Pure speculation, but could be a combination of keeping the thickness down (it's only 4.7mm thick), and the purism of recreating the pen-on-paper feel.
That being said I wouldn't be bothered at all about a thickness increase, or breaking out of the pen-on-paper "immersion"... Perhaps there's a more technical reason.
Most e ink doesn't use a true backlight, but an array of lights along the inside of the bezel that light up the screen reflectively. It's still very good for battery life. Both the kindle Paperwhite and the onyx tablets have this feature. Onyx even let's you tune the warmth of the light.
I have an Onyx Boox Max Lumi [1], there are 2 reasons why the "backlight" is very useful.
First off it's not really a backlight like you see in most LCD displays, it's a front-light, or edge-light that projects directly on to and is reflected by the e-ink display (the transparent top layer of the display acts as a wave guide for the edge lighting, and it's really quite an impressive engineering feat that they got it to apply so evenly on a 13.3" display area).
Obviously this will be useful when ambient lighting is too dim to even read paper, but the fact is current e-ink technology is just not as reflective, or high contrast as regular printed text on copy paper. The front-light illumination at low to mid levels (at least on the Onyx series) goes a long way towards making the screen background look almost as white as real paper. Granted if you are outside in the sun you will not notice the frontlight even at max brightness. But in dim indoor lighting, it's the difference between looking at greenish-grey kinda washed out image, and something that might fool a casual passer by into thinking it really is paper & ink.
I'm going to guess it is to keep it slim. And while I normally think this fad to make everything thin is stupid, in this one case I feel it makes sense. You want the thing you're writing on to protrude from the table as little as possible.
Thin (and especially light) tablets are not stupid.
I have the fact that especially "pro" tablets are becoming heavier. They're not comfortable to hold.
In my opinion the "perfect" tablet should not weigh more than 250-300 grams, we just don't have the tech for a flagship tablet that can weigh that much, yet.
You are right of course. I was primarily thinking of phones, where the battery life is sacrificed for half a millimeter and laptops, where ports are eliminated for a millimeter or two.
I find weight particularly important for reading in bed or when lying down on the couch.
Experimentally, I've found that my Kindle (320 grams including case) hurts a lot less than my iPad (470 grams) which hurts a lot less than my Surface Pro 4 (790 grams) when dropped on my face.
AFAIK adding backlight means that the distance between the display and the pen tip needs to increase, so you end up with a small parallax effect and writing doesn't feel as natural anymore.
Also, paradoxically, the added light layer reduces screen contrast when the light itself is off.
(Have an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi with Frontlight. The display is good in strong light, but even under fairly-brightly-lit indoor conditions, the Frontlight is useful.)
Same here. I'm so used to reading with the backlight at night for years (kindle paper white and Oasis) that going back to clip-on external light (I haven't used one since the paperwhite came out, do then even sell those still???) is a non-starter for me.
A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption are so low as to be indistinguishable from paper
B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
Maybe someone who's an expert in display tech can chime in? My money's on A) since so much is invested in it.
I think A is fundamentally impossible. A backlit display is always going to look different to a reflective surface.
My money's on C: a new display tech which works similarly to color E-ink, but isn't actually E-ink. Qualcomm's Mirasol technology looked amazing for this, but sadly it never made it into any mainstream products and they've basically shut it down at this point.
In principle it's possible to measure the ambient light and set the emitted light to simulate reflected light from paper so that an OLED looks indistinguishable from paper. Next gen QLED displays might have the brightness to pull this off even in bright sunlight.
If you really want to simulate reflected light you also have to be able to control the angle of the light that you emit, and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).
I suspect that it might be easier to improve reflective displays, but I have no expertise in this field so maybe I'm completely wrong about that.
> If you really want to simulate reflected light you also have to be able to control the angle of the light that you emit
Uniform emission is fine because paper has close to Lambertian reflectance. "The apparent brightness of a Lambertian surface to an observer is the same regardless of the observer's angle of view." [0]
> and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).
Or make sure that the display itself has close to Lambertian reflectance and take into account its color in the emission calculations.
> I think A is fundamentally impossible. A backlit display is always going to look different to a reflective surface.
Not all LCDs are backlit. Some are purely reflective or 'transflective' (eg. the screen used on the old Gameboy.) That's not to say they look like paper now but it's not 100% impossible.
Edit: Also the screen used on the Pebble Time watches looks reasonably close to a colour print-out with the backlight off. These are a "memory LCD" made by JDI (although they were somewhat confusingly marketed as "e-paper" despite being an LCD.)
