want any more.
After seeing how fast the Daylight Computer^1 display is (60fps), and the fact that it supports a massive variety of apps because it runs Android, I think that's the route I want to go to replace my Remarkable...
I considered getting a ReMarkable a couple of years ago. My primary needs were note taking and PDF reading for studies. The ReMarkable's low powered hardware and limited app ecosystem put me off. Also, I didn't want multiple devices i.e. a tablet and a seperate note taking device.
So, I settled on getting a Samsung Tablet with a S-Pen and using the "Flexcil Notes & PDF Reader" app. The tablet was not cheaper than ReMarkable but I had access to all the apps in the Android ecosystem. The note taking app was not free and its premium features make it cost between £4.59 - £10.49 if billed through Google Play store. The app was well worth it and you can search for reviews of it on Youtube.
If you are planning on getting a ReMarkable for studying, I'd suggest to instead consider using an iPad or Android tablet with pen support instead.
Adding to this, another great option is getting a Wacom One for your laptop. They're available for 30$ and you can use desktop note taking apps like OneNote or Xournal++ if you're more comfortable with them + you have the multitasking features of a laptop OS.
I previously wrote about how difficult it was to return and get a refund on a Remarkable 2. It was hell. I would highly recommend avoiding them like the freaking plague if you're at all on the fence, because it's a hellacious process to return one.
I also assume that if you were to ever need to use the warranty for any purpose that requires returning the product it's going to be the same thing and also awful.
I appear to be in the minority where the RM2 is a perfect fit for my needs - but I can confirm that their support is aggressively anti-customer, and also non-compliant with EU consumer laws.
My device broke in warranty (< 1 year). Customer support refused replacements, finally offering a 2nd-hand / refurbished replacement (illegal according to EU law).
Despite my attempts at polite out-reach to individuals at the company, including C-level, everything was ignored until a lawyer friend sent a formal letter - and suddenly everything was magically resolved the next day.
It's such an expensive device, and each press-release makes it more and more cultish - I couldn't recommend buying this - I'll wait for a competitor to do a better job.
They even acted unhelpful in a bug report I tried to submit. I provided ample detail, and they continued to request other things that didn’t seem relevant. I supplied all version numbers, my account info, versions of my devices (iOS and Rm2), a screen recording, and I think it never got fully filed since I didn’t keep responding to them?
The bug was critical imo. The app wasn’t saving my work, and then would crash.
It’s supposed to be “like paper” plus sync. But it’s not like paper, and sync is unreliable. So, I use for an extremely narrow set of functions now. That is, editing my writing.
Ugh, that sucks. I had hoped my experience was a one off situation but I've heard from others over the past few years that they have had the same type of problem.
Too risky anymore. Is it an open box item sold as new? Is it a counterfeit? Is it actually just a brick that was sent in a box to you?
Plus, Amazon controls everything, and if we get philosophical here I'd rather support individual companies and buy my products locally if possible. I can order my furnace filters from Amazon. They are a tiny bit cheaper, but it's getting increasingly difficult to go buy them locally at a store. This trend has only gotten worse and while maybe a furnace filter is something you can wait to get a replacement for, there are other items where it's just better if you can get them the same day, particularly those that you might not be entirely sure is exactly what you want/need, and/or you're choosing sizes.
But our ability to make that type of purchase is going away because people blindly buy from Amazon, which is often more expensive than buying locally now. Gone are the days that Amazon was cheaper.
Looks neat, but not being able to do something as simple as backup and sync without a monthly subscription makes this whole ecosystem a no go for me. Especially for a device that already costs $600-800.
Did they announce they're locking this new device? I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.
This feels like something some Chinese company can put out at much cheaper price, just a barebones large e-ink tablet, for hackers and tinkerers, with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription, where they just supply the HW and the community on GitHub builds the SW for it, a-la RPi.
The hardware is easy for China, but there is a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, or it exists but is too slow to be usable. If you want to work on that software, then the pinenote is a great deal, order one and get busing writing/optimizing code. If you want a tablet that works the ReMarkable has been around for years.
For those curious, the PineNote is currently $399 + shipping, but out of stock (and has been for some time, not even mentioned on the store home page that includes just about everything else).
As someone who's been following #pinenote for the last ~3 years this isn't true, it's "not dead yet" but Pine64 refuses to ship a second batch until they have a stable community distro to ship pre-flashed. Currently the hardware support itself is sorted, and the desktop integration just needs to be sorted out.
To be honest (and as a reMarkable 2 owner), the software side of reMarkable isn't a "out of this world" experience, it's basically "just enough" to do it's job but not more than that.
For me, it’s not even enough. My remarkable is sleeping in a drawer.
I totally understand the "it’s just a notebook and nothing else" limitation. Like : ok, you can’t do anything else than using it as a notebook. Why not. It’s how it’s marketed and I bought it for that. My issues comes from the fact that it’s actually a really dumb notebook where it could have been a "better" notebook.
I mean, it’s 2024 and they still don’t allow you to create links between pages.
And the global ergonomics are pretty barebones too. Navigation is slow. Ok, it’s e-ink, e-ink is slow at rendering full pages. So maybe at least don’t make your UX be a succession of screens ? It’s like designers forgot that you can create interfaces that don’t require to redraw the entire screen between each action.
This thing is both a really beautiful and enjoyable object (the writing feeling is truly incredible) and a daily frustration of intentional limitations and laziness.
It comes from the fact that I'm tired of subscriptions, and some SW being "tailored made" is not always synonymous with very high quality. Community developed FOSS SW can sometimes be better quality and more functional than commercial SW.
For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.
Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.
I do really like Plato for its superior performance and design, but it's lacking in features and documentation at this stage. KOReader feels like a flimsy hack written in lua, mainly because it is, but it does support SSH, two columns, grid view, more flexible gestures and extensions.
Why is it fascinating they suck at it? That's what every monopoly does, rentseek. It's not that they can't do better, it's that's there's no incentive for them to do before. Kind of like Google and their search getting worse and worse.
First of all, you are comparing two desktop environments that have been around for almost the same amount of time. KDE is extremely mature, both because of its age and its popularity. This is not the case with some niche e-ink products.
Secondly, you cannot even remotely compare the software needed for document rendering with the one for hand writing. The former is a very mature ecosystem and you can just write a UI on top of muPDF and port it to your platform to have a feature complete solution. The latter instead requires a wealth of expertise in how humans write and draw to develop both the drivers and the user land applications. Take the Librem phone or the PinePhone as exampleS. it took nothing to port Firefox or GIMP or DOOM to them, and yet the feel of their UI is terrible. Writing your PIN to unlock them lags, inputs are laggy, moving across the UI is slow and buggy. They are worse than the first iphone from almost 20 years ago, even though plenty of good developers have worked on them
> with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription
I am also not a fan of the subscription model & pricing scheme but I guess that is how they want to pay back their investors. However, besides this they are (relatively speaking) also a pretty open company with a sizable community on github maitaning a lot of custom tools / applications. They do not provide official support for these modifications, but these tablets are definitely not locked-in like an ipad or impossible to tinker with because of obscure undocumented chinese hardware
The reMarkable company has been super adversarial to a lot of these tools, and the file standards and API have been moving goalposts for years. MOST of the tools on that Awesome list are defunct because the primary open source tools for getting data to the reMarkable cloud (rmapi and rmapy) are no longer maintained — the primary maintainers both cite reMarkable's moving target API as the final dealbreaker. SUPER sad.
