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

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].

[0]: https://reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1545mn9/excel...

I have not tried KOReader, but I can test it for you. What features do you use?

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.

Though I'd give nods to:

- 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.

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.

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)

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

[1] https://support.remarkable.com/s/article/Using-reMarkable-wi...

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

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.

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 got a supernote instead. He couldn't be happier with it.

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)

;-)

I kind of like this A1 ebook idea. Time to get out the wallet.

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).

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]

[1]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

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.

note it doesn't do handwriting. But it is $185.

It's optional, but you can use Calibre with an extension to convert epub to kepub as well.

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.

Here is a comparison shot between Gallery 3 and Kaleido 3 (the latter uses conventional subpixels to create colors): https://assets.goodereader.com/blog/uploads/images/2023/03/2...

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.

The actual physical limitation is the electrophoresis technology. I'm pretty sure moving particles around in a viscous fluid will never be fast.

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...

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.

For a science/engineering firm, this sort of arrangement isn't uncommon, because stuff you do in the lab leads to customer deliverables.

Of course, people can also do things electronically, which they increasingly do.

(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).

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.

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 use RCU [1] for that.

  0: https://remarkable.jms1.info/info/filesystem.html
  1: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

The workflow is plug -> web browser -> remarkable IP -> drag and drop.

Anyways, I think I could have dealt with it if it handled large books fine.

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.

I could be misinformed though, haven't researched it a lot.

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.

Although I haven’t looked at those addresses in some time; perhaps they are more stable now than they used to be.

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)

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...

But, that's just me :-)

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

To each their own!

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.

Remarkable screen and pen latency is much better.

I hope they both succeed. Both awesome. I'll probably get this new Remarkable as well.

(That being said, I use my pen and paper bullet journal ($30) more than both of these combined).

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

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!

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)

And no, "labels" do not address this problem.

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.

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

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.

Then again, rose colored glasses and all.

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'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’d’ve shelled out $800 first thing this morning for an RM Pro if they added linking across the system.

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...

TLDR: not sure about this :(

It’s like an anti-discovery device.

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...

[^1]: https://daylightcomputer.com

- how fast the nibs wear out

- how inaccurate the screen is

- the screen update rate

- infinite pages

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.

How well does the machine work w/o it?

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?

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.

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.

(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?

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.

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.

Buyer beware.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OTOH Kobo's Epub reader is very nice, if you convert your books to kepub – use callibre.

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

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

https://github.com/reMarkable

https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

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.

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)

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.

Asking for a perpetual cloud synchronization at no cost is bold.

Remarkable supports Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive integrations.

I use the Google Drive integration regularly.

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.

For fairness, I bought a Remarkable 2 and works fine, but I do not use it anymore because it does not fit my needs.

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.

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!

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.

Awful/barely functioning OCR kind of eliminates one of the main advantages it could have over paper notebooks, search and indexing, though.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Is there a way to revert to the older versions of the software?

It feels like a tax on the less technical/informed.

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.

It’ll be neat to see if this device is more or less locked down. I hope less.

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.

[0]: https://toltec-dev.org/testing/

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.)

Having said that, iPad is the de-facto standard for all musicians that I've come across that don't use paper sheet music.

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.

https://github.com/ookami125/Remarkable-Stylus

So any suggestions here?

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.

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.

PS Thanks, I was on mobile, I wouldn’t be able to have found the link

But writing is where you notice how small the screen really is.

It’s down to the size difference between printed text and handwriting.

I'm really looking forward to installing Zed on this thing!

So I sort of feel like I should love it more, but this bit makes it annoying for me.

Will I be able to use it if the company fails?

Will I be able to install third party firmware and software?

> 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 wont be giving them any more of my money.

(1) e-ink for both paper-like visual texture (the pixels are not square) and eye comfort (impossible with traditional screens)

(2) single-purpose note-taking without distractions (although some hate that)

(3) paperlike haptic feel (the only thing that can be addressed by screen cover on an ipad)

(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.

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!

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.

It has nothing to do with E-ink, but about how it feels to write on the Remarkable display with the pen.

The person I was replying to thought it had entirely to do with the viewing experience which I don’t believe to be true.

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.

It makes me wonder if an alternative route to this type of tech is to integrate OCR more into a device.

And if you can't write software for it, any recommendations for a hackable e-ink tablet?

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.)

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

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

Are slack meetings really that far behind? I was doing that with my iPad in zoom 5 years ago, and regularly do it in Google meet now…

Anyone have experience with their 100 days risk free program?

Been itching to upgrade my beloved Libra H20.

Thanks in advance.

That's an "exchange rate" of 1 USD = 1.6045 CAD. That is a far cry from the actual exchange rate (which is 1 USD = ~1.35 CAD).

And ReMarkable isn't the only company selling products at rip-off pricing to Canadians.

This absolutely sucks.

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.

Although, I do kind of want one.

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)

1. https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/

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.

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 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.

Not for me either.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

With the replacement I get wrist strain. With the originals I don't.

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 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.

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.

I am now wondering if we could have a reMarkable Paper Pro Mini, a pocket version I can carry around and take notes.

It's not an LCD on top, it's just a static stained-glass checkerboard pattern.

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!

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.

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.

Think you can plug this into your PC to drag and drop files like external storage? Nope.

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.

(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...)

EPUB rendering is slow the first time you open it, and notes and highlights get lost when you change text size.

On the other hand, PDF rendering is excellent. I make it a point to buy PDF versions of ebooks and have had no issues using it like that.

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.

Not a programming job but I do a few hours of coding a week for work — generally building internal tools to improve processes.

This may be the first legitimate color e-ink tablet with good (EMR; see: S-Pen, Wacom, old style Thinkpad) pen input.

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 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.

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.

Please, Remarkable, find a way.

Use an e-ink tablet if you want:

- long battery life

- paper-like writing experience

- high resolution (for b/w)

- an alternative to paper for books and notes

That said, there are devices which are essentially Android tablets w/ e-ink screens, which aside from refresh rates work much as one would expect.

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.

Never buying any of their devices 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 use a 3rd party pen with the RM2, much better ergonomics, but not clear what now will work.

- 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 rM2 also "just runs linux" under the hood. I bet you could write a utility to screenshare over USB if you really wanted to.

The display buffer is proprietary and requires DMA (and breaks with every software update), so while you technically can, it won't be easy.

That's a use case I hadn't considered - I've not worked in an office in over a decade.

To my knowledge there's no quick solution there. It sounds like maybe this just isn't the device for you.