>A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption as so low as to be indistinguishable from paper
I thought in relation to eye strain and ability to read in sunlight the quality would be theoretically impossible to ever be indistinguishable?
I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen. Lets start with B.
> B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.
E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the industry to buy in and start making products using this technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their production to then start producing 7 color panels in much smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it will be a commercial success.
When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display tech when they could invest in some new internet services startup or AI/ML startup instead.
As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.
LCD doesn't have to be emissive. Black-and-white LCDs are most often not. It's unlikely but not impossible for there to be some breakthrough in colors LCDs
I actually thought of that! I had a friend in high school who had one. You had to set the contrast separately for each color and could never quite get it looking right
Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of it. I would go as far as saying the article is quite confusing because the author (Mike Kozlowski) says things like "ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors, using only colored pigments" and then jumps to "They can display a total of 32,000 colors". Statement A contradicts statement B unless I have missed something obvious.
> Later this month I'll take a look at Supernote which already has a enthusiastic community and promises to have a rich API for 3rd parties to explore and expand.
I tried the Remarkable 2 for a month but ended up returning it and ordering the Supernote A5X instead – I couldn't be happier! Its main advantages (IMO):
- The Supernote acts as a regular USB mass storage device, so syncing files (w/o resorting to the cloud) is not as hard as with the RM2 (which serves a really buggy web interface over USB, pretending to be an ethernet device). Sure, the RM2 gives you SSH access but that doesn't help much because it's using a shitty proprietary file system, so you can't just scp your documents but need to convert them first.
- The Supernote comes with much better PDF reading and annotation capabilities. (The RM2 has pretty much none.)
- The Supernote's soft non-glass surface is more comfortable for long writing sessions – writing on it feels like writing with a gel pen. Plus you'll never need to replace your pen tips as they're made from ceramic.
- The Supernote A5X is running Android instead of a barebones Linux system, meaning that it comes with more features out of the box and it'll be much easier to extend it in the future when Ratta opens up their platform. (Sure, you can "hack" your RM2 but the chances that the next official update will then completely brick your device are rather high – /r/RemarkableTablet/ is full of these stories.)
Thanks for sharing. I got the reMarkable 1 pretty early and I've been debating ordering the reMarkable 2. I've heard almost exclusively good things about it, but right now I'm happy enough with the original device. I hadn't heard of Supernote until seeing this comment, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on when I think about upgrading.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty much none" when it comes to PDF reading and annotation capabilities. That's pretty much exclusively what I use my RM1 device for and it works great.
EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to the RM2, it's very enticing. (Once you throw in the folio and the pen for the RM2, the A5X is comparable if not cheaper.) Since my old Kindle Keyboard died a while back, I haven't replaced it. Looks like the A5X can also read Kindle books which is a huge draw for me. Do you know if there's any API that allows me to write my own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I want to be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically that will be eventually synced the next time I use it.
I don't use those features but currently you can sync it using Ratta's own cloud (which is optional by the way, no obligation to create an account), dropbox or email.
Otherwise you can copy files via USB.
There's no APIs that i know off and currently the device is not hackable so there's no alternative software.
> I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty much none" when it comes to PDF reading and annotation capabilities.
Well, all you can basically do is scribble within a PDF. The RM2 doesn't offer proper PDFs annotations and it doesn't even come close to the Supernote in terms of other useful features like bookmarking, digests, etc.
> EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to the RM2, it's very enticing.
Yup, exactly. It seems more expensive upon first sight but it's actually a pretty good deal.
> Do you know if there's any API that allows me to write my own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I want to be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically that will be eventually synced the next time I use it.
This is exactly what I'm waiting for, too! My hope is that once they open up their platform I'll be able to install the Syncthing Android app and sync my Supernote with all my other devices over WiFi.
This is true and I don't really mind that personally although having read up a bit more on the Supernote, the annotations it generates do seem much nicer.
> it's actually a pretty good deal
Pricing seems about the same really. Especially when you consider the bundle of table, folio, and pen together for each. I was disappointed to see that the standard Supernote pen does not include an eraser and the LAMY pen which does lacks the ceramic tip and instead requires replacing nibs just like the reMarkable pen.
> Pricing seems about the same really. Especially when you consider the bundle of table, folio, and pen together for each.
Fair enough. On the other hand, the Supernote comes with more features than the RM2 and gets updates much more frequently, so one would have to price that in, too.