I've been hoping to write my own now that the dust has settled, but it's definitely a MAJOR project yet to be done by the FOSS community.
I started tinkering with their cloud API and it's not a major work at all to create a client to it, I managed to create a POC uploading and managing files on their cloud in a weekend. I still need to polish it a little bit and make sure I cover all the possible operations but definitely doable.
Could consider a Kobo Elipsa. (I have a different Kobo device.) It runs some sort of Linux and you can install Koreader and a couple of other things. You can tweak a config file and set up the device without an account. Not sure how the writing experience compares to reMarkable, though (probably not favorably).
> I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.
Could you for example mount a NFS or CIFS directory on the LAN, then access .PDFs and documents in other formats without signing to any external service? I was looking for something like that and have been waiting for years for the PineNote to become ready, usable and available, but have given up. Unfortunately all readers out there are tied to this or that cloud service subscription, and I would use them only locally.
(I call them readers because I don't need the note taking feature; being able to place bookmarks would be more than enough)
Probably. One bit of jank is that the rm2 api names pdfs with descriptor ids, and has a custom directory setup to track inking. I’m not sure if it will load ‘named’ pdfs easily or not, but an alt e reader should.
It’s open enough that I ran a Tailscale client node on it for a while. You do get root of a limited but not nerfed Linux machine when you buy one. What you don’t get is any support for maintaining your changes: they wipe most of the os on each update.
If you don’t mind a little bash scripting, I think it would be fairly easy to keep modifications synced up. Upshot : expect friction, not locks.
You can easily sync your handwritten notes to your computer and phone for free using the app. Once synced, you can back them up with your preferred method. The cloud service is designed to be a convenient, set-it-and-forget-it option.
Asking for a perpetual cloud synchronization at no cost is bold.
Why is there need for their cloud in the first place? I mean if I already own a Google Drive account, why should I need a pair of hands in the midpoint to drag my data around?
The Google drive integration is completely different to the connect one.
It’s not automatic, it’s manual.
It works essentially in the same way that the ‘send to email’ feature works. Which means if you make a change to a file, you have to delete the file on gdrive and reupload it.
Of course it's different. reMarkable are trying to leverage their own solution. It pays for them to make the user journey a little more awkward. But 3rd party integrations still exist and they do still work.
Bingo, Boox support WebDAV or FTP file sync and it's a breeze to use. It pains me how much of modern tech doesn't support the very standards half of it's built on. All to moat users into their domain.
You do know that Apple provides 5GB free cloud synchronization right? And Google also has 15GB free. For those who value convenience this is now table stakes to provide free cloud sync for small amount of data. And frankly 5GB is enough for handwritten notes.
i tried to use it a few months ago for the real time share of the screen. it didn’t work and also the files were not syncing with the service i am paying for. it wanted an update, but the update failed each time.
after digging (which is something i shouldn’t have wasted my time on), it seems that it lost the correct time because i didn’t power it for a while and there was no way to set the time manually. because of that, the signature for validating the firmware update was failing (it uses the time).
there was nothing i could do. it fixed itself few days later, after i gave up.
this is still unpolished so many years after the first release. i’m not sure i would recommend it to anyone. i’m sure i will trust it to work next time i will give it another chance.
This is my stance. I'm increasingly just not buying anything that isn't have FOSS. Artificial constraints that try to force a subscription are a hard no.
Good news for you! The ReMarkable is build on Linux and you can direct access to the whole system via SSH!! They even give you the su password so you can do _anything_ you want with it!
You can break the custom integrations that they created or even brick the whole device.
But nothing is stopping you from logging into the system and modifying anything you want. There's actually a whole ecosystem of 3rd party mods and software for the ReMarkable!
Yeah, the subscription and the fact that it can’t handle simple tasks pushed me away from buying the reMarkable 2. I opted for a more convenient tablet instead. Without those features, it’s just a fancy toy that can easily be replaced by a sheet of paper. Plus, it’s heavier and needs more care. Why spend almost a grand on a device when paper does the same job for free?
It’s amazing for reading technical papers, and I can store reams of them on there. Useful to be able to mark them up as I go. Also textbooks. So for me, it ends up being much lighter than what it replaces.
This makes perfect sense. I remember working with a pile of datasheets years ago, but my use cases have changed a lot since then. Now, I can’t find any other purpose for the device besides writing. Even if I cloned myself ten times, I still wouldn’t be able to justify the price tag.
What does the ReMarkable really excel at? You can make notes, but the software is not that great from what I've seen. It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important. You can read PDFs but typing notes is much faster on a desktop/laptop, and for nontechnical books a kindle is much better form factor. You can use it to draw, but e-ink is inferior to a wacom tablet or iPad pro. e-ink is great in bright environments, but in most places where people work that's just not an issue. And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?
It's a cool product but I don't get it. I don't get who needs this.
Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.
> It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important
Don't use the cloud sync and instead manually sync things between your own hardware, encrypt at rest if you feel like it.
> e-ink is great in bright environments [...] And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?
Living in a country with lots of sunlight and as a person who sometimes visits the beach, this is exactly what I want.
One of the main variables I look at when I buy laptops is "How well can I read from the display when I'm in sunlight?", I'm sure I cannot be the only one who likes to sit outside with my computer, or have windows that let in sunlight.
I don’t think anybody gets real work done at the beach, and if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues. And if I have to sync my notes manually it’s easier to use pen and paper and snap a picture afterwards. The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.
> I don’t think anybody gets real work done at the beach
Writing notes is not just about doing "real work"...
> if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues
The ambient brightness does matter, even if you put the laptop in the shade, having anti-glare and a display that works well is really necessary in those cases. If you haven't tried it before, I urge you to try it, because it seemingly works differently than you think.
> The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.
Within your parameters of what "real usage" looks like, then yeah. But if you take a look at the real world, you see there are plenty of use cases.
I learn best via writing things out by hand in my own words, and almost never read the notes afterwards. I am also profoundly disorganized :) Before I got a reMarkable I had accumulated (and thrown out) dozens of bulky paper notebooks. Now those are all digital.
Despite reMarkable's marketing around high-quality hand-drawn professional notes, I suspect crappy "transient" notes to aid memory and mental organization are the most common use case. For me it's really a thinking device rather than a writing device.
If I actually need to reference or organize my notes I will
type something out in emacs.
I find it very useful when doing CAD (with intent to 3D print something). It lets me quickly sketch rough shapes and note measurements I've taken, visualize ideas to show them to colleagues, do geometry "math" with less chance of messing up. Paper would work just fine, I guess, but RM has editing and undo, so reworking large regions doesn't result in attempts of striking out with more ambiguous lines.
So, to generalize, I'd suggest it for people that do bespoke construction of some sort often.
I have the RM2, and my answer to that question is: nothing. Even when handwriting - which is their core feature - the screen is very imprecise at times - up to 1 mm. You can't search in notes, not even after converting them to text.
When I first bought it, my Remarkable 2 was one of the very few pieces of technology (hardware or software) that I didn't actively dislike.
Then they started releasing software updates that made the UI slower, moved around the buttons in said UI, made it easy to accidentally select the wrong widgets (e.g. because two widgets are in the same part of the screen and so a double-tap combined with the high refresh latency causes a misinput), made notebook/page loading much slower (which, to their credit, they have fixed), and started adding lots of typing-related features that I don't use or need.
