The hardware on the first one was very good compared to others at the time, but some software features I'd like to have was missing. So I tested a friend's one, but never ended up buying one myself.
But from the looks of it they have added and worked on much of that software the last years. Looks very compelling now.
I looked in to the remarkable a few months ago and I couldn't find any way the price justified the benefit over pen and paper. Unless you are reading lots of pdfs, it seems like a waste. At the new price point it might be decent though.
I have used the original, you can choose pen modes with varying degrees of pressure sensitivity. This allows you to take notes easily with whatever level of pressure you want, but also switch to a different pen if you want to draw a textured picture.
The lightest of touches are registered by device. I suppose if you choose the wrong pen mode for the immediate task you might have to push hard?
I do pointed pen calligraphy and various penamanship styles and I can tell you that the remarkable tablet requires VERY, VERY little pressure to register a stroke. It takes almost no modification for me to get the fine delicate linework required for Spencerian for example.
I love all the comments like this. It sounds great. But they all reference such tactile experiences that I’m left thinking, “huh, I might buy this, IF I could try it out.”
I don't understand the fascination with super-thin devices. Can you hold it for any extended period of time without much strain? Will it slip and shatter when the palms get slightly moist?
It weights about 400g, so about what a paper pad does I guess? In any case, it has a textured surface, and assuming it's similar to the reMarkable 1 it is not slippery.
A US Letter sized pad made of 20lb paper is 1lb per 100 sheets[1] so an 88 page pad would weigh 400g, neglecting the cardboard backing. If it were made of 16lb paper then you would get a bit over 100 pages in 400g.
1: 20lbs means 500 sheets of the basis size weighs 20 lbs. The basis size for US Letter sized paper is 4 sheets (22x17), so 2000 sheets weighs 20lbs.
> "The new tablet is just 4.7 mm (0.19 in) thick, thinner than the iPad Pro and Sony’s competing Digital Paper tablets, both of which are 5.9 mm."
At that thickness, I'd be worried about sturdiness and, in particular, bending, à la the problems with the iPhone 6.
I can stick an iPad Mini or similar tablet into a jacket pocket or backpack and jog a couple of miles to a bus stop daily without concern. Will we be able to do the same with this, I wonder?
The problems with the phone is that it's often carried in pants pockets. I don't think something of this size will have the same kind of forces applied to it.
This is much larger than a phone which increases the effects of small bends. I managed to break one of the early large-format ebook readers with a glass display in a jacket pocket, for example.
I happen to have Sony's competing 13" e-paper tablet already and I'd be nervous about putting it into a backpack without something non-bendable next to it to prevent flexing.
Actually, I think that things which get thrown into bags on a regular basis face more stresses than a phone in your pocket.
It could be jostling around with corners of large books, laptops, cables, random containers, etc. It can also have more space to accelerate when you swing your bag around, whereas a phone is held firmly your leg when you run/jump/etc.
Durability in a bag is what separates great electronics manufacturers from decent ones. If I buy something and it doesn't survive bag life for several months, which is quite common, then I write off the manufacturer as a creator of fragile throw-away devices. But I've never had a phone have any sort of problem from pocket stresses.
I imagine most people will buy a case for this, as this tablet does not come cheap.
When I take my tablet (in a case) out and about, it goes into a laptop sleeve before it goes into a bag. For me, it's not bending I'm worried about, but scratches.
While you joke, I actually used that method on a modified clipboard to hold mine in a zip up folio. I'm super happy with the way it is positioned now because I have it held in place with a clipboard.
https://imgur.com/a/thrkIww
Any details on whether they've fixed search? Zoom? Or made it a mountable USB drive so it doesn't require their app or similar janky solutions? The first one really looked nice, but all the reviews were full of practical usability issues and this promo doesn't touch on the topic.
It still sounds as if it has the original's killer negative: everything you write is sync'ed to their servers, which is a huge no-no for work use without IT approval, at least at my workplace, or anything regulated by privacy laws like HIPPA. I'd love one of these things if it was able to function purely offline even if I had to sacrifice cloud features.
It's a failure of their marketing that they didn't make this clear. The device is capable of working 100% offline. Notes are stored on the device, with cloud sync being optional. File transfer is possible with SSH, or the (poor) app or the equally poor web interface when connecting via USB. You don't have to create an account for the rM cloud, you can use the thing without ever connecting it to the Internet.
The marketing sounds like they've stepped up the app/cloud bits with a browser plugin, etc. Do you know for certain the second version still supports the non-cloud snycing? The support site is incompletely updated for the new device; it's not clear at all if they still permit private operation.
No idea about the new model. I'd hope it can still work offline, given the team's background in free software, but who knows. The tech lead sometimes posts here on HN when the rM is discussed, so Martin, if you're reading this, a comment would be great :)
Found an article in the "remarkable 2" section of the support site. No mention of support for offline/private syncing, which is a real shame. (The "read more" links go to v1 pages and seem to be autogenerated.)
[On the original, you could not] rotate the device 180 and use it normally, but you could click a toggle in the settings which would reflect the UI laterally, for left-handed people.
Does the reMarkable adapt to left-handed people? If you're left-handed, don't worry. A few of our colleagues are also left-handed. They want to make sure all lefties have an excellent experience with their reMarkable device.
You'll be able to set up your reMarkable to left-handed mode when you first set up your device. We've also made it easy to switch between right-handed and left-handed modes in the main settings.
I think that's talking about the first reMarkable. reMarkable 2 looks very optimized for right handed use.
But I'll be honest--I don't purchase "left-handed" notebooks or use them backwards or left-handed books or anything so maybe it doesn't actually matter as much as right-handed people think it does when righties writing articles imagine what lefties think.
The original was designed for both hands in the software. I think it's likely the new one will be as well, and any insinuation by the author otherwise is probably wrong.
It does look like they support some kind of left-hand mode in the settings, but it's practically impossible to find this on their website or what it actually means in practice. Very disappointing given about 10% of people are left-handed (including me).
I own the 1st gen and it has a left hand mode. Basically the UI gets mirrored. The 1st gen device itself is left-right symmetric, so it works well. The 2nd gen has the metal bar on the left, so not sure how well it works on it.
I think that was just misleading fluff. I'm left-handed and I have a current gen reMarkable. It has a good left-handed mode. It looks to me like the metal strip on the left side is meant more as a mount point for the cover. I don't think they neglected lefties in the design of this device. IMHO, the extra space on the left side from the metal strip makes it easier for a left-handed person to rest their palm while writing.
The speed improvements are impressive. Wonder though if there is any physical change in the display? It seems to be identical, was hoping they could bring something with a whiter background.
I bought the original version but found that some PDF files absolutely destroyed it. Not massive files where each page is a scanned picture, just regular PDFs from academic journals. I'd open one, it would spend 20+ seconds displaying the "working" spinner, then often as not it would reboot. Had to return it.