> I was disappointed to see that the standard Supernote pen does not include an eraser and the LAMY pen which does lacks the ceramic tip and instead requires replacing nibs just like the reMarkable pen.
True. I hear that Ratta (the company behind the Supernote) is working on a pen with built-in eraser, though.
I recently saw that in a firmware update last month there was a new "gesture eraser" feature added. Supposedly if you hold two figures down elsewhere on the screen, then drawing turns into area erase. Curious if you've tried this and how well it works.
This is going to sound like an odd question -- does the Supernote do too much? Or is it still simple to use?
I've been wavering on a RM2. I already have an iPad with the Paperlike screen cover. And I absolutely love writing on it. However, it has two downsides for me that keep me from using it all the time for notes:
1) It's still pretty heavy
2) It does too much. Seriously, I also have a keyboard for it, and there are tons of apps that I can use. This is the problem -- because it can do so much, I can't just use it for only notes.
I never heard of the Supernote until today, but it sounds great. I'm just worried that it might do a little too much? I'd love to have a note taking device that I used as much as I used to use a paper notebook.
It has an excellent note taking app, a quirky way to create word docs, a calendar, ability to read and annotate pdf/epub, an email app (which I found impossible to set up), and kindle. That's it. You cannot install/side-load apps.
So, it is a perfect device for no distraction note taking.
I understand where you're coming from! Let me dodge your question by saying that, at least for me, the RM2 provides too little . Remarkable (the company) seems to pursuing Apple's vision here in that they're trying to avoid feature bloat – this I appreciate but I still think they should provide more than the most basic of features.
As for the Supernote, it comes with quite a few features I love but also a few ones (email, cloud sync, OCR) I don't really use. But that's fine as they never get in my way, so I don't really notice them.
One exception where the RM2 is (still?) superior feature-wise: Brush styles. The Supernote doesn't come with a lot of options here and is still missing a caligraphy pen and a pencil. It hasn't really bothered me but it might bother people who want to use their e-ink tablet for drawing.
> Sure, you can "hack" your RM2 but the chances that the next official update will then completely brick your device are rather high – /r/RemarkableTablet/ is full of these stories
No... they're approximately 0.
The next update will wipe out your modifications, everything outside of the home directory is wiped, but the device will still work.
People bricking their devices are people actively doing things that brick their devices, not updates coming along and bricking them later.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted – this is certainly a matter of taste. Why do you consider it a feature, though?
Here's why I prefer Android over plain Linux on anything that's not a laptop or desktop computer (or a server):
- Much more secure. Every app is running in a sandbox and permissions are clearly defined. (This is a big one! I don't want to have to trust the apps I'm running.)
- Data encryption by default
- Clearly defined ways for apps to talk to one another (intents etc.), for user data to be separated from app cache etc, for user data to get backed up via Google Backup / Seedvault. Anyone who's trying to do the same on Linux needs to re-invent the wheel here. As Ratta is planning to open up their Supernote platform for 3rd-party apps, this is crucial.
- A/B updates – it's hard to break your device
- Bluetooth & fingerprint support. I wish the Supernote came with a fingerprint reader but it does allow you to use a bluetooth keyboard (though typing comes with a rather long delay)
Part of the draw for me is a device that does very few things with hardware/software optimized for doing those few things well.
In a lot of ways that's the opposite of Android. It doesn't mean that an Android implementation as the base OS has to be bad, but it requires extra effort to constrain it to be good. I've also had performance issues with Android in the past, but maybe that's better now.
It's important to note that unlike the Onyx Boox that exposes the Play Store, the Supernote is only using Android under the hood, it's not visible. It's still an experience controlled by Supernote.
That why they could preinstall the Kindle app, however they don't let you install apps and have a bad experience in the Play Store, bad experience with apps that work but are clunky on an e-ink display...
I learned that 9-10 inches is to small to annotate pdfs so I decided against remarkable or supernote a5. To be honest, most science-y documents I read by the computer, because I try to use knowledge right away in some notebook and/or repl.
But then I noticed that I also read substantial amount of soft skill/self help/popscience books and they're easily obtainable in epubs. I pulled te trigger and bought supernote a6x. It size is perfect. I can read and annotate on the go, I can jot during coffee breaks. I take notes on the meetings and then I can put supernote on the stand beside monitor and see bullet points/todo lists for this day.
Supernote support and community is very helpful and constant upgrades take user requests into account.
The supernote website / product pages are super confusing.
If I want the Lamy pen, and don't want the "nebula" cover, I have to buy the lamy pen separately, but I'll also still get the standard set, which I don't want? Or can I choose the Lamy set but change the cover?