The device is still good, but I still find myself getting annoyed at it in a way that I didn't when it was new - although for me that's my experience with virtually all technology.
I wish there was a tablet with similar ergonomics that allowed me to tinker with the guts. I want to be able to write Python or C against a simple API and immediately run my code - I don't want to have to write an Android application, which I think is necessary for the BOOXen? I just want to easily write code that processes my pen strokes in real time.
I use the Fujitsu Quaderno A4 as my daily reader and notetaker (PDFs only).. it is absolutely fantastic. Simple but extremely thoughtful design. Extraordinarily light, durable, long battery. "It just works".
Most reviews I have seen say the battery life is terrible (which is the reason I haven't bought one). Can you share a little more on your experience and the 'long battery'.
I use it "off and on" (say 1-2 hours each day) for several days.. I probably charge it once every 3 to 4 days (and by then maybe it's 30-40%)? I haven't noticed a battery issue at all. My intuition is it lasts a week with normal usage. I always make sure to keep Wifi/NFC off of course (as it is not an Internet device).
I love to write, actually I think I have to write as it’s the only way I’ve figured out on how to put guardrails on my thoughts.
I got my first remarkable a few years ago and I was super excited, I thought it could be the bridge between my need to write and the digital world.
I gave up, I also tried an iPad too but again I gave up.
I ended up using a cheap fountain pen and the paper that I like its texture.
I think the problem with all these devices is that from a product perspective they focus on the wrong things.
I don’t care about colors and syncing with the cloud or whatever else.
I care about emulating an as close as possible experience to natural writing and that means latency of the device and the tactile feeling I get when I touch the screen with the pen are the most important aspects.
I haven’t seen much there happening and maybe these are just too hard problems to solve.
Or maybe I’m just a member of a too niche group of people.
But until I find a digital writing instrument that gives me the sensory feedback of a pen an a paper I don’t see me going back to these devices.
I've been a remarkable user for several years and have spent hundreds of hours I'm sure in front of the RM1 and RM2.
I love the increased storage (8GB goes fast with a bunch of scanned PDFs) and the addition of color (so long as it's as readable in sunlight).
However I'm stuck on the old 2.x fw versions because I don't like the infinite page thing they added, so I won't be upgrading. Also it'd be cool if they offered proper support for self-hosting rather than forcing us to use tools like rmfakecloud (which is great btw).
I haven't looked at the software stack in a while. Has RM gone more open source yet? I didn't like how they were pivoting to toward the SaaS subscription thing. I'd much rather pay a little more up front for a fully open device then cheaper upfront but with an annoying subscription plus closed source.
The RM runs on linux and they hand you the admin password. I'm not sure how much more open you can get. Just SSH into the device and then use one of the 3rd party stacks for syncing.
No I get it and loved the RM open source community. I was involved with that a few years ago. At the time the SaaS stuff was new and I personally thought they should have gone the other way and doubled down on a fully open stack, but then I kind of moved on to other things and haven't kept up with what has happened since, and whether they were doubling down on closed source/SaaS or the opposite.
I do agree them pressing the SaaS angle feels bad. Once I found out about the stack that the RM is built on I was blown away, I definitely had a moment of "why are they hiding this?". I told a few others in my office (we're software engineers) and everyone was completely unaware that this was an option. They really do bury the capabilities of the hardware.
It feels like a tax on the less technical/informed.
> Once I found out about the stack that the RM is built on I was blown away, I definitely had a moment of "why are they hiding this?"
Right?? I mean, their tech is amazing. They are clearly cream of the crop, passionate, engineer craftspeople. They should be the anti-Apple and be extremely open. RaspberryPi style.
At last someone echoing my biggest gripe with RM2.
I dare say a number of recent sw upgrades have been annoying - but the one that made me use my rm less is the infinite scroll and pressing a button to add a new page. Also the zoom feels very clunky.
Is there a way to revert to the older versions of the software?
I used to advocate for remarkable. I have one. I got multiple as gifts for people. Now I am a hater. The rug pull that took a $700 one-time-payment device and gated all the features behind a mandatory subscription was a dick move. Please don’t support this company.
Yes. But the move itself is why I hate them. I detest subscriptionware, Especially for features that don’t require any ongoing service from them. They don’t need server side code for any of the features they took away. It is all local on device. This is like BMW charging subscription for seat heat.
It appears RM's out of fashion now. But mine does exactly what it promised to do: let me write and sometimes highlight PDFs.
The latter got better after persistent zoom - you zoom the PDF once for the margins and it remembers it for ongoing pages.
I got grandfathered into the connect service, it's also $36/yr, so not a huge deal? I transfer using the app. The app also lets you screenshare your drawing live, so I use it to draw during video conferences. That's been useful a few times.
It didn't promise to be a full-on tablet, and its value prop is in not being one. I prefer that it doesn't run a full mobile OS with other apps. That's against the damned point. I just want something to replace the paper stack I usually have near my laptop.
Just for everyone's reference, there is a rich community of third-party packages [0] ("apps") and launchers for rM and rM2, so it's possible to add on any number of sync (syncthing), encryption (gocrpytfs), epub (koreader), web browsing (netsurf), vnc (vnsee), wacom driver and more. The user get's root shell access from the beginning, and you can automate all sorts of things using systemd and standard shell utilities.
The out-of-the-box software may be a bit barebones for some power users, but you can certainly add-on the functionality that you desire.
Every time I see this device pop up, I really struggle to find out what exactly this has over something like an iPad with an Apple Pencil?
With this one being $579 including the basic marker. The iPad Air with an 11" screen with the cheaper pencil is $678. iPad with an 11" screen and the cheaper pencil is $428.
If it is the screen feel, how does that compare to the paperlike screen protectors for iPad?
Some say a lack of distractions, but you can turn on do not disturb?
I am just really curious what this solves vs other tablets that I am missing here, especially at this price point. Or is there something I am really missing here?
That kinda sounds like a thing where a big improvement to the Focus feature to lock you to a specific app (or disable apps instead of just removing them from your Home Screen) would address this problem?
Writing this on an iPad - have bought like 5 RM2s for myself, employees and kids. It’s a great device. I just ordered the Pro. It comes very close to replacing a pad of paper, and has a bunch of quality of life benefits over paper. I’m not saying it’s better than a pad of paper, but it’s the first eink device I had used that offered a principled alternative.
I mainly use it for my journal/planner, using like a 1200 page PDF. Could I have that PDF on my iPad? Yep. Do I? No, the experience of the ultra high quality iPad color, pixels, brightness, interface, UI, all that just puts your (my) brain in a different space.
Anyway, it’s not for everyone, but I think most people who give it a try for note writing prefer it to the iPad.
The DPT-RP1 line was acquired by Fujitsu and is now sold at the Quaderno. The hardware has been updated a bit in the Quaderno Gen 2, including a Wacom digitizer. They're still great devices, and the same open source software for the DPT-RP1 (dpt-rp1-py) works with both Quadernos.
You're linking to dpt-tools. I've never tried that software.
I have a Quaderno Gen 2 and personally use dpt-rp1-py (https://github.com/janten/dpt-rp1-py), so I can confirm that at least it works. (When I first set it up, I had to run the "dptrp1 register" command twice because I got an error message the first time, but that hasn't come up again -- you only have to register it once on a given computer.)
