My friend has one and I got to try it a couple weeks ago. The writing experience is as fantastic as the article describes. But, the rendering of screens is slow and you have to look at bizarro artifacts for a second or two before a new screen is shown. This is... not great. But, I am guessing this can be improved on in future versions. I am waiting for a better/cheaper model to come out, but fully intend to get one when it does.
I can see that disappearing quickly as it did between 1st and 2nd gen kindle. On my paperwhite it's now completely un-noticeable most of the time, there's only a few operations that have some lag.
I'm tempted to buy one, but know how frustrated I get with bad UIs, so might hold off until the next gen.
FWIW I'm a fellow UI-grouch, but haven't hated anything about it enough to outweigh everything else I love about it. The funky screen redraw is just a brief thing and doesn't really get in my way.
The only UI thing that makes me scowl so far is that sometimes my pen settings inexplicably get reset.
I am very tempted then, presently I have 5 different notebooks for different things and doing a couple of courses which I've started to study like I did at university and take written notes instead of just passively consuming.
The general consensus is that you learn better if you write but it's frustrating to not have the notes digitized and backed up.
No, the quote specifically says "the reMarkable tablet", meaning the one under review right now. jonnybgood notes that this particular version doesn't have the potential to replace paper because it is too expensive, and I happen to agree.
Because when I'm out and about, I don't want to stop somewhere to charge my pencil. This way, you plug it in to the iPad, and in less than a minute you can work with it for any hour or more - no need to hunt for a wall plug or bring along a cable.
Also it's kind of silly they didn't make that end (where an eraser usually is) function as an eraser.
That is the one thing that annoys the crap out of me, considering the stylus from my Toshiba Windows Tablet PC (what, thirteen/fourteen years ago?) had this functionality. I’ll ignore that I have to charge it all (Toshiba one didn’t) because of the tech differences, but I can’t grock a reason not to have an “eraser”.
i don't get the problem with that fact. At first i was also like "This looks stupid and somehow dangerous for the device/port, and why do i need this adapter??". But after using the Pencil i never even though about the port, or the adapter, or anything like that, since i can charge the pencil for like 60 seconds and directly with my ipad. Without searching my charger. And these 60 seconds will be enough for the day.
With these fast charging / long using times i really dont have a problem with this concept.
I used to have Kindle DX, but today there is no bigger sized Kindle. I wonder why. Feels like regression to me.
Remarkable got huge potential, but needs better integration with ebook stores (e.g. Amazon), OCR and Apps. Price is excusable for 1st gen, but probably too high for mass market.
I got the Kobo Aura One which is 7.8 inch. Kobo has nice integration with the Pocket bookmarking app. Does anyone else have the Kobo Aura One and have opinions on it? I'm happy enough with it so far but not sure if it was quite value for money.
The Kobo Aura One is a bit on the expensive side, but the display is excellent (300dpi), so in the end I think it's worth it, especially if you also care about the waterproofing. I also happen to like the "natural light" very much, as I'm often reading in the dark, although it's a bit uneven at the edges. I'm not very happy with the default software ("Nickel"), but fortunately the device is very hack-friendly (no jailbreaking needed), so you can easily install Dropbear (=ssh server) and KoReader, which IMHO is the real killer app for any E-Reader. I would never buy any e-ink device which does not run KoReader.
It looks promising, I hope it will be the begin of a new era of gadgets with less cognitive load...
Does anyone know whether the software is user friendly? E.g. cloud integration, doesn't require to install shitty software, can email documents, etc...
Is it hacker friendly? And perhaps write a small app for it (terminal viewer).
I wish I could try it in Europe (Germany, Spain or France...)
Always-connected is a plague on modern computing that has ruined the experience for anyone with slow computers and/or unreliable networks. If you proposed a 3MB web page with 300ms API calls for every action and called that a replacement for an app for anyone with an unreliable/heavily metered connection you would be laughed out of the room. Yet that's the status quo of 'modern stacks'.
It's eye-opening how useless a $1000 smartphone is in the middle of the outback, in the Yukon, etc. We've regressed to dumb terminals with the cost of decentralized computers.
Always-connected is a plague on modern computing that has ruined the experience for anyone with slow computers and/or unreliable networks .. ...and people with tendency to distraction, procrastination or addiction-ish habits.
> Does anyone know whether the software is user friendly? E.g. cloud integration, doesn't require to install shitty software, can email documents, etc...
You need to install a Qt desktop app for the cloud integration or its equivalent mobile version.
There are however some projects out there already that are working on alternatives for the cloud integration such as this one [0].
What I want is an e-ink laptop with simple but good word processing, coding, text-mostly browsing, emails and such.
I like my reader. It doesn't feel like "device" and I'm much more relaxed using it. Im on my third one and all three were on airplane mode since the day I bought them. Reading on tablet/phone triggers my hyperactive "device mode". Checking emails, hn, tinder, contol-tab, notifications, Twitter, youtube... Not good before bed. e-ink just lends to relaxed focus, for me. The battery life also helps me forget it's a device.
An e-ink laptop built for working on stuff with fewer distractions, 20+ hrs battery life, decent text editing and word processing, emails... I want.
Atm, a Kindle paperwhite. I also had two Kobos previously. Honestly, any small ereader is as good as the next one, for me. All I need it to do is turn pages. A backlight is sometimes nice, but not essential.