Also, the Lamy pen has a function button, but also doesn't have the ceramic nib. This is weird since they go to such great lengths to convey how valuable the "never wear-out nib" is on the regular supernote pen. Also, does the Lamy pen need to be charged somehow?
Also, apparently, Canadians have had to pay ~$95 in duty, and shipping already isn't cheap. 95$ in duty is insane IMO.
Seems like an interesting product, but the website needs a huge overhaul IMO. I've been looking to replace my Kobo H20 Aura for a while, and I wouldn't mind ponying up a more for the supernote, but the website leaves me with more questions than answers.
I bought the Onyx Boox Note Air some months ago, and I must say that I'm really happy with it. Screen refresh is good, there's almost no ghosting in default mode, and refresh rates are acceptable.
There are only two downsides about it: The vendor does not respect FOSS and does not publish the sources for their modified Linux kernel, and the device constantly phones home to China. However, the device can be rooted easily [1], and you can install a firewall to stop the preloaded apps from phoning home (verified it with Wireshark).
Man, I don't know. I have the Onyx Poke 3 and I find the software pretty janky. For instance, in order to install a dictionary, I have to jump through a whole series of hoops to download one to a PC and then upload/install it on the tablet. I could install the Kindle app (after I enable the Google Play Store), but then I might as well buy a Kindle. In order to upload epub or pdf documents to the Poke3, I have to interface through a browser on a page with a very limited interface. They do not have upload by email, bluetooth, or any other convenient interface with my phone. All in all, it's just felt like a half-baked product to me.
I use Syncthing [1] to do all the syncing, works like a charm. I have a folder synchronized between my reader, my PC and my phone, and whenever I need to send a document to the reader or from the reader to my PC, I just put it into that folder.
I discovered Syncthing last week, and it's exactly what I was looking for: a local server that syncs between Device A and Device B on the same network. No need for a middleman like Dropbox.
This is why I'm leaning towards the Note Air. The Kobo Elipsa is coming out soon but it syncs with Dropbox only.
You can install a dictionary on the device, they are just stardict dictionary files...it's literally putting a file in a folder. They also have some available to download although mainly focused on Chinese/Russian.
It runs Android. You can just sync things through the cloud provider of your choice. Put the Dropbox, OneDrive, NextCloud etc. app on and just download it from there.
Most eReaders don't have upload by email just Kindles and that doesn't let you send a more recent better formats like KFX or AZW3, just ancient mobi. Ditto Bluetooth.
And guess what? At least with Android phones "Nearby Share" works too (although that may require setting up Google Play Store.
I thinks he is looking for a "kindle" and really should get a Kindle. I actually own a Kindle and a BOOX Nova 3, they are two different products, not interchangeable if you are picky about which is better at doing what. I would have a E-ink tablet, a Kindle and a iPad depending on the tasks.
Yeah maybe. I use my Nova 2 as an everything eReader. Run the Kindle app for Kindle books, Kobo for kobo stuff, etc. Plus it will do things like Marvel Unlimited, Tachiyomi that readers from Amazon and Kobo won't.
I don't use most of their stuff on it; anything Android works and that's what I use. However I do like their reader. Never tried a dictionary installation but the rest is all resolvable with Android apps I would think; for synching anything you would use on an android phone works here too; dropbox, google drive etc.
The fact it runs Android is vastly better than some custom software (like Kindle and others) because of this reason.
If it phones home to China count me out. I’ll go for the reMarkable tyvm
I can just see me working on a brilliant invention (one can dream , right?) and putting my notes into the note boox, only to realize it gets patented before me by a Chinese company.
I don’t like the software on my Onyx boox. It’s over engineered with too many options often not intuitive. Unless you opt in for their cloud service syncing sucks. I still can’t figure out how to access documents from Dropbox and edit them and sync it back.
I bought this last year during pandemic. My reading time has grown exponentially, i couldn't update sure . I like that i can use play store apps so i use kindle, libby, pocket and oreilly.
It's been a while since I looked at it, but here's what I remember:
In the UI, you can choose if the device should communicate to Chinese or US servers. Both of them are available under the boox.com domain, so I assume they are both controlled by the Chinese manufacturer. The device uses this to check for firmware upgrades, to sync notes, for their own book store and IIRC to send some basic usage statistics. As per firmware version 3.0 (v3.1 is current), this traffic was only partly encrypted.