> You cannot sideload any apps, so you are stuck with the defaults, but the most damning thing, is that you cannot sideload PDF files, since the MooInk 2C lacks a PDF rendering engine.
You can see the price on this thing. Large e-ink screens are expensive, colour large e-ink screens even more so. How many people do you think would pay 900EUR+ for a device 2cm larger on each side?
I chose Supernote because the battery is replaceable. Like a real notebook, I don't care about accessing the internet. I care about reading, writing, cloud storage, and product life-time. If I wanted to access the internet, I'd just use a real computer.
I meant browser. There's no browser support. It syncs with Google Drive and there are no other options yet. You can connect to the IP of the device through your desktop browser to directly manage folders and files on the device though.
Love the hardware hate the software. I’m a heavy user, but won’t buy another device from them, unfortunately. Debugging sync issues has been very difficult for me and it’s hard to just reset the device because it’s hard to export annotated files.
I noticed when reading through user reviews for the remarkable 2 that I can find several that are pretty critical of the product, but the rating of the reviewer is apparently 5 stars. https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2#user-reviews
It has 229 pixels per inch based on the E in Gallery 3 display. On E ink’s site, the Gallery 3 product specs says support is up to 300 ppi. Remarkable should’ve gone with the higher resolution.
I concur. For a device of that price, size, and considering the reading and note-taking use case, only 229 ppi is abysmal. Why cut corners in a key part of the product?
E Ink has a monopoly on microcapsule displays and the prices are incredibly high. The device would be much more expensive if they used the high-density display.
>E Ink has a monopoly on microcapsule displays and the prices are incredibly high
This is either horseshit or very sneakily worded. GoodDisplay sells their DES screens which are also electrophoretic screens, with the only difference being that they use cofferdam tech that directly builds microcapsules onto the underlying substrate, rather than being separately produced and sprinkled on.
>As an example, $449
How is that an example? If you're comparing it to LCD please say so explicitly. LCDs are produced at a rate of billions per quarter, whereas electrophoretic screens are a niche tech used in ereaders and not much else. It wouldn't surprise me if LCDs had 1000x the production, you don't need a monopoly to explain LCDs being cheaper here. It's just raw economy of scale.
> This is either horseshit or very sneakily worded
This comment infringes on HN guidelines. I'd recommend editing it accordingly and remove the accusatory tone.
> with the only difference being that they use cofferdam tech
No. Cofferdam's 11.6" B&W screen is less than 100 dpi (adjusted to 11.8") and cannot reasonably be considered a viable alternative for reading and note-taking.
> How is that an example?
It explains why the “for a device of that price” argument is not relevant here. The screen itself is very expensive and the profit margin of ReMarkable is not as stellar as some people would believe.
E-Inks official specs list the color refresh time as 0.5ms in fast mode, 1 second in standard mode or 1.5 seconds in quality mode. That sounds like it could get annoying when reading full color content (e.g. comics).
At least it's an improvement from Gallery 2 which took 10 seconds to refresh in color mode, no wonder hardly anything ever used that generation...
The main issue I had with my Remarkable 1 was that I couldn't quickly scroll through pages of e-books. If I was looking for something specific in the pages, an ipad allows me to swipe across rapidly. Remarkable was this tedious repeated button press, waiting each time for the screen to refresh. Had to go back to ipad although I loved the device.
Kobo lets you tap and hold a corner (or hold down the page turn button), and after a second it'll start fast-flipping through pages. Not as fast as an iPad but pretty quick, sorta like flipping through a book at a moderate pace.
Onyx BOOX. Set the refresh rate to anything faster than "Normal"/"Regal", and you can page through docs pretty much as fast as you'd care to.
NeoReader (Onyx's book reader app) also has a lightbox / page preview mode where you can see 4, 9, or 16 pages at once. Obviously too small to read at 16 pages up, but good enough to spot figures, diagrams, chapter breaks, and the like. That renders pretty quickly on ePub or generated PDFs, but can be slow on scanned-in books where you're looking at images of text rather than rendered text.
Both Kobo and Kindle devices allow you to fast scroll page thumbnails, which helps work around the refresh limitations of e-ink. Something like that is still missing from RM's software. You basically have to switch to multi-page view and then scroll that if you want to go quickly through a document.
Well... While I admire reMarkable in technical terms, I'll not buy a black box where I have to hack the box just to manage my system. I do not care much about handwriting recognition and other "cool solution to help the end user", I do care about no eye strain reading of LONG damn documents, where scrolling distract instead of help, and casual ability to draw things. Period.
Unfortunately they took a classic commercial path, maybe fueled by many "users desires" described by users who have not much an idea about how they can use such devices and the result is well... Not exiting especially for the price. I have no issue paying something I own, I do not pay for something I can only use.
No, in plain filesystem access, mounting it like any other file system on a mass storage, putting there my pdfs, pulling them back etc. I do look for a simple pdf/ebook reader with e-ink display large enough to fit A4 without zooming back, with essentially the same features of Evince/pdf-tools and so on. NOTHING more, nor less, nor with extra layer of complexity for commercial purposes.
Nothing* does mass storage these days, because you a) don't want to run your filesystem as FAT32, b) have two devices mounting one disk at the same time.
But anyway, you don't have to hack anything, they literally give you all the access you could ask for. Run samba on it if you want.
* I'm sure there are exceptions, but they're not common in my experience.
I have no issues mounting Linux fs, since my OS...
> have two devices mounting one disk at the same time
There is exactly NO reasons to allow mounting when the device OS is shut down and there is non reasons to not allowing mounting a data only volume who can be balanced read-only on one or another side. It's simply an arbitrary choice.
Anyway, as far I know their OS, a custom GNU/Linux distro is open in the sense of the license but I even need to host their own "fake cloud" just if I want a no-someone-else service needed setup and the unofficial repo is not much more exiting https://toltec-dev.org/stable/
Being open to me does not means "hey you have the code" like AOSP, is being damn open EASILY, the device is mine, I handle it as I handle a desktop computer.
For me the killer anti-feature of reMarkable devices is the limited storage. I have way more than 64 GB of ebooks and PDFs (lots of full-color tabletop game books), so anything that has both such limited storage and no SD card slot is off my radar.
It's not good as an e-book reader regardless of how much storage you need. It renders epubs to pdf on the fly (so changing the font size induces a long delay in a big document, for instance). The documentation even tells you it's not a good ebook reader.
I figure I'll drop this here just in case. I don't really use my RM2 since keeping it in my backpack caused the cover to start getting destroyed.
I wrote this as a "is this possible" type program. It ssh's into the tablet and then emulates a stylus through the windows api. Worked with things like blender and krita. Can't say I'm likely to update it again, but it at least worked last I tested it. Also note it doesn't install anything on the device it only reads out the device file for the pen.
Oh - did they remove SSH access? With a RM2 you could go to
Settings > General > About > Copyrights and licenses
and you were shown an IP address and the root password for SSH..
No they didn't - you just have to activate "Developer mode" (forcing a factory reset, so don't set up too much, you'll have to repeat it all..)
Is this suitable for reading technical pdf textbooks (math, programming, etc)? Last I checked the screen size was smaller than A4 and ReMarkable had a focus on writing and taking notes rather than displaying books...