I desperately want a solution for working outside. E-ink would be absolutely awesome. Unfortunately I don't see anything on the horizon. Even the devices that will work as monitors described in the sibling posts would be problematic because they are simply too big. I need something I can put in my bag and go. I guess I'll have to wait until the rest of society catches up with my nomad-work existence :-)
I dunno. This might make e-ink a viable LCD replacement eventually but for the device above, I'm ok with the current hardware. What I want is form factor (laptop) and appropriate OS/UI.
Absolutely. A tablet + e-ink laptop would be my ideal travel pair. Laptop for work or recreational writing, tablet (or phone) for entertainment. I prefer to keep those separate anyway.
Seconded. Runner up was the Pixel Qi style screen that was in the OLPC, but everything about that appears to be dead.
The OLPC’s screen was pretty cool in black and white and was quite usable in full sun. It also was fast in a way that epaper wasn't.
In color mode, it was pretty muted, and the resolution was... commensurate with those of the time period. But, I imagine that things would have eventually improved. Kind of a shame the whole thing seems to have dead-ended.
I've actually been working on something of this sort with a battery-powered Raspberry PI running Debian and a Pervasive 7-inch e-Paper display. I whipped up a pretty decent prototype that had a terminal (so, Emacs, w3m, newsbeuter, etc.), PDF reader, and rough support for keyboard-driven X apps, but then my little girl got to the wiring with scissors, and my momentum died. (It also had a small character LED display to show rapid feedback while typing.)
The last few days I've been working on a new version of the software, and I think I'll wire it back up. If I get it clean enough for others to use, I'll write it up.
Have you written any kind of blog or documentation about the build? I've been interested in a mini-laptop e-ink solution for a while. I think that most of the coding I do takes very little resources and is primarily just talking to the cloud or other servers. No reason to lug around a bunch of resources I don't need, right?
I haven't, and I'm disappointed to see that the display I used is now discontinued. That will push me to use a more effective one in the next iteration, which I'll write up.
Looking forward to more information about this as well. I'm thinking about wiring up an e-Paper display to a Pi for some digital signage applications and curious how you got it all to work, and the prices for doing so!
I used a 7.4" display from Pervasive, about $50USD. It's a simple development board with an easy to drive controller. All the software was in Python, with a few performance-critical bits in Cython. I used wire wrapping to hook things up, and it was not difficulty, even though I'm a programmer with no previous hardware experience.
I have at least a photo of emacs running on a very early version, but it's not representative of what I eventually arrived at. I'll see if I can dig it up.
I also prefer an e-ink reader for reading. Still using the same Kindle Touch that I bought used probably 5 years ago. Probably charge it once a month, and don't have to worry about blue light before bed.
I think a huge untapped market is digital signage. For anyone who needs to display a load of text and have it be perfectly legible in bright light, giant e-ink screens would be perfect. Large-scale LEDs that look good in bright lights cost a fortune and use a ton of power.
I would 100% buy this. I make lots of business trips that are 36 hours long. I have to take my laptop because some emails and documents just aren't conducive to handling on my phone. But a lightwieght and thin laptop style device with crazy good battery? And all it does is email, documents, and text browsing? Definitely would buy that and stuff it in my bag for these trips.
The old HP Omnibook was pretty close. Monochrome screen with an advertised 8 hours of battery life, solid state storage, at a time when conventional laptops struggled to get two hours.
I have the DPT-RP1, and it's fantastic for reading things in A4 or letter format like articles and papers. The best things about it are the large size and the extremely light weight, which makes it both easy to read and hold.
Highlighting works great as it detects lines of text and can select even over multiple lines (the Remarkable doesn't do that). Writing quick annotations/notes with the pen works fine, but it's not pressure sensitive and the writing looks quite bad compared to real paper.
Long PDFs or books are hit and miss: There is no table of contents view and no support for anything besides PDFs. So you can't put e-books on it without converting to PDF first, and if you need to jump around in a (technical) book the lack of a table of contents or overview is very inconvenient. If you read through from A-Z then it's ok.
All in all it works great in replacing printer paper, but not so much in replacing your paper notepad.
There's no actual official announcement, but the lack of table of contents and a few small other things will probably be fixed by the upcoming firmware update, once it's actually released.
The DPT-RP1 really shines as a paper/article-reading and annotating device, but I wouldn't recommend it outside of that use case.
Probably... I picked up a 13" e-ink reader from the Good Ereader folks[1] a couple years back. I'm not sure they're available anymore, but I'm a huge fan of mine. The only downside is it's a little aggravating to find and sideload an old version of the Kindle app that works on it. But for PDFs, it's awesome, and the note-taking with the stylus is really smooth too.
While I agree that an e-ink display is much easier on the eyes, you might be able to get a distraction free experience from an iPad by using the Do Not Disturb-Mode, though I'm not sure if that mode will hide notifications while the device is in use.
Well it saves you from all the software issues described in the article as there is a mature and powerful ecosystem, so reading, annotating, sharing and syncing pdfs is not an issue.
I read a ton of pdfs on my iPad and am quite happy with the experience. Yes, epaper would be nice, but I don’t think there’s a good solution yet.
Pomodoro technique is for time management, not managing all the distractions you likely have on your iPad. From notifications to being able to "alt-tab" into your vices like HN.
I had a CrossPad twenty years ago. And it feels like this device has improved extremely little from it. The CrossPad was recording what you wrote in a notepad placed on top of it, it had a little radio in the pen, and later you could download what you did, if I remember, in a vector format so it was better than a scanner. The ReMarkable on the other hand, records what you are writing on a screen and later you can download what you did because it seems the device is not capable of doing a thing with it.