Besides this, the software seems to include some kind of Tencent SDK, which tries to contact Chinese servers quite aggressively, regardless of which setting you choose in the UI. The traffic is encrypted, so I couldn't figure out what it does. The servers seem to belong to Tencent's QQ service [1], so they supposedly use it for their on-device support feature. However, because the device tries to contact the servers immediately after startup, I assume it does some kind of analytics tracking as well. Blocking the service's domains on the DNS level doesn't work though, as the SDK will start to contact fixed IP addresses if DNS resolution fails.
Luckily, all of this traffic can be blocked after rooting and installing a firewall (see my post above), since all of this is implemented under Android user ID 1000, which makes it easy to block in AFWall+.
I have also really enjoyed my BOOX Note Air. I read like crazy on it and use it for note taking constantly. I like that I can have Firefox on it, for a little light web browsing. Maybe it's because it's my first e-ink device and I got enamored with the "new and shiny" of it all; I dunno.
Personally, I don't need it to translate my handwriting, I just like the act of writing and like being able to design my own paper types on demand, with infinite paper. For me, it meets my needs. I put hands on a variety of devices at Yodobashi Camera and this was the only one that felt natural to write on. Everything else had a perceptible lag, or the pen was weird, that I couldn't handle for long.
Of course, leave it to HN to make me feel like a total shithead for not looking into FOSS and other things (it didn't cross my mind even once). Guess I'll be rooting it this weekend; I really hate sinking the time/effort/risk into doing stuff like that.
I bought a Remarkable 2 myself, and I have to say I'm really happy with it. The built in e-reader was a bit mediocre, but a quick SSH session and a couple community scripts later and with just a long swipe across the screen I could access Koreader whenever I wanted.
I have an RM2 and use it a lot but the jagged lines bother me. I got the Onyx Boox and returned it, the software was just too clunky and did not have the paper feel, instead felt very plasticky
I don’t understand how they put so little effort into software compared to hardware. They raised money recently they should be able to hire a decent software team, but I’m afraid they’ll start pushing towards subscription only features now
I only have the reMarkable 1, but I've actually been pretty happy with the software on the device on the constant upgrades. What has been really disappointing is the clunky desktop and mobile apps and the fact that there's no Web app. Personally I wish they would just abandon the desktop and mobile apps and build a great Web app that works OK everywhere.
The software is fine for note taking, and reading and annotating PDFs, which is what I mostly use it for at work. The reader does however not feel set up for reading books. With it being fairly trivial to install Koreader however this turned into a non-issue to me.
"so little effort into software"? Quite the opposite, it seems like they've put a lot of effort into the software. Everything "just works" and is polished, unlike almost every other piece of software I've ever used.
Don't mistake a lack of advanced features for a lack of software effort. reMarkable is making an intentional trade-off - more feature quality, less feature quantity.
I'm all for fewer polished features - but we don't get any of those.
Prior to the latest updates I actively regretted my reMarkable 2 purchase. Now it's back to "a decent device that I would never recommend anyone pay full price for"
Let's start with eReading: Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF didn't work. As such, your table of contents and index are worthless, you don't have quick access to footnotes, and so on. They only very recently finally added this in the 2.6 update.
If links don't work they must have some way to jump between pages easily, right? No, wrong again. Jumping to a page number is 3 clicks deep (pretty sure it was 4 prior to 1.17): Upper left corner, page overview, "Go to page". You then have to move from the top of the screen to the bottom to enter the page number and then back to the top since they couldn't be bothered to put an enter/OK button with the other buttons.
Then there's the controls in general. To switch between writing utensils, you need the left menu. This covers your document content and there's no way to just scale the content into the remaining space. This means that to work on an entire document you need to be constantly opening and closing that menu. There's not even a way to have the button backgrounds be transparent so you can read what's behind them without interacting.
Search is very slow. It takes FOREVER to index a book, and you're given no indication of if it's done. Instead, if I open a large PDF and search, I will be told that there are no results rather than that it hasn't finished looking yet. If I wait 15 seconds, things may magically appear on my screen unexpectedly.
eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size requires you to wait while the entire book is rerendered (losing your notes in the process since they're image-based rather than proper annotations)
This is primarily a drawing/creation device. A basic tool that would help here is stroke-based erasing. They have stroke knowledge since Undo supports that, but the eraser is a clumsy mess that reminds me of the worst cheap elementary school supplies.
While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in "light mode" except for the settings app which is inverted into dark mode with no way to change it to a normal UX?