I was also pretty shocked that there was no way to get a list of all annotations you've added to a given PDF; I really wanted a way to read through a book making notes as I went, then get an overview of where I'd made notes. Even a way to bookmark a given page would have been useful.
Fix those two issues and it would have been a great device for me; the page size was juuuust big enough to display pretty much any book at a readable size.
I'm very glad it's working well for you, but the software as of January 2020 was unable to properly read PDFs from a particular journal... it may have been Science.
There might be something to do here to clean those up and make them more ergonomic for the device. I have de-DRMed most of my kindle books and turned them into PDFs, even some thousand page monsters with graphs and images, etc, and so far all work well on the device. There are a bunch of open source PDF utilities that may be able to help if desired. Cheers.
This is essentially an advertisement. There's no need to read, unless you are looking to buy a $400 convenience replacement for a $1 pad of paper plus a scanner.
Terrible link, the actual reMarkable website is much better.
It's a very niche device but I've owned mine for nearly two years and am a big advocate. In some ways, the first model was proof of concept. Excellent hardware and writing experience, but the early versions of the software were horrible, and the device itself is very ugly. The software has improved dramatically in the time I've owned it, going from horrible to bad, then to almost acceptable, and now it's decent.
I'm happy to see the company is doing well enough to make a second generation reality. Looks like it will be an overall improved experience, with a magnetic marker, a slick-looking device and overall incremental improvements. I'd like to see some kind of trade up program though, it's expensive (and 50$ more for a marker with one extra sensor is ridiculous) and I can't justify paying that much for an incremental upgrade.
My only concern about the new specs would be the thickness, or rather the sturdiness. The first generation is thick by modern standards, but it's very sturdy. I've dropped the device, I've dropped the bag with it, I've bumped into things with it - not a scratch. Very refreshing in the age of fragile devices. Hopefully the rM2 doesn't sacrifice much sturdiness to be thinner.
This, centum percentum! If 'papery' was my need of the hour I'd go back to physical paper straight. This is lame marketing of an expensive lifeless product that aims to copy the dead tree. That's not what our new mediums are about.
Whatever pushes progress in the low-power, reflective technology of epaper displays should be celebrated, I think.
One could imagine hacking something like this tablet to have a true interactive Squeak like environment on it. Or, better yet, a Squeak-like environment designed from the ground up specifically for epaper displays...
Reflective or iridescent, the nature of light that falls into your eyes doesn't change. Low-power is definitely an attribute that I can get behind but modern batteries are good enough to not go underpowered when it comes to books.
Reflective displays have the advantage of perfectly adapting their brightness to their surroundings. This is especially useful for portable devices. Emissive displays can have light-sensor-controlled brightness, but they don't adapt pixel by pixel like reflective displays.
However, if you are using an emissive display in an environment with constant and even lighting, you can set the brightness correctly and it will be just as good. Many people in such lightning conditions configure their displays wrong and mistake the misconfiguration for an inherent disadvantage of emissive displays.
> have the advantage of perfectly adapting their brightness to their surroundings.
The surroundings might not be lit enough for the health of eyes. This is the usual case and one of the prime issues why dead tree books and e-paper tablets lead to weak eyes.
There's evidence that lack of exposure to sunlight increases risk of myopia. But emissive displays are typically dimmer than sunlit objects, even at full brightness. If insufficient brightness is a concern, you're better off using reflective displays outdoors.
People often read at night before going to sleep. If reading in the Sun was a requirement, one could do that with physical books too. However, most reading happens indoors and for that an iridescent panel screen such as that on an iPad with full gamut of colors is suited better.
Paper is just better than glowing screens for lots of perceptual tasks. No-flicker is better than flicker, too. Keep in mind that lots of our new mediums can be thought of as chaff in the way of reading the right good book.
There are a lot of LCDs that don't flicker, or ones that flicker at 40khz or other high frequencies which is imperceptibile to a human. There are databases on the internet if you want to get a flicker-free LCD screen or laptop.
Are there any tablets that you've felt good writing on? I have a Galaxy Tab A (glassy surface) and I can tolerate drawing the occasional diagram on it. I haven't used its stylus at all after getting the first remarkable.
I still hate the idea of not being allowed to buy/sell used books, and the potential to spy on you, which everyone from kindle to Wacom has decided to do. Paper and paper books are just the way to go for now
Yup, this is what I do. Battery lasts forever. Since I get most of the books off Project Gutenberg, there wouldn't be any slick wifi transfers for me anyway.
Not only that, but this actually adds the book to one's personal library (as "document"). For .mobi, this also synchronizes the last read position, just like it does for books from the Kindle store.
That's up to you, but the drawing experience feels wayyyy better on the remarkable than on the smooth glass of the iPad, from my own experience. It's also far lighter and really does feel paper-y.
Paperlike is nice, but I've heard it actually wears down the tip of the Pencil. That's another thing you may need to buy, but relatively inexpensive ($20 for a pack of 4).
I just added the Paperlike 2 protector to my iPad Pro a few month ago. It's amazing to write on now. You can notice a bit of distortion in the display, but it's really nothing that bothers me at all. I've been very happy with this combination. Because of this setup, I've switched almost all of my note taking over to my iPad. Before, I only took notes in a paper notebook (large Moleskine soft cover). And so far, I haven't had any excess wear and tear on the Pencil nib...
The only issue I had was waiting on shipping from Germany.
Thanks for the feedback and it's great to see you're enjoying it! We're currently working on better worldwide distribution - in the USA we're working with the new Shopify Fulfillment Network to drastically reduce shipping times!
It depends what you want to use it for. It's a distraction free device, which has no notifications, web browser, social media, etc. If you get easily distracted by that, then it's worth it as a note taking device IMO.
pretty sure iTablets have a do-not-disturb mode too, which should take care of most immediate distractions, but this thingy could help in the way that yeah, you CAN'T check social media etc...(for which there are apps too, at least on android, which can lock up certain apps with a timer)
The fact that there are no distractions is actually pretty nice. Just like having a home office puts one in "working mode" when sitting at it, using it puts one in "thinking/reading mode."
It's also pretty good IMO for taking meeting notes, because the only things one can do is listen to the meeting, take notes, and doodle (which has been shown to improve attention and detail recall [0]).
Of course, that also applies to a paper notebook and a nice pen.
It's an e-reader so yes. The new Kindle oasis starts from $250 and it has a smaller screen and you can't write on it. If it were a regular tablet then yeah it would be pricey.
People often compare it to an iPad initially, which completely misses the point in my view. The rM has nothing in common with an iPad, and the word "tablet" in the name makes people think of the completely wrong thing.