In twenty years, we got... nowhere. Now you can wipe the writing surface with a button press instead of turning a page. Twenty. years.
I am so happy I pre-ordered one of these. It is by far the best e-ink tablet I have used for handwriting, and it is light enough to take with me everywhere.
Paper is just one of those things where everyone thinks they know what they want to use instead, but who really knows! Maybe what we all want is smart glasses to record and transcribe everything we write onto physical paper / surfaces. I can also see the appeal of a device that facilitates both writing and reading, but the issue is that computers (desktops / laptops) are already so damn good at this.
I have this device, and for hackers, this review misses some stuff:
* the company behind it is based in norway, so you can be pretty sure the techies got treated well
* they abide by the GPL very well
* by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local
* I really hope they start a good opensource community program. There are already efforts underway for hacking on this, and in theory making custom applications for this could be very fun
* last I saw, some of the developers are active on reddit and HN, so I hope they comment on the last point
Is the response time really that fast? On my e-reader, it takes solid 1 second in the best case (and sometimes more than 3s worst) to switch a page. This device looks really fast. But maybe it's just updating small region and that's why it's so fast?
>But maybe it's just updating small region and that's why it's so fast?
Exactly. I have one and I think writing has really short latency. My friend says it's slightly slower than an iPad but I haven't tried that so I don't know, in any case it's still very good.
The only really bad thing about the reMarkable is that the software still sometimes crashes, leaving you for ~20 seconds with a notebook that you can't write on.
>The only really bad thing about the reMarkable is that the software still sometimes crashes, leaving you for ~20 seconds with a notebook that you can't write on.
Interesting, in 3 months I haven't had a single crash
Page switching can take a bit,depending on how much there is to render. When I read papers, it never takes more than half a second or so, at most.
Drawing also doesn't have any painful latency (I say painful because it IS barely noticable, but it doesn't take away the feeling of drawing/writing and instant feedback)
>>Switching pages can still take a few seconds (the display is lightning fast, but the processor for generating the page is not).*
Can take up to a few seconds, but really depends on what the device is rendering. For most arXiv papers and light graphics (e.g. clean charts) the page turns have been very tolerable.
A lot of responses are commenting about writing being fast. AFAIK, the slow part of eink displays was always effectively clearing them. Drawing is fast, and drawing without needing to clear anything, such as during writing, should be expected to be responsive. Many new systems don't do a full clear for every update, but that introduces more artifacts each time until a slow full clear is done. But the better displays now can get away with it without being distracting.
Just curious but which ereader do you have? The current higher-end Kindles (I have an Oasis and a Voyage) turn pages so fast as to be unnoticeable with a noticeable full screen flash every 10 or so pages.
Echoing other responses here: writing on it is practically lag-free (there's a tiny amount of lag, but I don't even notice it anymore); using the eraser tool to erase sections takes a little more lag, using the move tool to move sections around lags a bit more, and a full page refresh can take a couple of seconds.
In practice, it's been perfectly usable (for me). The only nit I've found responsiveness-wise so far is the startup time. It's not convenient when I suddenly remember something and want to write it down and have to hold down the power button for three seconds and then wait another five or more for it to get to the main screen and then wait another two or so to get to my scratch pad.
Parent asked about relevance. It's relevant if some people have worries about treatment of techies. Should people have these concerns? Dunno, but probably off-topic for this post :)
"Normally" would be overstating the problem I think, but it's not as though toxic work environments where people are expected to work unsustainably long hours are exactly uncommon in the tech sector.
Yeah, but I don't think the people writing the software are usually getting too badly treated. Are the electronics assembled in an East Asian sweatshop?
Techies get treated well probably equals higher employee retention, again leading to higher institutional memory, meaning bugs have a chance of actually getting fixed. More happiness probably also correlates with more creativity, meaning that there is also a chance of getting more features with updates.
by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local
Maybe it's just me, but why do the defaults for devices like this seem to now always require either a special app or reach out into the Internet? Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth? The hardware is certainly capable of it.
That said, I don't mind the presence of WiFi, but the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.
Most customers are ignorant of security issues and the privacy regulations are too weak. This has resulted on one hand in only noticing the conveniences of cloud sync on the customer side and an information greediness on the side of the companies.
My enthusiasm for this device instantly evaporated when I found out about the mandatory cloud integration.
I already know from a customer support situation that Amazon has remote access to kindles, they can tell you what files you have on device, etc.
It's depressingly bad...
Bonus: this reMarkable website does not work without third party JS. It's completely blank. One of the 3rd parties is hotjar, which does all sorts of shady analytics like clickstream and keylogging.
The GP and lima have both claimed that one can transfer files without the cloud, but this is not mentioned in their FAQ (https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us).
This is a direct quote: "Use the reMarkable desktop app or the reMarkable mobile app to transfer documents and ebooks onto your device. Once imported, your files will be synced across your connected devices. reMarkable works best with our custom built apps for iPhone, Android, PC and Mac."
By using a search engine on their web-site(!) one can find details about USB support: "NB: This functionality is currently experimental, as we haven't fully implemented it yet. We will work to improve how this works and looks in future software updates."
Maybe this is a great device which allows open access, but it's very difficult to figure this out from their website.
> Maybe this is a great device which allows open access, but it's very difficult to figure this out from their website.