Those are all off the top of my head. I have a much longer list of thoughts in a document somewhere. My overall point is that my expectations a full Android device with fancy editors. My expectations were an optimized focus/creation device, but the software lets the hardware down in a bad way even for their core scenarios of reading, annotating, and drawing.
> I'm all for fewer polished features - but we don't get any of those.
I don't think that the rest of your comment substantiates this. You don't have any arguments that the core functionality is lacking in some way - everything you say seems to be about non-core things.
> Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF didn't work.
Note the "didn't", and also PDF hyperlinks is not an "essential" feature for the purpose of the rm2, which is writing and annotating.
> If links don't work they must have some way to jump between pages easily, right?
Not core to writing and annotating. You're looking for a document-navigation system, which the rm2 is not.
> Search is very slow.
See previous comment about the rm2 not meant to be a document-navigation system.
> eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size requires you to wait while the entire book is rerendered (losing your notes in the process since they're image-based rather than proper annotations)
This might be the only valid complaint here, although it's still a non-essential feature. An essential feature is the ability to take notes, which you can.
> This is primarily a drawing/creation device.
That's literally how it's marketed - "Writing, reading, and visualizing only".
> A basic tool that would help here is stroke-based erasing. They have stroke knowledge since Undo supports that, but the eraser is a clumsy mess that reminds me of the worst cheap elementary school supplies.
The eraser tool is perfectly functional. I use it continually with no problems. Could it be better? Yes, like almost every piece of software ever written. Is it "a clumsy mess"? Not even close.
> While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in "light mode" except for the settings app which is inverted into dark mode with no way to change it to a normal UX?
That's a single UX issue, among many things that they got right, that has little impact on the usability of the device.
You neglected to mention how the drawing, cut/copy/paste, convert-to-text, eraser, templates, and almost every other feature "just work". You do get all of those "polished features" - your stretch goals are not core functionality.
>That's literally how it's marketed - "Writing, reading, and visualizing only".
>Not core to writing and annotating. You're looking for a document-navigation system, which the rm2 is not.
Document navigation is absolutely a core part of reading. When I read a book, I page around it because that's how books work. When I reference a book I've already read, I want to look in the index or the table of contents and go there.
There are 6 things that reMarkable claims the device does on their homepage. "All your notes, organized and accessible on all devices" and "Take handwritten notes, read, and review documents" are two of them. Reading and searching are core scenarios.
I don't personally own a reMarkable, so I have no idea if this is related to what you're mentioning, but version 2.7 does seem to have added improved navigation of the sort you're describing: https://blog.remarkable.com/software-update-2-7-small-steps-...
> Document navigation is absolutely a core part of reading.
This is a stretch. "Reading" means reading. You open a book and read it cover-to-cover. "Document navigation" is extra stuff beyond reading - it is not core. When you read a novel, you are not expected to jump back and forth between different chapters or sections, and the vast majority of people don't.
When you teach your child to "read", you don't teach them to click on PDF links (that's "web searching" or "computer literacy" or whatever) or to flip to arbitrary pages as fast as possible, or to search through a file - you literally teach them the English alphabet, how to parse words and sentences, and that's it - they know how to read. One knows how to "read" even if they've never seen a computer in their life, and if they don't know how to cross-reference books and articles, and if they don't know how to use an index.
> When I read a book, I page around it because that's how books work.
That's irrelevant. You can write on the margins of a book "because that's how books work", yet that's totally unrelated to "reading". I can clip out fragments of a book and put them on my refrigerator - that doesn't mean that a core part of reading is the extraction of inspirational quotes.
> When I reference a book I've already read, I want to look in the index or the table of contents and go there.
And yet, that's not a "core part of reading", and doesn't need to be optimized as such. The core parts of reading are reading words and flipping pages. Indices and tables of contents, while important, are not a core part of reading - they're important, sure, but if you remove them, you can still read things. That's what "core" means - "core" means "without this element, you cannot do the activity".
Let me repeat that again - if you remove the ability to flip to arbitrary pages (but keep the spot you were last reading in - which the reMarkable does), remove the table of contents, and remove the index, you can still read a book.
Will you be able to perform research effectively? No. But that's not what the reMarkable is for. I'll be the second to admit that the reMarkable 2 is terrible at research - but it's not meant to be used for research, it's meant to be used for simple reading, and note-taking while you do research on another device.
> [...] searching are core scenarios.
False. Their homepage literally never mentions "search" or "index". It's simply not there. Would search be useful? Heck yes. Is it necessary for reading? Absolutely not, see above.