The rM is best thought of as a pen and paper notebook, except of effectively infinite size. There are no apps. The UI (the only user-facing program) has minimal features, most of which are there just to mimic what you can do with an actual paper notebook. There are only a few exceptions, like being able to drag your notes/scribbles on the page. The device won't integrate with any 3rd party services, it doesn't have search, etc. If a physical notebook doesn't have it, then the rM probably also doesn't.
That definitely makes the rM a very niche device, but I'm getting great use out of mine, while I never managed to get much good use of an iPad.
Does the "convert to text" feature work as nicely and smoothly as advertised in the Remarkable 2 launch video[0]? If yes, then that alone is worth the price for me. I've tried a number of solutions that have claimed to do this over the years and none of them really work.
The conversion relies on some kind of cloud service (possibly Google's Cloud Vision API). So you need to be connected and there are privacy/security implications. And, it's very dependent on your handwriting. I cannot get coherent results with that feature, but my handwriting is as readable as base64-encoded Perl. I've seen it produce impressively good results when other people try it.
The process itself is indeed smooth, select an item in the menu and a few seconds later you have the text, which can then be emailed.
Just to make this bit clear: with effectively infinite number of pages. One would imagine that panning around infinitely large pages would be a possibility with a product like this, but the feature is not there.
I struggled with this thought before buying my rM1, and I can honestly say it's worth the price tag.
Both physically and mentally this device has changed how I use tablets/devices. It feels like real paper to me, and without all of the glorified app icons and notifications screaming at me I feel more focused on the task at hand. Purpose-driven devices reduces distractions and has helped me grow professionally and I'll even go as far as saying reduced some stress and anxiety.
I am seriously considering buying a dumb phone (minimalist interface) thanks to the impact the rM1 has had on my productivity.
What is the HN policy about posting redirecting URLs to other pages in general? If there isn't one I think there should be clear rules on that. To be clear, I'm not talking about moved pages and links that change after submission.
Beetlejuice didn't so much show up and take advice as he showed up and tried stage a shotgun wedding with your underage daughter in order to exploit some sort of interdimensional green card loophole.
This is suddenly very reminiscent of John Mulaney describing Back to the Future...
The whole "say someone's name 3 times in a mirror" predates Beetlejuice by a long stretch. That said, I don't know of any of the those myths that ended in happy endings for those saying the name, so I think your main point still stands. ;)
Just send mail with any advice you have to the address at the bottom of the site. He may not agree with you, but he's more than reasonable about responding (everything in the inbox is read), and it will do more good (and probably get you more goodwill) than campaigning for policy changes in the middle of random threads.
It's also worth considering, when thinking about why it hasn't been banned, whether or not the main value from the threads (assuming the perfect source) would be from the link or the comments.
For some types of submission, it's the link: personal blog updates, academic papers, interesting technical achievements, detailed research, so on.
For others, it's the comments: company updates, interesting world news, most things happening in real-time, obituaries, so forth.
For others still, it's tied: blog posts on historical subjects, 'Show HN:' posts, submissions about different ways of doing things than mainstream methods.
Product launches, from my perspective, fall in the "Value in Comments" category. So then you have to decide whether it's worth the trade-off. By banning TechCrunch, would the site lose comment value?
Looking at this one, you'd really be missing some good comments by getting rid of TechCrunch links; there are all sorts of anecdotes about the product in this thread, and there are a bunch of interesting anecdotes about competing products as well.
I've had my Remarkable for a little over two years also and it's easily my favorite tech gadget.
Occasionally I'd go from regular work (notes on a project file), to a business or client meeting (pull up notes from past meetings, update with new notes), to a volunteer meeting after work (pull up the previous week's training notes). At each point I had all the information I needed without having to juggle binders or loose-leaf papers.
And I love that I can rework my notes as I write them. So, during a meeting, first draft is just scribbling stuff down, then while people are busy listening to themselves talk, I can drag my scribbles around into priorities and tasks, add a diagram, clean a few things up. This is a completely different workflow from either plain paper or laptop/tablet, and it really works for me.
> The company is claiming a 3x boost to battery life, using the same 3,000 mAh battery, based on performance improvements throughout and a more efficient (but more powerful) dual-core ARM processor. That means two weeks of use and 90 days of standby. This is welcome news, because frankly the battery life and power management on the last one were not great.
The only thing that holds me from considering buying the remarkable is its size. If they would offer a 13 inch version, then I would consider doing that. Right now I am super happy with my sunny DPT-RP1.
What file format do the Sony's use? Is it cloud-based like the ReMarkable or can I manage the files myself locally and copy them over USB to my computer?
I'd love to have an e-ink tablet for hand writing and sketching ideas, but I'm not crash hot on it all being locked in to some closed ecosystem.
FWIW, reMarkable device is accessible by ssh, so you can manage the files yourself. I don't think the format is well documented. I saw some articles about reverse engineering it, but it didn't feel well supported by any means. But if I wanted to use say a private GIT repo instead of rM cloud, I think that would not be very hard to set up.
What's the time interval from "closed" to "I can write a note" (carefully avoiding the word "off" because that might mean something different on an e-ink device).
I've tried a few things in the last couple of years to take my note taking electronic, and it turns out that delay is important - if there's too much delay I end up not jotting down the couple of quick notes I need to write. Wunderlist opens very quickly on my Android phone and I ended up unconsciously using it to write down quick things. OneNote (an otherwise great tool) take an age to open and get to the right page, so I end up not using it except at my desk.
The Remarkable (the older one that I have; not sure on the newer one) has two "off" modes: an "inactive" kind of mode, where it has just deactivated the screen from lack of use, and a "sleep/power-off" mode, where it's actually either gone to sleep or been powered off by the user or a low battery.
In the first mode, it comes back in about 1 second. It's enough that there's a bit of a lag and I don't like it if it happens right in the middle of something, but I haven't run into this very much.
In the second, it takes a few seconds to spin up, so I got into the habit of doing that before a meeting or whatever started. It takes about as much time to get it started up and navigate to the appropriate file as it would to fish a binder out of my bag and open it up to a blank page.
I've owned mine for nearly two years and barely used it, although your comments about the improved software are making me reconsider. I do also like the sturdiness of the first generation device, especially compared with my experiences with Kindles
Mediocre, though reasonable for small PDFs. Reading something like scientific papers (5-10 pages) is pretty great, with long PDFs (manuals or ebooks) the navigation is a pain and you notice the slowdowns. I wouldn't get the rM as a reader, but reading and annotating PDFs is a decent secondary function.
Short papers are just fine. Long documents, as long as you read them mostly sequentially, are IMHO just fine as well. But trying to read something where you need to flip around a lot is painful.