Isn't that par for the course for esoteric information only useful to highly advanced users in the consumer electronics[1] space? I'm yet to see an Android device that touts unlockable bootloaders on their websites.
1. Being "open" isn't the ReMarkable's tablet schtick/selling point. It's a consumer product that happens to be open. The minority users who want to take advantage of that know where to look/can find that out on HN.
I'm talking about being able to transfer your files between two devices sitting 10cm apart, without using someone elses servers.
This is a very basic feature, supported by everything except those spyware products which are selling customer information or those that reserve the right to do it in the future.
If reMarkable is not one of those, they should make it clear in their marketing.
They tried, but exposing a "simple USB mass storage" isn't easy at all from a running operating system. USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex. This is why file-based protocols like MTP exist.
But, since you can SSH into the device, rsync works just fine on the Remarkable. :)
They had a variety of pretty big engineering challenges to solve: getting the form factor right, making sure your hand didn't interfere with the screen while using it, getting the pen-and-paper feel right, and getting the e-ink refresh rate down to where you could draw and write on it and have it feel natural.
I'm fine with them choosing to solve those challenges instead of supporting USB mass storage.
...and designing, developing, and supporting your own custom application and its associated protocol isn't an "engineering challenge"?
USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex.
The point is, USBMS is a solved problem. My MP3/MP4 players, my Android phone, my satnav, even my soldering iron[1] can do it. The Linux kernel, which reMarkable uses, already includes support for this[2]. It's conceptually very simple --- in its most basic form, if the device detects that it's plugged in, it unmounts its internal block device and lets the host control it, and vice-versa. More advanced functionality, such as found on Android and many MP3/MP4s, lets you choose whether the device or the host controls its storage, via a very obvious interface on the device itself (one position is "charge only", the other is "transfer files".)
Yes, exposing a block device over USBMS is a solved problem.
Exposing files from a device's internal storage (which is ext4 in this case) over USBMS is very much not a solved issue. You'd have to copy the files back and forth or write a driver which emulates a FAT filesystem.
The alternative would be to use FAT internally and expose that block device, risking corruption (you have no control over what is done to your poor filesystem).
None of my Android phones can do that. In fact, Android used to expose the raw device in earlier releases and stopped doing it because it was too unreliable and the UX was bad since the filesystem had to be unmounted.
> Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth?
I agree that it should definitely be an option because there are plenty of situations when using this device where you might not even have connectivity.
> the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.
It is definitely silly and wasteful but it's oh so simple when it works correctly. Instead of dealing with SMB shares, email, FTP, rsync, cables, mass storage devices, properly ejecting things, or any other technology; you instead just put a file in a designated folder and it's available on all of your devices in a matter of moments.
I guess if this device is targeted only at power users then rsync support is great. If they're hoping to make this a mass market device then they probably need something more user friendly.
That gives me a lot of hope. At some pint the article mentions a "proprietary cloud service" which immediately made me worry that this would be a locked-up device.
If the underlying software is open source, that would also suggest that it if there is a large enough community, it will keep working for much longer than the company supports it. And it gives hope for better software fixes. For example, the writing-lag mentioned sounds like it should be solvable with better data structures under the hood.
The API used for the cloud service is quite simple. There are already two projects on github implementing it (one by me) - search for remarkable-tablet to find them.
The tablet also works fine without using the cloud service, it has a built-in webserver to upload documents to it that you can just access via WiFi or USB-LAN.
Really this device is a hacker's dream in terms of openness. The only last thing I'd wish for was open sourcing the main software application running on it.
Do you think one could hack it into a "screen" by streaming a black-and-white image data from a computer to it?
So the connected computer would do all the heavy lifting related to rendering, compress the result to something that is really easy to decompress, send it over, and tablet would just decompress a bitmap and blit it to the screen?
Haven't tried, but you're either limited by USB2.0 or the wifi chip.
Given the low refresh rate of the panel, something like that should work just fine. Pretty sure I saw a YouTube video by someone who hacked it together using periodic screenshots.
> by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl
Could you explain how this works? I assumed that's what the HTTP interface setting was, but I couldn't see this documented anywhere. I really don't like the Windows and Android app so this would be a nice alternative.
The SSH access is actually not hidden behind a switch.
When you connect a reMarkable into your computer it identifies as an ethernet adapter and assigns you an IP over DHCP, you can then access SSH on the device via that IP.
This is what the device shows you for gaining access (don't worry, that's not actually my password anymore and I've put SSH keys on it anyways): https://i.imgur.com/zbJUBOe.jpg
This screen is in Settings -> About, right below the GPL information.
Edit: If you were asking about the HTTP interface, that becomes available at the same IP but it is hidden behind a switch (Settings -> Storage -> Enable USB web interface)
I hope this is good, or that they are working on making it better. I love e-ink, far prefer it to reading on my phone, but the last 2 devices I've had have had terrible software, eventually been discontinued, and in any case, the screens have broken. I get the impression e-ink is much more fragile than an LCD, but maybe it's just a question of the build. I've dropped my Huawei many times without breaking it, and although I've seen many iPhones with broken glass, the display and touch input generally remains usable.. on my e-ink devices, in one case a bit of water completely destroyed it, in the other case, I don't know what happened but I took it out of my backpack and it was busted, so it must have been a small shock, as I didn't drop the bag or anything. I'd buy another e-ink device in a heartbeat, but it had better be solid because they aren't cheap.