IMHO, it's too small for PDFs. If they offered an 13" / A4 / Letter sized version for a few hundred more, I'd buy it today. Instead I'm using a 13" iPad Pro which has different compromises.
I've mostly used it for reading textbooks or academic papers (and taking notes on them) and it works fine for me. It can be a little small but you can zoom in if you need
I know but even moving that to prototype stage this year would be amazing. I’m in no rush just excited, and very prepared to be disappointed by the time estimates
PS Thanks, I was on mobile, I wouldn’t be able to have found the link
I read arxiv content on the Remarkable 2 and I am satisfied. The reader auto-removes the white margins, so the smaller screen is not a problem. The zoom functionality is snappy for an e-ink device from 3 years ago (slow by modern standards). The quick-view thumbnails used to scroll through far-away pages is sufficient for my workflow. Generally I am very happy with the device for consuming static academic PDFs.
From my past research 13" is the minimum I'd be comfortable with for a tablet that is tailored for research papers. The only one that seemed just right was the Sony DP-1 or (DPT equivalent) though it was around 1000 USD and Windows only compatible (for file sync and what have you).
Kindle Scribe is fine for b/w research papers, while having two paperback book pages side by side in landscape mode (switch to unjustified text with smallest margins, change to size 3 Bookerly text, add a click of line spacing, switch on page numbers instead of location), makes a lovely improvement in book reading.
That is the only thing I use mine for these days. Screen size is fine for that.
I miss an API to their cloud storage. It is simply a dealbreaker that it aims to help avoiding distractions but leaves no room for building an automated workflow around it.
It's designed as a reading tablet with good pen support, so yes. And E-ink makes reading more comfortable than LCDs. For technical PDFs, size matters a lot. Normal reading tablets often resize the text to be easily readable, but PDFs cannot do that. So having a tablet of good size becomes a dealbreaker for such use-cases, more so than other features.
Remarkable lacks a backlight, and e-ink displays don't have deep blacks, so depending on your reading environment, it may be a bit low-contrast. I got a kobo elipsa myself for this reason. Kobu is notably cheaper and has a backlight which helps the contrast a bit, but the pen support is waaay worse.
depends on source of books I find, and perhaps also if you have eye strain issues, I need to read mine with my glasses often, which is irritating. But the zooming in can often leave you with text being too big to fit on the display.
So I sort of feel like I should love it more, but this bit makes it annoying for me.
It honestly depends on you. I used a Google Nexus 7 as a textbook and paper display during university back in the day and while in some cases you needed to zoom in overall it was fine. I don't have any experience with this remarkable but purely from a screen size perspective, if your eyes are healthy and you're willing it should be fine.
I'm in the market for something like this, but for sheet music. Something where I can upload PDF copies of music to a reader, annotate them with the stylus, and easily page through the music as part of a performance. I sing choir, so weight is a factor. My Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra is just a tad too heavy.
I read lots of discussions on comparable devices on this post, can anyone recommend something suitable for music?
On android I use MobileSheets which does everything I need.
the reMarkable lets you upload PDFs and then you can write on them, so perhaps it can do what you need.
I was using mine a little while ago for a PDF-based RPG-type thing which involves a lot of writing on the PDF and it worked quite well (the main downside was the PDF took a while to render as it's very image-heavy but that might work better in your case.)
I use it everyday at work (handwritten notes and reviewing short PDFs like resumes and white papers). It’s one of the biggest professional ROI investments that I’ve ever made.
The people who hate the Remarkable seem to be either zealots for openness or people who want to read ebooks on it or people who hate subscriptions. Those 3 things don’t matter to me at all so I’ve been extremely happy.
I've had an rM2 for a few years now, and can answer these.
> Will I be able to use it without creating an account with the company?
I _think_ so. I created one, and am not willing to wipe my device to see if it's required. I _have_ used mine for months without connecting it to the network, so it's certainly not required on a regular basis.
> Will I be able to use it if the company fails?
Yes.
The "Connect" service is nice and all, but really the big that that it provides is an easy way to sync files to and from the device. That's not required; you can just use USB to transfer if you want.
> Will I be able to install third party firmware and software?
Yes.
There are active F/OSS projects out there for the rM2, including custom bootloaders, OS forks, and applications.
I bought it before they added a subscription, so I was spared the pain.
For me personally, it was too expensive to be able to just use the device and not worry about damaging it, I even stopped wearing a watch, because I worried that it might scratch the display.
I don't have that worry with a notebook, but then again, notebook is physically limited especially when compared to digital tablets.
I do enjoy writing, so after I sold my unit, I went back to pen and paper, but I do still love the tech so I keep an eye on it!
Usually colour E-ink is slower than monochrome, I wonder what the product will actually look like and function, when it launches.
A highly interesting release. I love my remarkable2 as a note-taking device. I also own a Kindle and an iPad, so reading books or running apps isn't my requirement. I only need something to take notes and that the remarkable does very well. Funny though, that color wasn't the most missing feature. But it is very intriguing that it seems to have the first full-resolution color displays, with the color being part of the eInk pixels.
From a practical side, the additional screen space probably is the biggest feature to me. I would hope for some more software improvements, like a few more drawing tools, especially as the colors make that even more appealing.
Also, I would like to have an image slide show and of course an official option to customize the sleeping/off display images.
I have a remarkable 2 that never gets used any more. All I wanted was to be able to natively highlight PDFs and ePUB books, so that I could write some code to export those highlights for myself. I gave up waiting for that and I doubt it will ever be a reality. Such a shame and such a waste.
Good to know. Is there a single app that's suitable as both a notebook and reading/annotating pdfs? And would restricting the device to one app affect your ability to transfer files to the device over iTunes?
I find (1) to be the biggest snake oil of electrophoretic displays. The only case where it's remotely true is direct sunlight. In normal indoor lighting conditions they severely lack contrast/whiteness/blackness compared to a good screen or printed book, and are hugely dependent on proper lighting, for example your hand will give it shadow so you're practically forced to use the frontlight if your device has it (reMarkable doesn't), as it's almost impossible to light evenly and match the background otherwise. In other words, when reading indoors they have all downsides of paper with none of the upsides. It just doesn't work as "paper replacement", it's strictly inferior, and feels like a downgrade compared to modern active displays.
(3) is mostly matter of choice, and it's a feel of matte plastic, very far from actual paper.
(2) is the only reason I'm using it. It's thin (although not as thin as a piece of paper) and single-purpose, a physical product.
For what is worth, I am fully convinced that (1) (the paper-like visual feel) is completely true, not a snake-oil claim, even if it is just a perceptual placebo effect that is masking the ostensibly true nature you described. Placebo effects matter ;)
I guess I should also have added (4) this tablet is a lifestyle and fashion statement about having the disposable income to use it instead of an actual high-quality paper notebook.
I use iPad for some note taking (or rather, presentation planning). The responsiveness is good. I can’t deal with any lag in these devices so have never felt the need to try remarkable. Stuff like the surface work well when it’s the high end models but then you’re paying the same price as an iPad anyways!
E-ink is not "paper feel". It's a super low-power display, it only consumes power when the content on it changes. Since it works by moving around physical pigment molecules inside little cells, the screen will continue showing the last thing that you put on it literally forever while consuming no power.
I have an e-ink tablet, the Boox Note Air 3 C, when I use it as an ereader or notetaker the battery lasts for weeks. A little less when I use it for web browsing or apps that change the content on the screen a lot.