One of the use cases I had in mind when buying rM was reading stuff like IEEE 802 standards, programming language standards, hardware references, etc. But with these documents, the table of contents itself can have 10s of pages. The tools for searching and moving around are there, but the high latency of the e-ink makes them frustrating to use. And hyperlinks in PDFs are not active. And you can't bookmark something to create your personal collection of pages that you often need, which would somewhat alleviate the abovementioned frustration.
I use rM daily, but just not for reading manuals. It's just not a good use case for the device.
Have you seen/tried DPT-S1/DPT-RP1 and if you have, what are your thoughts including compared to reMarkable, because I've been looking at these tablets for many many years now (There's even DPT-CP1 now). But because they are all very costly, it's really hard to decide, I did buy DPT-RP1 for ~800€ but because of the high price, I returned it.
Also, how often do you need to buy new tips, or do they not wear out? I'm asking because the ones for DPT family are designed in such a way that they wear out. I guess I've always been more on the DPT side, because it's made by Sony, which gives me a feeling of confort, you know, a company with long history.
If price wasn't an issue, which would you prefer.
rM2 does look much more refined and it is half the price of DPT-RP1 (the Sony website does list the price at ~600$ but sadly the reality is that if you want to buy that in the EU the price is approximately:
EU_price = base_price + (base_price*0.22))
And of course the shipping...
I really hope rM2 turns out to be an amazing product, because the digital paper market feels very stagnant at the moment.
I would love to hear more of your experiences with the device.
Thank you,
To be fair, Sony are a company with a long history of absolutely amazing hardware crippled by comically bad software. The DPT series doesn't even show you the PDF table of contents, last I looked.
I've never seen any of Sony's e-ink devices live. I understand that the first ones were pretty disappointing, but I'd like to try the CP1. I have tried the Boox Note 2, which is actually a decent Android tablet, and the tactile feeling of writing is much better than on iPads, but still far below the rM.
One marker nib lasts me about 10 weeks, but it seems to be very individual. Some people can write hundreds of pages on a single nib, others need a new one weekly. In any case, I wouldn't say nibs wearing out is a major concern. It would be nice if they didn't wear out, of course, but the design of the nibs seem to be crucial for giving that excellent writing feeling.
And yes, these devices are expensive. I'm in the EU myself, and some 400€ is rather steep for upgrading the rM to rM2.
I was a fairly early pre-order for RM1, early enough that I had forgotten about it in the 6 months or so it took after pre-order for me to get it.
But as soon as I get the email for RM2 I pre-ordered again. To your point, it is the product the digital paper market has been waiting for.
I am an avid hand-writer. I have been a Levenger Circa user for more than 20 years, and basically had a subscription to the Circa paper for the last several years, as I went through so much of it. It took me a while to adjust my workflow and so forth, but I am now a full convert to the RM and think the device and the ecosystem have enormous potential, especially for developers.
The RM folks are very dev friendly, though their docs and so forth are poor at present. I take this to be a function of focus/resources rather than intent. The architecture of the software on the device is very good and dev oriented, and the code (what they've released) is well written. The device can run a webserver! The APIs- community documented- for the server-side of the RM platform are minimal but well structured. I was fairly quickly able to dig into them and write some utilities, which work reliably. So I am very optimistic about the ecosystem around these devices.
To your questions- I write on the order of 20-30 "pages"/day on the RM, and go through 1 tip maybe every 2 weeks. The writing experience is very comfortable. Adding an "eraser" to the premium RM2 pen addresses the main ergonomic inconvenience. I also use the device for reading PDFs. There are some ergonomic nits there but on the whole it works well.
Yes, RM is a new, small biz, but to my eyes they have a great product, a great approach, solid operations, and are developer friendly. I have not used the Sony device, and can't compare it, but I see nothing but good things ahead for RM.
Your comment on the device being dev friendly and the fact that you wrote your own utilities is really making me consider to preorder RM2. I saw all these comments and wish I can somehow integrate my own workflow into it.
Yeah, regarding workflow, I commented elsewhere but despite being a preorder of the RM1, I failed to establish a good "rapport" with the device when I first got it (late in 2018), and basically set it aside for a year until suddenly late last year, struggling with my paper workflow, a switch was flipped and I saw how I could adopt it, and I did, and now I love it.
The software had improved dramatically- they seem to be doing a good to exceptional job at getting incremental features out on a regular tempo without breakage, no simple task- but I think a certain amount of "hammock-time" plus increased awareness of non-digital pain points was necessary for a new perspective to flip into place. (This is re: seemingly small things like using distinct per day notebooks and per week folders, rather than a single monolithic notebook with paper-like day headings etc)
And my workflow is still limited- I am not using the writing recognition at all as yet- and there are plenty of use cases I come up constantly that it doesn't address- smart task lists, various kinds of copy paste, maps (!!!). If one has any kind of paper-based or digital habits adopting the device will be a challenge and involve frustration until it clicks, and probably even after.
But I have confidence both in the device's trajectory and moreover in the ergonomics of a community developer's engagement with the org. There is a lot of open space for patient, flexible developers to build cool stuff in. Cheers.
I had both, and returned the remarkable as it was rather unremarkable. By itself it wasn't so bad, but next to a Sony I could feel the difference.
Everything just felt better on the Sony- not just the hardware or the software, but the whole product. With some minor fixes (ex: moving the icon from the dropdown menu to the empty space on top of the screen) it could move from outstanding to just perfect.
How easy is it to get Kindle books onto your Remarkable? Is there a solution to automatically fetch a DRM-free version of each Kindle book you buy and automatically push it to the Remarkable?
Nice and intriguing but unfortunately this is still priced as a premium product.
Obviously the company making it has its reasons for pricing but a product like this needs to be priced as an accessible consumer electronics product (ie $50-$100).
I've been keeping an eye on largish-format epaper tablets for a while (I'm an avocational organist and singer, and would love to have my whole music library with me at all times). ReMarkable is actually on the cheaper end of the spectrum. I think it comes down to low volume and target users (professionals who wouldn't balk at paying this much for a business tool). Basically, a typical vertical market.
I looked over some of the amazon reviews, and they seem to be talking mostly about issues in older versions (2018) of the software, which I don't have direct experience with, but the software has gotten better, even in the time I've owned it (they just released version 2.x of the SW).
That being said, there is still room for improvement, particularly with reading (vs writing, which this device is very good at).
I mostly use it this to replace stacks of notebooks (my brain thinks better with pen and paper in hand, but with all the digital conveniences in hand. This device is the best that I've tried for writing (and I've tried many, including an ipad pro)
Cons: historically, the price. No blacklight. Clearly the device has been optimized for writing, not reading, although supposedly 3rd party ebook readers like Apollo are good (the device is not locked down and has a hacker community).
It probably depends on what you mean by really small.
Writing resolution is pretty good and most importantly it tracks the tip precisely. It's not as sharp as a real 0.2mm mechanical pencil, but you can write legibly down to ~2mm line height (1).