I wish that people who reviewed devices with handwriting support would include some pictures showing math writing. Throw in an electronics schematic diagram or two, also.
I want to know how well the thing works as a STEM writing scratchpad. If it can handle math and electronics reasonably well, that should be sufficient for most STEM.
I own one. It's OK for handwriting but not perfect. Easy enough to draw and redraw schematic diagrams (and regular shaped objects) if you're not too worried about them being a bit fuzzy at the edges. Think it's better suited to doodling using the larger pencil setting though.
Math writing needs a much higher resolution than ordinary text. For example if you are writing 2^2^2 the last 2 is really small. You also need a larger surface area so that you can draw diagrams and layout your calculations exactly as you want. I haven't tried ReMarkable myself, but from what I've heard, for math it is not quite there yet.
I've been reasonably happy with my Surface Pro 4 for math, using OneNote. I do occasionally zoom in when writing something with more than one level of superscript or subscript, but it is responsive enough that zooming in or out is not overly annoying.
I've got one too. I take most of my notes in notebooks but would end up with loads of notes that I would never refer to again and I couldn't be bothered uploading to Evernote.
I got this 100% in the assumption that hand-writing recognition will come eventually. Or maybe some kind of link to Evernote so they can do that bit.
Funny the review mentions the battery life being good - it's really not as good as was expected, and is probably the #1 complaint on social media (man, I feel sorry for their social media team).
I have been using it since November (second preorder wave).
Pros: The e-ink display is great, large enough to show one page of any pdf. The device is light. Taking notes feels good. Battery life is great for reading books, good for taking notes.
Cons: Price. In-house cloud storage that you must use (there is a beta setting enabling some weird tunnel over usb, have not tried it yet ...). Apps you must use in order to transfer document onto device (Windows, iOS, Android only). All your documents are automatically backed up and synced once you are on a wi-fi, whether you like it or not. No apps ... there is not even a web browser and there is no way of installing anything. Because the controls are on the bottom, the reading experience is not as good as with Kindle. Round pencil tends to roll around.
Many of the cons are software related and could be fixed. But there is no way of telling, whether they will be fixed.
At the end of the day, I do not regret getting it.
Same group as you. I primarily use it for reading.
Just want to group together a few response to you and others about my experience:
-battery life has been fine, especially when used mostly as a reader.
-no web browser/apps is actually a plus to many who are focused on reading or creative things as they are a distraction. LCD tablets fulfill that need fine.
-no swiping on docs is ok by me - less marks from dirty paws
-refresh rates in my use are not 'one or two seconds.' I think people tend to exaggerate wait times in general. A page flip is probably about half a second when reading Reviews of Modern Physics
-I've only had one crash/reboot.
-The latest software seems a bit snappier and has some improvements when it comes to pen use settings
-No issues while annotating pdfs
-its a little bit slow refreshing the document lists/library but we are talking a second, maybe second and half worst case
-I understand why they are using cloud, though its not really important to me (syncing docs across multiple devices). Likewise, nothing I have is super confidential so that again is not (yet) a big concern to me
-the zoom feature is a little bit clunky and can be improved
-I would like a future iteration to include a backlight
-Any future version should also be slightly larger, perhaps
1x1.5. This would likely enable viewing of letter size docs without the need to crop the margins. That said, its only a minor inconvenience to crop things like journals so they are viewable without the need to zoom
-Some ask for handwriting recognition though I think first (and easier) would be some type of option to do version control on modified documents.
-A fair price is probably closer to $450 but have to remember this is hardware version 1
All in all, I am pretty happy with the device and hope they continue to improve the software. Were a second generation to be released, I would consider upgrading if it had a backlight and faster cpu/memory combo.
As a side-side note, and just for the record, in 1993 existed (I had one) the Compaq Concerto, using the Windows for Pen Computing (a spin-off of Windows 3.1):
My model was a 486Sx 33 Mhz with a whopping 8 MB Ram (default was 4 MB)
I could have written more or less the same review at the time, nice (doing what at the time was more like "magic" or "science fiction" than anything else) it would have needed a more powerful processor, need (better) character recognition, sold for a VERY steep price [1], etc.
At least it needed not a stupid proprietary cloud, it was compatible with most if not all existing software, doubled as a "normal" laptop.
[1] The cost was if I recall correctly around 4,000,000 Italian Lire, roughly 2,000 Euros which at the time was like 3 months salary of a worker.
EDIT: Clear slip of the fingers, it was 8 MB and 4 MB, I wrote GB originally
>As has been pointed out many times here, this does not require a 'stupid proprietary cloud' either.
Let me rephrase "needed not" with "came not with a default", and allow me to doubt that a "common user" (or if you prefer "non-hacker" will be able to change the settings/whatever that this (otherwise nice) E-Ink device ships with.
I've tried the Boogie Board Sync in the past and it really is write-only. The price is nice and they're honest about its features. Still, I really missed not being able to page through earlier notes.
Also, the feel of writing on it is okay but not good or great.
Had it been able to show earlier notes I would have recommended it to everyone looking for a digital notebook.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadedit: clarity
I'm tempted to buy one, but know how frustrated I get with bad UIs, so might hold off until the next gen.
The only UI thing that makes me scowl so far is that sometimes my pen settings inexplicably get reset.
The general consensus is that you learn better if you write but it's frustrating to not have the notes digitized and backed up.
It sounds like it might be good.