While E-ink is a large selling point of the Remarkable, I think parent is talking about another one of the selling points: That it feels like writing on paper with texture, rather than a glossy display (like iPad's display).
It has nothing to do with E-ink, but about how it feels to write on the Remarkable display with the pen.
I have both iPad Air with Paperlike cover and a Boox Note 3C... and the Boox with its color eInk and Wacom pen is SO MUCH nicer to write on and read that it's really not comparable.
Also paperlike film for iPad significantly degrades the screen, making it darker and grainy. It's still a better all-around device, but its really not as good as these eInk tablets for writing.
I concur. I switched from the very first remarkable to an ipad pro with paperlike but it's very different and much less paper-like. Also, the paperlike screen protector lost lost 100% of the roughness in just a few months, and now when I write it's basically the same as writing on the glass.
I have a reMarkable 2 that I use pretty regularly. I have had the same pin nib breakage other folks have had, but ate the $130 to replace my pen. Since that, I haven't had any issues. It's generally a great device that I enjoy using, although I don't use it while I'm at home because I have my custom mechanical keyboard and can type much faster than I write in Standard Notes in Markdown. Every time I take a trip though, I take my rM2 with me, and it's my primary on-the-go notetaking tool and I take a /lot/ of notes.
I did a bit of research and decided to go ahead and jump on the Paper Pro. I hope it's worth it, because it's quite a bit more expensive than the rM2 was.
Whenever I start looking into a device like this, I'm reminded how much progress has been held back by the grip Amazon has on the book world. Building on shared book annotations would be a great way to develop intelligence, but it can only be on the down-low.
This looks pretty interesting and definitely something I’d like to try out for reading - but, on a different note, I’ve been using ChatGPT to scan in my handwritten notes and have been very impressed with the results. So much so that I’m increasingly less interested in a clunky expensive device that isn’t always accurate, and more interested in a way to efficiently scan in and organize paper notes. I haven’t tried the Remarkable but in my experience there is nothing quite like a well-designed pen and high-quality paper that when you really want to write stuff down and think on paper.
It makes me wonder if an alternative route to this type of tech is to integrate OCR more into a device.
Does anyone with a ReMarkable have any experience with hacking on it? Can you write software for it, or are you pretty much stuck with what they offer out of the box?
And if you can't write software for it, any recommendations for a hackable e-ink tablet?
You can write software for it but reMarkable as a company has been downright adversarial to the open source community and MOST of the tools on that Awesome page are now defunct because reMarkable has obfuscated API endpoints or changed file-standards to prevent third party efforts.
But from what I have read software support for the device is very unfinished and not moving that quickly. So while you can hack on it, you will also likely need to.
(EDIT: Some other comments here appear to be suggesting that this is unlikely to come back in stock.)
They have been pretty hostile toward the community lately having trademark / copyright watchdogs takedown all sorts of community resources in figma, etsy, etc.
As much as I like the concept, and would love to have a use, I don't see how I'd apply that to my life.
Writing documents is likely impractical (ocr seems bad, and I doubt it'd like my handwriting in particular). Reviewing them maybe, but it doesn't plug to the online tools we use at work, and then comments are only for yourself. Maybe when reading a paper and underlining a few things? Which is the odd case
I switch to paper for strides of time, which I don't see a point in replacing by a device that needs a charge and costs 1000cad
Does it have a handwriting recognition capable of converting math formulas to LaTeX? I'm waiting for this since ages. We are supposed to be close to AGI, but we still have no good handwriting recognition on any device.
There are quite a few samsung pens, which can be but don't need to be charged.
That is, the writing works without charging but "air gestures" etc. additionally work via bluetooth or something and do need additional charging.
That said, due to the fact that it does have an eraser, I would still guess that it is EMR but probably with a softer tip (e.g., the galaxy folds had special pens; other emr pens are "compatible", but might damage the crease, so they are not officially compatible).
I'm a Remarkable 2 owner and yeah, this is a "make or break" feature to even start considering a potential upgrading, but found nothing online about if the Pro version has this or not.
I did look at getting a RM2, but for the same price I could get a iPad with a pencil. Granted the pencil wasn't that great, but the software on the iPad is.
I have good notes on the iPad which is great for "journaling" and it almost works like the microsoft courier concept
I own a kindle, but I find it’s often just easier and better to use my iPad Pro and the upside of having a fully functional device outweighs the fancy display tech. I think it’s important to consider if eink so great that it justifies such an expensive device over a more conventional tablet.
I've read quite a bit on Kindle and Nook, iPad, and iPhone, and I think these Remarkable style eink writing devices and kindle style reading devices are each firmly in a small niche. The tech is really sexy, but for most people I think these kinds of devices and kindle kind of devices are impractical.
For instance, with Kindle and nook, the best use I got out of it was reading on the train and bus where having a paperback-book sized device was really convenient. Outside of that, I have rarely reached for my Kindle.
As for eink writing devices, Even without the high price, I am very skeptical that they would be more useful than a stack of printer paper and a decent pen. Especially with modern phone camera features that can transcribe your handwritten text and save the image as a PDF. I suspect the target market for Remarkable is quite small, and I also suspect that many people who buy them rarely use them, just like I rarely use my kindle.
Here's an experiment: navigate your browser to the Remarkable page, look at it, and pay attention to how you feel when thinking about using the device. Next, navigate to the PineNote page[1], a device that has technological capabilities that are quite similar to the remarkable 2, and do the same thing. I suspect that the Remarkable marketing is doing a lot of work here. (One caveat here is that the Remarkable Pro is color, so the comparison is more different than if they still had a marketing page for Remarkable 2)
To me, eink is definitely better for reading books, which is what most of those readers (Kindle, Kobo etc) are used for.
The other big advantage is battery life. I have an old Kobo Aura I got second hand on eBay. I keep the WiFi turned off, have installed KOReader and load books over USB (with the held of Calibre). With semi-regular usage the battery lasts weeks if not months. Way longer than any phone or tablet I ever had. Granted of course those devices do a lot more, but it's nice to at least very rarely have to worry about whether you have enough charge to read a book.
Like you I'm not sure of the advantages of eink for more general computing. I wonder what the (actual) battery life is like on the ReMarkable.
Like you, I have an old offline eReader (4th gen Kindle, replaced battery). My eReader lasts multiple books of use on one full charge.
I also have a ReMarkable 2. The battery lasts about 14-16hrs of on-time for me.
I keep it in airplane mode and have sleep mode disabled to prevent it from locking after 40 minutes. I turn it on around 10AM and turn it off at 5PM, writing on it sporadically between those hours. The tablet reaches a low battery state by Wednesday.
i have a kindle. I use it for reading books. Its only function (to me) is reading books.
I have an ipad pro (2018). It's functions are 1) watching youtube 2) drawing/painting on procreate and 3) using some music apps like AUM and various synths 4) acting a kitchen display for recipes and 5) general note taking if I need to take notes that involve drawing or diagrams.
I have a phone. I read on my phone because its the device I have with me most.
I look at this Remarkable and
1) It's much more money than either my kindle or even my phone cost.