The larger factor is the contrast: the reMarkable screen is light grey so I usually write larger than I would on white paper.
(1) not at the very edge of the page, but maybe v2 fixes that
>why so many posts to hacker News about this today? Seems and feels like guerrilla marketing.
Are you accusing the people who posted these links of being employees of Remarkable? If so, you could just look at their comment histories to see if it seems likely before posting a general accusation.
I am fascinated by this product. It is far more interesting to me than much of what Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or Amazon have done in a tablet form factor in many years. I'm not surprised that others may have a similar level of interest.
I am not and did not accuse anyone. I simply noticed many links to many resources about same product in a short period of time. You can make your own judgement call on that. Are press releases standard - of course. I would ague that guerrilla marketing is standard ops for many new products/services and it should not be perceived in a negative way. Its a tool, i was simply curious if this was the case. In addition i'm fascinated at guerrilla marketing operations and am curious if they in fact are, how are they are engaged, paid etc.....
To add to what jshevek said: Please don't insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Internet users are overwhelmingly too quick to leap to such explanations from (at best) a handful of data points, and it leads them to smear each other's integrity in ways that are not good for community. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
In this case, a new product was launched today, it's normal for companies to coordinate that with press, and it's normal for multiple submissions on a story to show up on HN. It's also normal for humans to overinterpret streaks as something other than the randomness they usually are; we all do it, but it's not good to do it in ways that insinuate dishonesty in fellow community members.
the only thing i want is a device i can write on that has a refresh rate (or whatever) that's near realtime (so that I don't get the cognitive dissonance from the lag in the line appearing). does such a device exist? i've tried surface and ipad and etc. all of them still have quite noticeable lag when writing.
That is the goal of this device. The original Remarkable was superior to the surface and the iPad, and according to their marketing the next one will be twice as fast.
It hurts my heart how conflicted I am about this device. The hardware _is_ there. I love using the original reMarkable tablet _when it works_. But damn there are some stupid software decisions, alongside some absolutely genius ones. (Disclaimer: I've had the original reMarkable tablet for 3 months now) Here's a summary of my experience with it:
- It's sometimes unstable, and crashes while I draw. Not super often but maybe 4 or 5 times a week. I don't lose any data other than the last ~5-10 strokes.
- There is a notebook called Quick Sheets that is permanently there, even if I try to remove it's metadata over SSH. It gets generated on boot. No idea why this is here.
- You can SSH in, and there's a good hacker community around the tablet. A lot of cool open source software is written for it.
- Putting a file on the device for the first time, after doing the same on a kindle for years, is an adventure to say the least. There is no calibre plugin for it that I've found.
- I have never been able to use EPUBs properly on this tablet, a lot of my books just crash it. I have to convert them to PDF first on calibre. So highlighting is just markup on the PDF and not really selecting any text, but you can write directly on the book with notes.
- The first time I opened an EPUB, it took a while (10s) to load. When I tried to change the font of the EPUB on the reMarkable, it just stayed on the loading icon for hours, and I gave up on EPUBs then, and resorted to PDFs.
- There is no dictionary on the EPUB reader. I miss this feature a lot. And even if there were, I wouldn't be able to use it because I have to convert my EPUBs to PDF.
- Metadata for EPUBs or PDFs isn't visible, only the raw filenames. So no sorting by author, genre, etc.
- drawing and marking up is phenomenal, as is reading on such a huge screen. I absolutely love reading and journaling on this tablet.
- I have never succeeded in exporting my notebooks or marked up PDFs using the built in software after marking up or writing in 100+ pages, I have to use some community written software instead.
- It's $500 total after pen and cover.
- There is no backlight.
- OCR is done in the cloud, and not on the device.
- The iOS companion app is goofy, a lot of the navigation within the app seems to be done in a hacky way, instead of using the usual iOS SDK components. (They segment screen portions for scrolling on pages and for navigating the app, and it leads to just the most bizarre behavior).
I want to love this tablet. And all we need is a software update. The hardware was almost perfect, and now with USB-C, a magnet on the pen, and an eraser, the hardware is even closer to being perfect (I think the only thing left is a backlight).
That's pretty cool and that it was really locked down was my only concern about it. Happy to see it seems relatively open, so just placed a pre-order. Thanks!
For what it's worth, I don't think my device has ever crashed. I wonder if there is a memory overflow bug such that different types of usage could lead to different crash frequencies?
>No idea why this is here
I agree it would be nice to turn off quick sheets for those who don't use it. For me, I love quicksheets. I often want to just grab the device, jot something down immediately, and put it away. Sure I could create a 'notes' file and put it somewhere obvious, but quicksheets reduces the time and effort for these quick notes.
The companion app is written in Qt, it's the same app whether you use it on Windows, Linux, Android or iOS. Because of that the interface can be a bit whacky, but it works fine.
Heck, even the interface on the remarkable itself is written using Qt!
I don't think it's that great for reading. It does not have a backlight. I own both the reMarkable and Kindle Paperwhite and I prefer to read books on the Kindle.
It is perfectly serviceable for reading, though it may lack some of the reading oriented features of other eink devices. I love the large size for some of my documents, which are unpleasant to read on smaller devices.
Based on other comments here, it seems that the Remarkable is missing several features that some people enjoy in their eReaders. The only one I can cite definitively is the lack of backlight. I can't speak to other allegedly missing features because I haven't investigated the issue. I am satisfied with the features I do use when I want to read certain docs on the large remarkable screen.
I bought the original one during the initial sale, I think I paid something around $300 for it. Loved it and used it as my main reading/note taking device. I got an iPad Pro (12.9) last year and I've stopped using the remarkable, but will prob get the newer version. I find it much easier on the eyes and better to read using the remarkable. It was a great piece of hw before, the new one looks even better.
Can any remarkable owners comment on the reliability/robustness of the document storage? Does it store versions and/or backups?
I made the mistake of buying an equilpen2 at an apple store years ago. I say mistake not because I didn't like the product (I used it for hundreds of pages of notes over the year or two after I bought it and loved that it let me write on regular paper) but because the company gave up on the product and eventually released destructive app updates that deleted all my notes from my local machines.
I was only able to recover my content because I had it synced to dropbox and now I'm paranoid about content creation devices like this potentially losing my content in the future if the company goes belly-up.
The cloud sync/storage is pretty rudimentary, no versions or anything like that. But they have an app for desktop/phone so you can download and backup. There are unofficial client libraries for the cloud API as well, so it can be automated.
I don't recall if it shows up as a USB storage device, but it will expose a webserver to you over USB to which you can put documents. I also wrote a utility to send documents up to their server side APIs, which them gets them automatically sync'd down to the device. Takes about a minute, works very well.