Nope. Maybe the later generations of the device and competitors entering the market forcing a lower price will, though. I’d pay 300 tops for it.
Surface Pro / Galaxy Notebooks(wacom-based) with "a layer of finely textured acrylic glass" will be a much better comparison.
> but it comes at the cost of not being able to flip through documents using finger swipes or taps
so no multi-finger zoom gestures
It comes with an adapter so you can charge it with same Lightning charger you use to charge the iPad itself.
I almost accidentally threw it out with the packaging. They should have incorporated into the cap so you'd always have it with you.
Also it's kind of silly they didn't make that end (where an eraser usually is) function as an eraser.
having a cap to protect its manliness is so... stupid
I’ve just been using the female-female adapter as a cap, but it doesn’t look as nice. It’s more oval than round and has the exposed port.
I’m kind of surprised no one has made a nicer female-female adapter with matching male cap.
Because when I'm out and about, I don't want to stop somewhere to charge my pencil. This way, you plug it in to the iPad, and in less than a minute you can work with it for any hour or more - no need to hunt for a wall plug or bring along a cable.
That is the one thing that annoys the crap out of me, considering the stylus from my Toshiba Windows Tablet PC (what, thirteen/fourteen years ago?) had this functionality. I’ll ignore that I have to charge it all (Toshiba one didn’t) because of the tech differences, but I can’t grock a reason not to have an “eraser”.
i don't get the problem with that fact. At first i was also like "This looks stupid and somehow dangerous for the device/port, and why do i need this adapter??". But after using the Pencil i never even though about the port, or the adapter, or anything like that, since i can charge the pencil for like 60 seconds and directly with my ipad. Without searching my charger. And these 60 seconds will be enough for the day.
With these fast charging / long using times i really dont have a problem with this concept.
Remarkable got huge potential, but needs better integration with ebook stores (e.g. Amazon), OCR and Apps. Price is excusable for 1st gen, but probably too high for mass market.
Does anyone know whether the software is user friendly? E.g. cloud integration, doesn't require to install shitty software, can email documents, etc...
Is it hacker friendly? And perhaps write a small app for it (terminal viewer).
I wish I could try it in Europe (Germany, Spain or France...)
Always-connected is a plague on modern computing that has ruined the experience for anyone with slow computers and/or unreliable networks. If you proposed a 3MB web page with 300ms API calls for every action and called that a replacement for an app for anyone with an unreliable/heavily metered connection you would be laughed out of the room. Yet that's the status quo of 'modern stacks'.
It's eye-opening how useless a $1000 smartphone is in the middle of the outback, in the Yukon, etc. We've regressed to dumb terminals with the cost of decentralized computers.
And of course they're getting some poor reviews for not having some bullshit cloud sync.
Edit: I've heard Sony takes some privacy liberties with their EULA, so check that and maybe block their desktop app from connecting to the internet.
You need to install a Qt desktop app for the cloud integration or its equivalent mobile version.
There are however some projects out there already that are working on alternatives for the cloud integration such as this one [0].
[0] https://github.com/juruen/rmapi
it is a fair question to ask whom the difference in features (plus the extra hassle) is worth the difference in price
What I want is an e-ink laptop with simple but good word processing, coding, text-mostly browsing, emails and such.
I like my reader. It doesn't feel like "device" and I'm much more relaxed using it. Im on my third one and all three were on airplane mode since the day I bought them. Reading on tablet/phone triggers my hyperactive "device mode". Checking emails, hn, tinder, contol-tab, notifications, Twitter, youtube... Not good before bed. e-ink just lends to relaxed focus, for me. The battery life also helps me forget it's a device.
An e-ink laptop built for working on stuff with fewer distractions, 20+ hrs battery life, decent text editing and word processing, emails... I want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj2Lvuc28k0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pw-oCItgx8
Imagine a laptop with this technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1xEuR2mLh8
The OLPC’s screen was pretty cool in black and white and was quite usable in full sun. It also was fast in a way that epaper wasn't.
In color mode, it was pretty muted, and the resolution was... commensurate with those of the time period. But, I imagine that things would have eventually improved. Kind of a shame the whole thing seems to have dead-ended.
The last few days I've been working on a new version of the software, and I think I'll wire it back up. If I get it clean enough for others to use, I'll write it up.
Highlighting works great as it detects lines of text and can select even over multiple lines (the Remarkable doesn't do that). Writing quick annotations/notes with the pen works fine, but it's not pressure sensitive and the writing looks quite bad compared to real paper.
Long PDFs or books are hit and miss: There is no table of contents view and no support for anything besides PDFs. So you can't put e-books on it without converting to PDF first, and if you need to jump around in a (technical) book the lack of a table of contents or overview is very inconvenient. If you read through from A-Z then it's ok.
All in all it works great in replacing printer paper, but not so much in replacing your paper notepad.
There's no actual official announcement, but the lack of table of contents and a few small other things will probably be fixed by the upcoming firmware update, once it's actually released.
The DPT-RP1 really shines as a paper/article-reading and annotating device, but I wouldn't recommend it outside of that use case.
[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/product/good-e-reader-13-3-e-re...
And the iPad is a distraction device, one would need to disable everything in parental controls to get a comparable experience :)
I read a ton of pdfs on my iPad and am quite happy with the experience. Yes, epaper would be nice, but I don’t think there’s a good solution yet.
Distracted? Try the pomodoro technique.