2) I can't install the kindle app on it, for it to replace my kindle
3) It's not small or convenient enough to replace the kindle or phone
4) It's not good enough for drawing to replace the ipad
5) I don't understand why it doesn't interoperate with a lot of existing stuff. If I want to use my wifi to backup the remarkable to my onedrive, it doesn't sound like that's possible, which is possible on my phone and ipad, and isn't necessary on kindle since everything is already dealt with by amazon whispersync.
It’s for taking notes, and you can put other formats of ebooks on it (and pdfs). It’s much better than a kindle for reading technical papers and textbooks. And I find that it’s really good for not getting distracted, and getting into deep work mode.
its very expensive as just a device for taking notes.
I suppose using its limited abilities and rephrasing that as "not getting distracted" is an interesting marketing tactic but I prefer to hold my own self control instead of just buying worse but more expensive products.
I’m not saying it as a marketing tactic, because I don’t work for them. I really enjoy the absence of distraction, in the same way that I enjoy it when I go to a place like a cabin in the woods with no connectivity, because the possibility of distraction is apparently always present in my mind until it’s definitively not possible.
I have enough demands on my self control in my daily life that it’s nice to not have to rely on it further.
But yeah, if you don’t find that helpful, maybe this isn’t useful for you.
I bought the rM1 but using it for notes was pretty poor experience :/ Writing was AMAZING. Reading back my notes on other pages was awful. I just want to quickly flip between pages. Apparently the rM2 was no better. I don't expect this to have significantly improved the refresh rate
I want to challenge the idea that drawing/writing on what feels like paper is subpar compared to a surface that have the pencil glide a bit more.
I always thought writing on paper is something we have to deal with because paper is.. well, the physical medium we always used because it is cheap to manufacture.
I guess it's a bit like putting lemon on fish, in the beginning we did so for a purpose but after a while people just got used to it and now it's a established thing.
Similarly, we're so used to feeling at least a tiny bit of resistance when writing that when it isn't there, things feels "greasy" or unnatural.
I personally agree with that it feels nicer with a bit of contrast compared to sliding around. Drawing on a Wacom tablet gives me a lot better results than drawing on an iPad, even when I get to see the lines where I draw it with an iPad and with the Wacom that drawing appears on the monitor instead at on the tablet.
I have a Wacom tablet myself and I do think it is nice to draw on, but I wonder if the surface can be improved. Would love to try possible alternatives.
Higher quality, fountain pen-friendly paper tends to be smoother than regular paper (e.g, clairefontaine, tomoe river, japanese paper in general) yet still much less slippery than a glass surface.
How slippery/grippy you want things to be depends on the type of pen you use (gel, ink, pencil, brush,etc.) and to some extent also preference, but people generally agree that there are cases which work just badly: very slippery (e.g. glass) and much too rough (e.g. sand paper).
I'm a hardcore fountain pen user, to the point that I have a lathe sitting in my office behind me right now that I use to manufacture replacement parts for pens that have been out of production longer than I've been alive.
Prior to buying the rM2, I kept all of my notes on Clairefontaine notebooks. I've stopped that completely and use the rM2. Their "fountain pen" tool is an adequate reproduction of the experience for everyday use in my opinion. I've been using it daily for around two years now, and have no real complaints. It's a very limited device, but they nailed it as a "replacement for paper and pen".
I also have an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and have tried all the various screen protectors. They're all a worse physical experience than the rM2, and I've never found an app that has a fountain pen tool that comes close to being realistic in my opinion.
I got annoyed with how quickly I was going through Remarkable nibs, so I bought myself a third party titanium replacement. It is very slick in comparison.
With the replacement I get wrist strain. With the originals I don't.
Sales tax is 13% in Ontario, so even with that, the exchange rate should be 1.35 * 1.13 = 1.53 not the 1.60 exchange rate they use. I'm assuming shipping is already included in the price in the US as well, and shipping cost in Canada shouldn't be that much different compared to the US. I guess if the cost of shipping is higher in Canada, then that explains the USD-CAD conversion jump from 1.53 to 1.60.
How do e-ink devices work for teaching? My use case is teaching mathematics: streaming my notes to a class using a projector, and recording them. I am reasonably satisfied with a Surface tablet, apart from the lack of Linux; do you think this would be an improvement?
Looks nice to use to write a note, but horrible to use to store/access existing notes. The file browser should recognise the low refresh rate and use something like column view in Finder, rather than a new window when going 'into' a folder.
Just my perspective, but I returned my Remarkable 2 - I don't think I personally had a compelling use case for it.
Ultimately this thing is not going to magically make you super creative and productive. Frankly it's easier for me to be more productive by using my laptop. I prefer typing notes because I can keep up with what my brain is thinking. I prefer reading books on my computer with the Books app. If I'm trying to work something out visually I'll use my sketchbook which I have at my desk.
But this is just how I like to do things. You might be different. I really liked the Remarkable but it just didn't work into my workflow.
I guess it's not like my comment is important but saw my colleague really forcing himself to use his RM1 as though it was a gift. Never really understood the purpose of something that was less than 1% as capable as an iPad, even if it may feel better to write on. Sure the battery is probably great due to eInk but honestly my iPad is never out of battery or far from USB-C. I can play games on my iPad for 3hrs and only use 10% battery it's insane.
The only thing I will say is that for the iPad I'm still surprised I can't really share my screen and start drawing on a whiteboard in a Slack meeting which was my primary desire for having one. Literally be in a meeting and start sketching boxes and circles to my coworkers to explain things
Anyone that has one of these - does it work with Linux? From Googling it looks like at best it works via wine, but even that is questionable with the latest version. Pretty ready to buy, but this is a pretty big turn off.
I can access my RM2 with SSH via WiFi or USB-C, if that's what you mean. But the official reMarkable client is not available for Linux, which I find a bit odd, since it is a Qt-app and the founder of the company apparently is an avid linux user.
I have got it working via Wine, but it keeps breaking after updates. I do not use it often though, as I mostly just upload new files via the website.
> But the official reMarkable client is not available for Linux, which I find a bit odd, since it is a Qt-app and the founder of the company apparently is an avid linux user.
If I had to guess it's probably because they want to keep it closed-source and that is a nightmare with linux distro packaging. I have also used the tables via the webapp like you for many years.
These days they could package it as a Flatpak and cover a lot of distros with out a lot of duplicate work. I mostly use Flatpak for those types of apps these days.
Question for hn people: does e-ink vs (blue-filtered) lcd actually matter? As in, is there much indication that lcds have worse effects on eye-strain, sleep and focus, as long as you the light is mostly warm.
It's much more pleasant especially in very bright light like when outdoors. And this depends on the device but you usually have a much much lower minimum illumination level too. A phone or tablet on the lowest brightness still pretty much lights up a dark room while e-ink does not. Big difference if you read in bed with someone who is asleep.
I have used my ereader for 100s of hours, so Im inclined to agree. Im just wondering if theres much concrete proof for this feeling. Im using a backlight with my kobo most of the time, at that point is it really much different from a screen on low brightness? I guess more broadly: is all the stuff about screens specifically causing eye-strain true? When I read a paper book all day my eyes get kinda tired too.
This is probably a dumb question, but why is there a significant difference between an lcd projecting light into your eyes, vs light bouncing via a bookpage into your eyes?
LCD screens project light on your face (and in your eyes). E-ink does not. And there's the whole sun thing (altough I rarely use my Kobo outside). I don't know about sleep and focus (I sleep easily and like a rock) but I can use my kobo without glasses, which I can only do for a short time with LCD.