They have their own file syncing but it runs Linux and is very hackable. There are 3rd party tools to sync elsewhere. You can even use rsync. See https://remarkablewiki.com/
This is great but how many tablets do I really need to get rid of paper? At least two, because typically I will be reading and taking notes simultaneously, and often times more than two, because I may need to check multiple sources.
324 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadThat being said I’ve always admired the Remarkable tablets.
Ianal but this website is probably violating GDPR:
https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/consent/
https://remarkable.com/
Dunno if the privacy is any better, but you can at least view it with adblockers on.
> reMarkable’s virtually instant response and texturized surface make for an unprecedented writing experience.
There is indeed a precedent for having literally instant response with a texturized surface: pencil and paper.
Also, I wish they were able to use an e-paper with a faster refresh rate, like ClearInk claims to be (see e.g. https://youtu.be/kE_byDwLjxk?t=34).
That said, it seems to look quite attractive as is already.
The lightest of touches are registered by device. I suppose if you choose the wrong pen mode for the immediate task you might have to push hard?
Where does one do that?
A US Letter sized pad made of 20lb paper is 1lb per 100 sheets[1] so an 88 page pad would weigh 400g, neglecting the cardboard backing. If it were made of 16lb paper then you would get a bit over 100 pages in 400g.
1: 20lbs means 500 sheets of the basis size weighs 20 lbs. The basis size for US Letter sized paper is 4 sheets (22x17), so 2000 sheets weighs 20lbs.
At that thickness, I'd be worried about sturdiness and, in particular, bending, à la the problems with the iPhone 6.
I can stick an iPad Mini or similar tablet into a jacket pocket or backpack and jog a couple of miles to a bus stop daily without concern. Will we be able to do the same with this, I wonder?
I happen to have Sony's competing 13" e-paper tablet already and I'd be nervous about putting it into a backpack without something non-bendable next to it to prevent flexing.
It could be jostling around with corners of large books, laptops, cables, random containers, etc. It can also have more space to accelerate when you swing your bag around, whereas a phone is held firmly your leg when you run/jump/etc.
Durability in a bag is what separates great electronics manufacturers from decent ones. If I buy something and it doesn't survive bag life for several months, which is quite common, then I write off the manufacturer as a creator of fragile throw-away devices. But I've never had a phone have any sort of problem from pocket stresses.
When I take my tablet (in a case) out and about, it goes into a laptop sleeve before it goes into a bag. For me, it's not bending I'm worried about, but scratches.
Found an article in the "remarkable 2" section of the support site. No mention of support for offline/private syncing, which is a real shame. (The "read more" links go to v1 pages and seem to be autogenerated.)
- Search was fixed in 1.5
- USB is still not a drive, but there's the web UI and also third-party apps.
- Zoom: Not sure what you mean, but rasterization was fixed/removed in 1.6.
Well this sucks if it is not leftie friendly as the price and features had me sold.
Does the reMarkable adapt to left-handed people? If you're left-handed, don't worry. A few of our colleagues are also left-handed. They want to make sure all lefties have an excellent experience with their reMarkable device. You'll be able to set up your reMarkable to left-handed mode when you first set up your device. We've also made it easy to switch between right-handed and left-handed modes in the main settings.
Glad the OEM thought this through.
But I'll be honest--I don't purchase "left-handed" notebooks or use them backwards or left-handed books or anything so maybe it doesn't actually matter as much as right-handed people think it does when righties writing articles imagine what lefties think.
I was also pretty shocked that there was no way to get a list of all annotations you've added to a given PDF; I really wanted a way to read through a book making notes as I went, then get an overview of where I'd made notes. Even a way to bookmark a given page would have been useful.
Fix those two issues and it would have been a great device for me; the page size was juuuust big enough to display pretty much any book at a readable size.
It's a very niche device but I've owned mine for nearly two years and am a big advocate. In some ways, the first model was proof of concept. Excellent hardware and writing experience, but the early versions of the software were horrible, and the device itself is very ugly. The software has improved dramatically in the time I've owned it, going from horrible to bad, then to almost acceptable, and now it's decent.
I'm happy to see the company is doing well enough to make a second generation reality. Looks like it will be an overall improved experience, with a magnetic marker, a slick-looking device and overall incremental improvements. I'd like to see some kind of trade up program though, it's expensive (and 50$ more for a marker with one extra sensor is ridiculous) and I can't justify paying that much for an incremental upgrade.
My only concern about the new specs would be the thickness, or rather the sturdiness. The first generation is thick by modern standards, but it's very sturdy. I've dropped the device, I've dropped the bag with it, I've bumped into things with it - not a scratch. Very refreshing in the age of fragile devices. Hopefully the rM2 doesn't sacrifice much sturdiness to be thinner.
One could imagine hacking something like this tablet to have a true interactive Squeak like environment on it. Or, better yet, a Squeak-like environment designed from the ground up specifically for epaper displays...
Downvoters: yes, you deserve the truth! :-)
However, if you are using an emissive display in an environment with constant and even lighting, you can set the brightness correctly and it will be just as good. Many people in such lightning conditions configure their displays wrong and mistake the misconfiguration for an inherent disadvantage of emissive displays.
The surroundings might not be lit enough for the health of eyes. This is the usual case and one of the prime issues why dead tree books and e-paper tablets lead to weak eyes.
Cheap, modular, long battery life, effective.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=booklight&ia=images&iax=images
There has been an FCC leak: https://fccid.io/2AMK2-RM110 showing a machined aluminum back, which the motherboard is affixed to. To me this looks good.
Disclaimer, I pre-ordered V2 today and am an owner of V1.
https://youtu.be/SWY_bwFMxro?t=73
Made out of aluminium, so I don't think there should be worries about give. I think bendgate is still fresh in people's minds.
There is a “send to kindle” function which allows you to either use a desktop application, or set up an email address you can send .mobi files to!
Highly recommended if you get tired of plugging in - thats why I swapped from my old Kobo to a Kindle.
The only issue I had was waiting on shipping from Germany.
It's also pretty good IMO for taking meeting notes, because the only things one can do is listen to the meeting, take notes, and doodle (which has been shown to improve attention and detail recall [0]).
Of course, that also applies to a paper notebook and a nice pen.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-thinking-benefits-of...
The rM is best thought of as a pen and paper notebook, except of effectively infinite size. There are no apps. The UI (the only user-facing program) has minimal features, most of which are there just to mimic what you can do with an actual paper notebook. There are only a few exceptions, like being able to drag your notes/scribbles on the page. The device won't integrate with any 3rd party services, it doesn't have search, etc. If a physical notebook doesn't have it, then the rM probably also doesn't.
That definitely makes the rM a very niche device, but I'm getting great use out of mine, while I never managed to get much good use of an iPad.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWY_bwFMxro&feature=youtu.be...