In twenty years, we got... nowhere. Now you can wipe the writing surface with a button press instead of turning a page. Twenty. years.
How, should we call it when software regresses. Its not bloat- its worser.
* the company behind it is based in norway, so you can be pretty sure the techies got treated well
* they abide by the GPL very well
* by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local
* I really hope they start a good opensource community program. There are already efforts underway for hacking on this, and in theory making custom applications for this could be very fun
* last I saw, some of the developers are active on reddit and HN, so I hope they comment on the last point
Exactly. I have one and I think writing has really short latency. My friend says it's slightly slower than an iPad but I haven't tried that so I don't know, in any case it's still very good.
The only really bad thing about the reMarkable is that the software still sometimes crashes, leaving you for ~20 seconds with a notebook that you can't write on.
Interesting, in 3 months I haven't had a single crash
Switching pages can still take a few seconds (the display is lightning fast, but the processor for generating the page is not).
Can take up to a few seconds, but really depends on what the device is rendering. For most arXiv papers and light graphics (e.g. clean charts) the page turns have been very tolerable.
Maybe it's just time for me to update? I bought this in 2014.
In practice, it's been perfectly usable (for me). The only nit I've found responsiveness-wise so far is the startup time. It's not convenient when I suddenly remember something and want to write it down and have to hold down the power button for three seconds and then wait another five or more for it to get to the main screen and then wait another two or so to get to my scratch pad.
Maybe it's just me, but why do the defaults for devices like this seem to now always require either a special app or reach out into the Internet? Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth? The hardware is certainly capable of it.
That said, I don't mind the presence of WiFi, but the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.
My enthusiasm for this device instantly evaporated when I found out about the mandatory cloud integration. I already know from a customer support situation that Amazon has remote access to kindles, they can tell you what files you have on device, etc.
It's depressingly bad...
Bonus: this reMarkable website does not work without third party JS. It's completely blank. One of the 3rd parties is hotjar, which does all sorts of shady analytics like clickstream and keylogging.
From GP: "So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local"
By using a search engine on their web-site(!) one can find details about USB support: "NB: This functionality is currently experimental, as we haven't fully implemented it yet. We will work to improve how this works and looks in future software updates."
Maybe this is a great device which allows open access, but it's very difficult to figure this out from their website.
Isn't that par for the course for esoteric information only useful to highly advanced users in the consumer electronics[1] space? I'm yet to see an Android device that touts unlockable bootloaders on their websites.
1. Being "open" isn't the ReMarkable's tablet schtick/selling point. It's a consumer product that happens to be open. The minority users who want to take advantage of that know where to look/can find that out on HN.
This is a very basic feature, supported by everything except those spyware products which are selling customer information or those that reserve the right to do it in the future.
If reMarkable is not one of those, they should make it clear in their marketing.
But, since you can SSH into the device, rsync works just fine on the Remarkable. :)
Personally I would be ok with my device disabling it's UI while it emulated a mass storage device when plugged into a host.
I'm fine with them choosing to solve those challenges instead of supporting USB mass storage.
USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex.
The point is, USBMS is a solved problem. My MP3/MP4 players, my Android phone, my satnav, even my soldering iron[1] can do it. The Linux kernel, which reMarkable uses, already includes support for this[2]. It's conceptually very simple --- in its most basic form, if the device detects that it's plugged in, it unmounts its internal block device and lets the host control it, and vice-versa. More advanced functionality, such as found on Android and many MP3/MP4s, lets you choose whether the device or the host controls its storage, via a very obvious interface on the device itself (one position is "charge only", the other is "transfer files".)
[1]https://hackaday.com/2017/07/24/review-ts100-soldering-iron/
[2]https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/mass-storage.tx...
Exposing files from a device's internal storage (which is ext4 in this case) over USBMS is very much not a solved issue. You'd have to copy the files back and forth or write a driver which emulates a FAT filesystem.
The alternative would be to use FAT internally and expose that block device, risking corruption (you have no control over what is done to your poor filesystem).
None of my Android phones can do that. In fact, Android used to expose the raw device in earlier releases and stopped doing it because it was too unreliable and the UX was bad since the filesystem had to be unmounted.
However, here's what Martin (the CTO) has been playing with:
https://github.com/reMarkable/vfatbuse
I agree that it should definitely be an option because there are plenty of situations when using this device where you might not even have connectivity.
> the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.
It is definitely silly and wasteful but it's oh so simple when it works correctly. Instead of dealing with SMB shares, email, FTP, rsync, cables, mass storage devices, properly ejecting things, or any other technology; you instead just put a file in a designated folder and it's available on all of your devices in a matter of moments.
It was one of the first things I thought of, "I hope I can run rsync on this thing to sync notes".
If the underlying software is open source, that would also suggest that it if there is a large enough community, it will keep working for much longer than the company supports it. And it gives hope for better software fixes. For example, the writing-lag mentioned sounds like it should be solvable with better data structures under the hood.
The tablet also works fine without using the cloud service, it has a built-in webserver to upload documents to it that you can just access via WiFi or USB-LAN.
Really this device is a hacker's dream in terms of openness. The only last thing I'd wish for was open sourcing the main software application running on it.
In other words, what good is a custom reimplementation of it if you can't make it point at them without dns hacking?
Do you think one could hack it into a "screen" by streaming a black-and-white image data from a computer to it?
So the connected computer would do all the heavy lifting related to rendering, compress the result to something that is really easy to decompress, send it over, and tablet would just decompress a bitmap and blit it to the screen?