Dumb question, but isn't light being project in our face the only way we can see things? Does it have something to do with the brightness of that light or the fact that it's direct that is bad?
I (non-expert) think that it’s the fact that it’s more about the brightness. And screens are really bright. And there’s the contrast with the surrounding environment. I’ve read that the brightness of the screen should be roughly equal to the amount of light reflected by a piece of white paper for ergonomics. E-ink is a surface illuminated by light while lcd are just light filtered and usually brighter.
I'd love to use one of these at work (or a similar product) but they've been banned because they ship the data off to some other cloud somewhere so they've been deemed a security risk.
So crazy how divided people on HN are about this product series. If this device also supports SSH, it seems like it should be solid since you can bypass most of the other subscription features, no?
This is actually ... remarkable in that it uses color particles. From what I know most color E-Ink displays on the market today have b/w particles and a color LCD on top.
Not color, but I got an Elipsa 2E to augment my Libra 2 (different sizes, different use cases). It works really, really well. The notebook software is nearly as advertised.
A “productivity hack” for folks who can’t afford this and already own iPad+Pencil which they primarily use indoors: switch to grayscale mode, it is awesome :)
129,800 JPY to get one to Japan, vs $749 USD in the US. So just by paying in JPY, I am paying $895.10, so $146.10 more. What gives? That's VERY expensive
10% VAT covers half of it. Possibly tariffs are responsible for some of it, or the difference could be due to strength differences of JPY, USD, and NOK since it's a Norwegian company.
Not presently, but I may possibly have impulse-bought the Pro (nearly got Rm2 but held back for the tech to improve - on paper this seems to be the case for the Pro), and I'm already reconsidering it so I probably will have some experience with that program soon.(n. b. They are not a functional company and cannot cancel orders that have been placed, FYI)
Well exactly as expected a colour e-Ink version of Remarkable and a much larger internal storage (64GB) instead of the very low 8GB non-upgradeable storage.
Given it now has Colour e-ink as I said before [0], I will buy one right now.
Between them you can pick between multiple sizes and specs. I haven't tried either, but I have a number of Onyx Boox devices (a Palma phone sized one, and Nova Air small tablet sized one) and I'm very happy with their quality.
I've been happy with my 13.3" Dasung Paperlike HD-FT. I can imagine eventually getting a larger color e-ink monitor for office work, and a smaller one for travel.
We've reached "peak something" with this much collective energy spent contemplating an expensive and complicated "solution" to a problem that is solved pretty simply and cheaply by a good spiral bound notebook and a nice pen.
I love this marketing soundbite too:
> “reMarkable gives me the deep focus required to work on complex problems.”
Mmmm. Yeah. I usually have to find a quiet place and eliminate distractions to get deep focus, but nice to know I can just carry this new device around with me and never lose deep focus!
Paper is nice, but can be cumbersome to organize. While I love physical books, my e-reader is so much convenient as it's lighter than the majority of book and I only have the one thing to bring. So if you like to take notes (and refer to them later) something like this could be great. But I agree that it is too much expensive for what it offers and too locked down. At least with the iPad, you can install third-party apps to sync files and what not.
P.S. I was seriously considering it, but I went back to paper after trying to use my iPad for digital notetaking (too much distraction and the main apps, goodnotes and notability, have become awful). I have a clipboard and a ram of paper as a thinking tool. Then I copy the final result in a text file.
> a problem that is solved pretty simply and cheaply by a good spiral bound notebook and a nice pen.
You're right, but only mostly :)
The paper and pen that it replaced for me certainly wasn't cheap. I bought the rM2, keyboard folio, and the pen, so I'm all-in for around $1k USD. My EDC pens are all around the $150-$400 mark.
There are use cases that it does much better, though. I regularly use mine in Zoom meetings, and the desktop app allows me to screencast my rM2 to the call. It's super nice to be able to draw a diagram "on paper" and have everyone on the call see what I'm doing.
> I can just carry this new device around with me and never lose deep focus!
This is a net zero, at least for me. Before, I had two notebooks (one for work, one for personal stuff) and a pen. Now I have a single device that's the same height and width, but is about 1/3 as thick. The weight is a bit less. It's not distracting because all I can do with it is take notes and read PDFs/ebooks.
Actually, I take it back. It's a net win. I no longer have a separate Kindle that I carry with me.
I posted some other comments in this thread - unless they've significantly improved the software in the past year I would 100% recommend against it.
(Also, a lot of manga gets distributed through proprietary apps now so an iPad is probably your best bet anyways, at least if you read the serialized version and not the tankoubon releases...)
Off-topic: If the future is less paper, then should we dig more holes in the earth's surface to make digital papers.
I mean the alternative is just replanting.
I'm done with ReMarkable, the company. I have the original reMarkable and was enthusiastic at first, but it's been downhill since.
It's clear the company is now run mostly by marketing and business people. At some point they didn't do any software development at all, and soon after they actually removed features. None of the original hacker spirit has remained.
Most of your money is going to marketing. The device and software are insanely overpriced, and I see their ads everywhere.
I have the RM2 and it took them one and a half years of me owning it until I could draw straight lines. I still can't search in notes, even after converting them to text. If I don't annotate everything I write with tags, then I'll have a hard time finding it again.
The screen is imprecise, sometimes the line appears 1mm away from the tip of the pen.
Their synchronisation service costs monthly, I think 3€?
I'm simply underwhelmed, especially for this price. The Supernote would have been a much better choice for me - now I'm looking at the Samsung Tab S9 series for real note taking.
I agree with the comment. Owner of the reMarkable 2. I also think that in this case making an open source ecosystem gives more business benefit for reMarkable because very soon they will disappear with the growing number of competitors (and new tech) arising.
Loving the dark pattern that it "starts at $579" and then the 'buy now' page tries to default you to adding on additional options that bump that up to over $700...
Two big buttons to choose one of the folios and a small radio button below for no folio. And the Type Folio is + 249 € but also Save up to 49 € with bundle, so it actually "only" costs 200 €. Why would you even do this, make it appear more expensive then it is and on top of that confuse me, is selecting a folio already the bundle or can I somewhere buy a bundle that saves 49 € instead?
That is a big disappointment --- for a while it looked as if everyone would standardize on the new generation of Wacom EMR (w/ 4096 pressure levels) so that a Staedtler Noris Digital or Lamy Wacom EMR stylus works w/ a wide variety of devices --- I use them on:
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10+
- Kindle Scribe
- Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360
- Wacom One (attached to my MacBook)
and I couldn't count the number of styluses I have floating around my home/office.
The new pen looks to be battery powered, whereas the old one didn't require a charge. They might be doing something fancy for better writing and gesture detection.
why get a remarkable, and get screwed by the company, when you can get a much cheaper boox go 10.3? it runs android and you can do what you like with it
In order to replace paper, devices have to compete with paper. I keep paper and pen in every room in my house. I am not going to buy a $600 device for every room in my house. A device had better be very reliable and make offloading easy also.
The software is moving too slowly and often in a wrong direction. Especially since they released the keyboard folio most updates were around typing (which is supar on any eink device)... and they generally made my experience as a pen user worse.
I don't care if the new hardware is awesome, whenever mine breaks I will switch to a competitor.
EDIT: the reviewer I mention is excited about the device https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkEg8WLeW4Q
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