The conversion relies on some kind of cloud service (possibly Google's Cloud Vision API). So you need to be connected and there are privacy/security implications. And, it's very dependent on your handwriting. I cannot get coherent results with that feature, but my handwriting is as readable as base64-encoded Perl. I've seen it produce impressively good results when other people try it.
The process itself is indeed smooth, select an item in the menu and a few seconds later you have the text, which can then be emailed.
Just to make this bit clear: with effectively infinite number of pages. One would imagine that panning around infinitely large pages would be a possibility with a product like this, but the feature is not there.
Both physically and mentally this device has changed how I use tablets/devices. It feels like real paper to me, and without all of the glorified app icons and notifications screaming at me I feel more focused on the task at hand. Purpose-driven devices reduces distractions and has helped me grow professionally and I'll even go as far as saying reduced some stress and anxiety.
I am seriously considering buying a dumb phone (minimalist interface) thanks to the impact the rM1 has had on my productivity.
"If this URL looks like an ad or a press release, please consider finding an original source for the information."
I really would like to see TC just gone. It didn't use to be this bad, but they've been going downhill since... forever, really.
This is suddenly very reminiscent of John Mulaney describing Back to the Future...
https://xkcd.com/555/
It's also worth considering, when thinking about why it hasn't been banned, whether or not the main value from the threads (assuming the perfect source) would be from the link or the comments.
For some types of submission, it's the link: personal blog updates, academic papers, interesting technical achievements, detailed research, so on.
For others, it's the comments: company updates, interesting world news, most things happening in real-time, obituaries, so forth.
For others still, it's tied: blog posts on historical subjects, 'Show HN:' posts, submissions about different ways of doing things than mainstream methods.
Product launches, from my perspective, fall in the "Value in Comments" category. So then you have to decide whether it's worth the trade-off. By banning TechCrunch, would the site lose comment value?
Looking at this one, you'd really be missing some good comments by getting rid of TechCrunch links; there are all sorts of anecdotes about the product in this thread, and there are a bunch of interesting anecdotes about competing products as well.
This isn't even a review. This is someone writing from the press release.
Occasionally I'd go from regular work (notes on a project file), to a business or client meeting (pull up notes from past meetings, update with new notes), to a volunteer meeting after work (pull up the previous week's training notes). At each point I had all the information I needed without having to juggle binders or loose-leaf papers.
And I love that I can rework my notes as I write them. So, during a meeting, first draft is just scribbling stuff down, then while people are busy listening to themselves talk, I can drag my scribbles around into priorities and tasks, add a diagram, clean a few things up. This is a completely different workflow from either plain paper or laptop/tablet, and it really works for me.
The only things I would like are slightly longer battery life and more options for syncing with other services like Dropbox etc
> The company is claiming a 3x boost to battery life, using the same 3,000 mAh battery, based on performance improvements throughout and a more efficient (but more powerful) dual-core ARM processor. That means two weeks of use and 90 days of standby. This is welcome news, because frankly the battery life and power management on the last one were not great.
I'd love to have an e-ink tablet for hand writing and sketching ideas, but I'm not crash hot on it all being locked in to some closed ecosystem.
[1] https://github.com/janten/dpt-rp1-py
I've tried a few things in the last couple of years to take my note taking electronic, and it turns out that delay is important - if there's too much delay I end up not jotting down the couple of quick notes I need to write. Wunderlist opens very quickly on my Android phone and I ended up unconsciously using it to write down quick things. OneNote (an otherwise great tool) take an age to open and get to the right page, so I end up not using it except at my desk.
In the first mode, it comes back in about 1 second. It's enough that there's a bit of a lag and I don't like it if it happens right in the middle of something, but I haven't run into this very much.
In the second, it takes a few seconds to spin up, so I got into the habit of doing that before a meeting or whatever started. It takes about as much time to get it started up and navigate to the appropriate file as it would to fish a binder out of my bag and open it up to a blank page.
Short papers are just fine. Long documents, as long as you read them mostly sequentially, are IMHO just fine as well. But trying to read something where you need to flip around a lot is painful.
One of the use cases I had in mind when buying rM was reading stuff like IEEE 802 standards, programming language standards, hardware references, etc. But with these documents, the table of contents itself can have 10s of pages. The tools for searching and moving around are there, but the high latency of the e-ink makes them frustrating to use. And hyperlinks in PDFs are not active. And you can't bookmark something to create your personal collection of pages that you often need, which would somewhat alleviate the abovementioned frustration.
I use rM daily, but just not for reading manuals. It's just not a good use case for the device.
Also, how often do you need to buy new tips, or do they not wear out? I'm asking because the ones for DPT family are designed in such a way that they wear out. I guess I've always been more on the DPT side, because it's made by Sony, which gives me a feeling of confort, you know, a company with long history.
If price wasn't an issue, which would you prefer. rM2 does look much more refined and it is half the price of DPT-RP1 (the Sony website does list the price at ~600$ but sadly the reality is that if you want to buy that in the EU the price is approximately:
EU_price = base_price + (base_price*0.22))
And of course the shipping...
I really hope rM2 turns out to be an amazing product, because the digital paper market feels very stagnant at the moment.
I would love to hear more of your experiences with the device. Thank you,
Lots of Love Mortuus
To be fair, Sony are a company with a long history of absolutely amazing hardware crippled by comically bad software. The DPT series doesn't even show you the PDF table of contents, last I looked.
One marker nib lasts me about 10 weeks, but it seems to be very individual. Some people can write hundreds of pages on a single nib, others need a new one weekly. In any case, I wouldn't say nibs wearing out is a major concern. It would be nice if they didn't wear out, of course, but the design of the nibs seem to be crucial for giving that excellent writing feeling.
And yes, these devices are expensive. I'm in the EU myself, and some 400€ is rather steep for upgrading the rM to rM2.
But as soon as I get the email for RM2 I pre-ordered again. To your point, it is the product the digital paper market has been waiting for.
I am an avid hand-writer. I have been a Levenger Circa user for more than 20 years, and basically had a subscription to the Circa paper for the last several years, as I went through so much of it. It took me a while to adjust my workflow and so forth, but I am now a full convert to the RM and think the device and the ecosystem have enormous potential, especially for developers.
The RM folks are very dev friendly, though their docs and so forth are poor at present. I take this to be a function of focus/resources rather than intent. The architecture of the software on the device is very good and dev oriented, and the code (what they've released) is well written. The device can run a webserver! The APIs- community documented- for the server-side of the RM platform are minimal but well structured. I was fairly quickly able to dig into them and write some utilities, which work reliably. So I am very optimistic about the ecosystem around these devices.
To your questions- I write on the order of 20-30 "pages"/day on the RM, and go through 1 tip maybe every 2 weeks. The writing experience is very comfortable. Adding an "eraser" to the premium RM2 pen addresses the main ergonomic inconvenience. I also use the device for reading PDFs. There are some ergonomic nits there but on the whole it works well.