As feature-limited as the reMarkable is, it is upfront about those limited features, and it executes on the features that it does promise at least better than most other pieces of technology.
If a guy could create amazing ux improvements without access to code [1] and by binary patching I’d assume a vc funded company could also. I consider this patch to be essential for my sanity
Has anyone here used a reMarkable 2 and had the chance to compare it to a Supernote or a Note Air?
I've had the opportunity to use a reMarkable in person, and it's the first and only digital writing device that I could tolerate to write notes. The MS Surface, iPad Pro and Samsung tablets have never cut it for me.
It's difficult to quantify why - a combination of pen-to-display distance, latency and screen texture perhaps.
Reviewers seem to agree that the Supernote and Note Air have higher latency, and higher pen-to-display distance, so I wonder if I could work with them or not.
The reMarkable seems to to be the go-to device as a digital notepad, but doesn't do anything beyond that, whereas the other devices offer a (near) full Android experience, which would be more useful to me as a dwevice that costs £400+.
I don't think I'd get a huge amount out of Android itself, but just being able to install a browser with a reader mode would be really nice. In my mind, I'd install Firefox and use that when reading articles.
> Reviewers seem to agree that the Supernote and Note Air have higher latency, and higher pen-to-display distance, so I wonder if I could work with them or not.
The Supernote does come with slightly higher input latency but not by much – I got used to it pretty quickly and honestly don't really notice it anymore.
If the reMarkable could integrate well with other productivity tools, I'd probably ask my employer for one.
Being able to read my emails, manage my calendar, read my RSS feeds, access my documents from Google Drive and optionally annotate them (a copy of it in PDF form) would be what I'd have in mind to justify buying one.
Personally, I really wish the Remarkable 2 would integrate with O'Reilly's new learning platform. I love having access to just about every tech book ever written, but I hate reading on a screen. The Remarkable is the perfect form factor for displaying tech books and if I could get the O'Reilly app on the Remarkable and read from their library on it... that would be enough to push me over the edge to get one. Hell, if that was all I ever did with it that would be worth it for me.
You can do this on a Boox android-based e-ink tablet, which I’ve done and generally works well (after initial setup fiddling with the color to grayscale conversion)
I've used the Note Air, briefly, and now use the RM2 everyday - my use case is for reading documents, signing documents, and storing notes at work due to the high number of lawsuits and FOIA requests. I use it almost exclusively for those three things.
The Note Air felt like drawing on plastic. Like using a ballpoint pen on a projector screen. It was easy for me to drift around the page. And my already terrible handwriting suffered. The transcription wasn't clean, and had many errors based on my handwriting. The RM2 feels like writing on paper. It has fantastic recognition for my handwriting, and the transcribing has one or maybe two weird words per page.
The only thing with the RM2 is there is no way to tag and search your pages. So you have to be very strategic with how you organize your notebooks, otherwise it's easy to just have a mess of a million pages you can never get through to find what you need. Tagging and searching would make the RM2 just AMAZING.
I have a Remarkable 2 and the device is great, software is improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those notes later on is next to impossible.
OCR is very bad and basically makes indexing and full-text searching impossible (and off device)
This is EXACTLY the reason why, after weeks of review, I ended up with an iPad pro.
Clearly it's a very different look and feel. However, using GoodNotes, it immediately finds whatever I've written (even in my sloppy handwriting) on any page I wrote it. It's kind of amazing actually.
I'd have preferred eInk, but notes that I can't find are not useful to me.
I keep reading that reading stuff on a paper or e-ink display is easier on the eyes than a monitor. Certainly makes sense if the comparison is to a CRT but compared to a standard LCD? Are there any medical studies that confirm this? As far as I know modern life exposes us to far little brightness, causing myopia for a lot of people. If anything a very bright backlight display should probably be better for our eyes...
I don't think that's true as long as you provide healthy lightning. Light is light, doesn't matter whether it came from the sun or from backlight lamp. E-ink obviously is preferable when you're reading in the direct sun light, because LCD could be barely visible in those conditions.
Light from the sun contains a much greater number of wavelengths (and different depending on time of day) than that from the backlight; it's not the same.
One significant difference is that with e-ink you can provide healthy lighting. With an LCD display you are stuck with whatever backlighting is built in.
I think it comes down to emitted light vs reflected light.
If you're looking into an LCD panel and the light it's emitting is not adjusted to match the environment you're in, too bright or too dull, then you will strain your eyes.