Given the low refresh rate of the panel, something like that should work just fine. Pretty sure I saw a YouTube video by someone who hacked it together using periodic screenshots.
Could you explain how this works? I assumed that's what the HTTP interface setting was, but I couldn't see this documented anywhere. I really don't like the Windows and Android app so this would be a nice alternative.
When you connect a reMarkable into your computer it identifies as an ethernet adapter and assigns you an IP over DHCP, you can then access SSH on the device via that IP.
This is what the device shows you for gaining access (don't worry, that's not actually my password anymore and I've put SSH keys on it anyways): https://i.imgur.com/zbJUBOe.jpg
This screen is in Settings -> About, right below the GPL information.
Edit: If you were asking about the HTTP interface, that becomes available at the same IP but it is hidden behind a switch (Settings -> Storage -> Enable USB web interface)
@notemaker Boox Max2 Pro looks better, thanks. Pretty small display, but it's a start.
I want to know how well the thing works as a STEM writing scratchpad. If it can handle math and electronics reasonably well, that should be sufficient for most STEM.
Math writing needs a much higher resolution than ordinary text. For example if you are writing 2^2^2 the last 2 is really small. You also need a larger surface area so that you can draw diagrams and layout your calculations exactly as you want. I haven't tried ReMarkable myself, but from what I've heard, for math it is not quite there yet.
I'd be happier with a lighter device, though.
I got this 100% in the assumption that hand-writing recognition will come eventually. Or maybe some kind of link to Evernote so they can do that bit.
Funny the review mentions the battery life being good - it's really not as good as was expected, and is probably the #1 complaint on social media (man, I feel sorry for their social media team).
Also the slow startup time is a bit irritating.
Pros: The e-ink display is great, large enough to show one page of any pdf. The device is light. Taking notes feels good. Battery life is great for reading books, good for taking notes.
Cons: Price. In-house cloud storage that you must use (there is a beta setting enabling some weird tunnel over usb, have not tried it yet ...). Apps you must use in order to transfer document onto device (Windows, iOS, Android only). All your documents are automatically backed up and synced once you are on a wi-fi, whether you like it or not. No apps ... there is not even a web browser and there is no way of installing anything. Because the controls are on the bottom, the reading experience is not as good as with Kindle. Round pencil tends to roll around.
Many of the cons are software related and could be fixed. But there is no way of telling, whether they will be fixed.
At the end of the day, I do not regret getting it.
and it works (flatpak run com.remarkable.reMarkable )
It takes about 400Mb since it downloads many libraries.
Just want to group together a few response to you and others about my experience:
-battery life has been fine, especially when used mostly as a reader.
-no web browser/apps is actually a plus to many who are focused on reading or creative things as they are a distraction. LCD tablets fulfill that need fine.
-no swiping on docs is ok by me - less marks from dirty paws
-refresh rates in my use are not 'one or two seconds.' I think people tend to exaggerate wait times in general. A page flip is probably about half a second when reading Reviews of Modern Physics
-I've only had one crash/reboot.
-The latest software seems a bit snappier and has some improvements when it comes to pen use settings
-No issues while annotating pdfs
-its a little bit slow refreshing the document lists/library but we are talking a second, maybe second and half worst case
-I understand why they are using cloud, though its not really important to me (syncing docs across multiple devices). Likewise, nothing I have is super confidential so that again is not (yet) a big concern to me
-the zoom feature is a little bit clunky and can be improved
-I would like a future iteration to include a backlight
-Any future version should also be slightly larger, perhaps 1x1.5. This would likely enable viewing of letter size docs without the need to crop the margins. That said, its only a minor inconvenience to crop things like journals so they are viewable without the need to zoom
-Some ask for handwriting recognition though I think first (and easier) would be some type of option to do version control on modified documents.
-A fair price is probably closer to $450 but have to remember this is hardware version 1
All in all, I am pretty happy with the device and hope they continue to improve the software. Were a second generation to be released, I would consider upgrading if it had a backlight and faster cpu/memory combo.
[edit for clarity]
probably boox who oem's it for them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Concerto
My model was a 486Sx 33 Mhz with a whopping 8 MB Ram (default was 4 MB)
I could have written more or less the same review at the time, nice (doing what at the time was more like "magic" or "science fiction" than anything else) it would have needed a more powerful processor, need (better) character recognition, sold for a VERY steep price [1], etc.
At least it needed not a stupid proprietary cloud, it was compatible with most if not all existing software, doubled as a "normal" laptop.
[1] The cost was if I recall correctly around 4,000,000 Italian Lire, roughly 2,000 Euros which at the time was like 3 months salary of a worker.
EDIT: Clear slip of the fingers, it was 8 MB and 4 MB, I wrote GB originally
Oops, yes, of course (corrected the post), thanks.
As has been pointed out many times here, this does not require a 'stupid proprietary cloud' either.
Let me rephrase "needed not" with "came not with a default", and allow me to doubt that a "common user" (or if you prefer "non-hacker" will be able to change the settings/whatever that this (otherwise nice) E-Ink device ships with.
I haven't Bluetooth'd yet, but plug it in and copy from its drive of single-page PDFs (with InkML?).
https://amzn.com/B00E8CIGCA $99.47
Also, the feel of writing on it is okay but not good or great.
Had it been able to show earlier notes I would have recommended it to everyone looking for a digital notebook.