Yes, RM is a new, small biz, but to my eyes they have a great product, a great approach, solid operations, and are developer friendly. I have not used the Sony device, and can't compare it, but I see nothing but good things ahead for RM.
The software had improved dramatically- they seem to be doing a good to exceptional job at getting incremental features out on a regular tempo without breakage, no simple task- but I think a certain amount of "hammock-time" plus increased awareness of non-digital pain points was necessary for a new perspective to flip into place. (This is re: seemingly small things like using distinct per day notebooks and per week folders, rather than a single monolithic notebook with paper-like day headings etc)
And my workflow is still limited- I am not using the writing recognition at all as yet- and there are plenty of use cases I come up constantly that it doesn't address- smart task lists, various kinds of copy paste, maps (!!!). If one has any kind of paper-based or digital habits adopting the device will be a challenge and involve frustration until it clicks, and probably even after.
But I have confidence both in the device's trajectory and moreover in the ergonomics of a community developer's engagement with the org. There is a lot of open space for patient, flexible developers to build cool stuff in. Cheers.
Everything just felt better on the Sony- not just the hardware or the software, but the whole product. With some minor fixes (ex: moving the icon from the dropdown menu to the empty space on top of the screen) it could move from outstanding to just perfect.
Does it support ePub format ebooks or just PDFs?
I have an IPad Pro, but I'm not in love with the writing experience or reading an eBook.
Obviously the company making it has its reasons for pricing but a product like this needs to be priced as an accessible consumer electronics product (ie $50-$100).
I would be happy with a cheapish form factor option, it doesn't have to be the slick looking product that is the only option currently available.
Only caveats - I like aftermarket cases more than Remarkable's. I bought one one from Amazon for about 30$.
Also I've been using staedtler's digital pencils, works great!
No browser, no clutter, just... really, really useful paper that's always there and doesn't get misplaced later.
That being said, there is still room for improvement, particularly with reading (vs writing, which this device is very good at).
I mostly use it this to replace stacks of notebooks (my brain thinks better with pen and paper in hand, but with all the digital conveniences in hand. This device is the best that I've tried for writing (and I've tried many, including an ipad pro)
Cons: historically, the price. No blacklight. Clearly the device has been optimized for writing, not reading, although supposedly 3rd party ebook readers like Apollo are good (the device is not locked down and has a hacker community).
I've long thought about getting one of these, but don't want to shell out $500 if I can't comfortably write on it.
Writing resolution is pretty good and most importantly it tracks the tip precisely. It's not as sharp as a real 0.2mm mechanical pencil, but you can write legibly down to ~2mm line height (1).
The larger factor is the contrast: the reMarkable screen is light grey so I usually write larger than I would on white paper.
(1) not at the very edge of the page, but maybe v2 fixes that
Are you accusing the people who posted these links of being employees of Remarkable? If so, you could just look at their comment histories to see if it seems likely before posting a general accusation.
I am fascinated by this product. It is far more interesting to me than much of what Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or Amazon have done in a tablet form factor in many years. I'm not surprised that others may have a similar level of interest.
Much more explanation for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
In this case, a new product was launched today, it's normal for companies to coordinate that with press, and it's normal for multiple submissions on a story to show up on HN. It's also normal for humans to overinterpret streaks as something other than the randomness they usually are; we all do it, but it's not good to do it in ways that insinuate dishonesty in fellow community members.
That is the goal of this device. The original Remarkable was superior to the surface and the iPad, and according to their marketing the next one will be twice as fast.
- It's sometimes unstable, and crashes while I draw. Not super often but maybe 4 or 5 times a week. I don't lose any data other than the last ~5-10 strokes.
- There is a notebook called Quick Sheets that is permanently there, even if I try to remove it's metadata over SSH. It gets generated on boot. No idea why this is here.
- You can SSH in, and there's a good hacker community around the tablet. A lot of cool open source software is written for it.
- Putting a file on the device for the first time, after doing the same on a kindle for years, is an adventure to say the least. There is no calibre plugin for it that I've found.
- I have never been able to use EPUBs properly on this tablet, a lot of my books just crash it. I have to convert them to PDF first on calibre. So highlighting is just markup on the PDF and not really selecting any text, but you can write directly on the book with notes.
- The first time I opened an EPUB, it took a while (10s) to load. When I tried to change the font of the EPUB on the reMarkable, it just stayed on the loading icon for hours, and I gave up on EPUBs then, and resorted to PDFs.
- There is no dictionary on the EPUB reader. I miss this feature a lot. And even if there were, I wouldn't be able to use it because I have to convert my EPUBs to PDF.
- Metadata for EPUBs or PDFs isn't visible, only the raw filenames. So no sorting by author, genre, etc.
- drawing and marking up is phenomenal, as is reading on such a huge screen. I absolutely love reading and journaling on this tablet.
- I have never succeeded in exporting my notebooks or marked up PDFs using the built in software after marking up or writing in 100+ pages, I have to use some community written software instead.
- It's $500 total after pen and cover.
- There is no backlight.
- OCR is done in the cloud, and not on the device.
- The iOS companion app is goofy, a lot of the navigation within the app seems to be done in a hacky way, instead of using the usual iOS SDK components. (They segment screen portions for scrolling on pages and for navigating the app, and it leads to just the most bizarre behavior).
I want to love this tablet. And all we need is a software update. The hardware was almost perfect, and now with USB-C, a magnet on the pen, and an eraser, the hardware is even closer to being perfect (I think the only thing left is a backlight).
Some examples of the open source stuff can be found on github [1] and their wiki[2].
[1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable [2] https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start
>No idea why this is here
I agree it would be nice to turn off quick sheets for those who don't use it. For me, I love quicksheets. I often want to just grab the device, jot something down immediately, and put it away. Sure I could create a 'notes' file and put it somewhere obvious, but quicksheets reduces the time and effort for these quick notes.
I'd also love an open Kindle alternative. This is too much for my budget, but hope prices will come down in 1 year.
Heck, even the interface on the remarkable itself is written using Qt!
Lack of backlight not a big deal for me; rather use a room light if necessary.
Also, any integration with the Android app store?
I made the mistake of buying an equilpen2 at an apple store years ago. I say mistake not because I didn't like the product (I used it for hundreds of pages of notes over the year or two after I bought it and loved that it let me write on regular paper) but because the company gave up on the product and eventually released destructive app updates that deleted all my notes from my local machines.
I was only able to recover my content because I had it synced to dropbox and now I'm paranoid about content creation devices like this potentially losing my content in the future if the company goes belly-up.
Can I just... connect a USB cable and transfer files? Why do I want an app at all?
The apparent requirement to transfer files through an app was the reason I didn't get a remarkable 1.