With an e-ink screen, anything printed, or even a cinema screen, it doesn't usually emit light and therefore relies on the light emitted from other things around you to reflect off of the surface, illuminating the surface of the thing you're looking at. This is more natural and provides less strain on your eyes.
On a personal preference side of things, I can't look at bright sources in the evening. My wife is a terror for looking at her phone at 100% brightness, it's blinding if she hands it to me to look at. Where as my devices are setup to dim and be as low as possible in the evening, even the profile on the TV.
I work a lot in the sun (even in the shade here there is a lot of sun) and a lot of times I have to get inside to do any work as normal LCD is simply not readable. While eInk is readable like, well, paper. So works fine in sun and shade.
I was interested in purchasing a ReMarkable tablet last year then realised the ReMarkable 2 just released months ago and was very surprised that to see that they still don't have a color e-ink version.
Until then, I am skipping it since I don't think it is worth the price.
Downvoters: So I disagreed with the HN hivemind with a point I made about saving money for a better version and now I get downvoted for wrongthink? So somehow, this device is worth $400 to spend on a 32 bit machine with 8 GB of space and 1 GB of RAM?
That is more like spending $400 on an over powered Raspberry Pi 2 just to read ebooks. (In black and white). You also might as well buy the latest iPad then.
Why you would be surprised baffles me. There are only a few e-ink tablets with color and they're all small and expensive. Setting that aside, they're not focusing (that much) on e-book comic reading, their focus is note taking, drawing and pdf reading. I use mine to do all three things and it works excellent, couldn't be happier. The remarkable is expensive no doubt but it's a much better device at what it does than an ipad or any other tablet for that matter if you ask me.
I can't comment on the other tablets mentioned her as I haven't used anything else but ipad previously and now the remarkable 1. gen.
my handwriting is also terrible yet this is so incredibly better than notetaking on computer as soon as you have graphs, e.g. here's my current page: https://imgur.com/a/D0m4okF
I'm in the same boat. If I could get Kindle e-books for free alongside the physical purchase of a book on Amazon, and these devices could import them I'd be all ears for a new toy to play with. Alas, two things which will never happen. :(
I am happy with the Boox; it's a great device (hardware + the reader too) I think and I use it every day. Besides the China nature (which means what user Tho85 already explained here), I am a huge fan of the idea more different eReader types. For a lot of tasks. I often work in bright sunlight and it works really well while my laptops, including the MacBook m1 will give me a headache in 15 minutes glaring against the sun; this is just perfect and powerful enough to be a big screen for another device.
Because of this device I now have the weird hallucination of my perfect device; seems it would be a surface pro x lte (but later gen; it needs to at last get closer to usable software wise) but with a color eInk screen. I know they will never make this but yep, that would be basically my daily driver. The Boox people could come quite far but they focus on eReaders.
My biggest complaint about the ReMarkable is the lack of any meaningful business management tools -- I love using it, but, I need to be able to limit sharing, specify a specific SMTP service to use for sharing pdf files, remotely wipe a device, enforce a password on the device before storing and sharing notes from a sensitive meeting amongst my team.
Outside of that edge case, I love it and it's indispensable and I use it at least 3 times a day for meetings and other to-do lists for myself.
I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device.
Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now.
Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technical sketching, email or even interactive notebooks like Jupiter on, you get a really over engineered piece of paper.
Now, it's pretty open, which is great, but I am not that convinced it will necessary remain so, and at that price, buying it only in the hopes of some people making better software in their free time always seems like a bigger gamble I like to take. I accept that for me ~120€ ereader, but for 5 times the price?
I really wish they would embrace mobile computing. Combining an e-ink tablet optimized for text with a moldable operating system like on the old xerox machines could be so incredibly good.
By the way, does the hardware allow connecting an external keyboard?
I'm a fan of the remarkable, use v2 every day. My high school daughter uses my old v1 every day. We both love it.
But it is absolutely very opinionated- entirely oriented around hand-writing use cases, specifically those that involve being away from power and network. So its power budget is low and it has amazingly robust synchronization.
You can read and do some other things on it, but that's not what it solves for.
Boox Note Air does through Bluetooth or USB C. It just runs Android so you can pretty much do whatever. It's literally an Android Tablet with an eInk screen.
Remarkable you can hack in keyboard support. They are just focused on making a good digital notepad. Even their reading software is sub-par.
Remarkable is really a device for people who explicitly don't want those features. They're betting hard that the market exists, although it probably isn't as large as the market for an as-powerful-as-possible general-purpose computing device.
I've seen it mentioned that someone got an USB keyboard working, and the device is pretty hackable overall (you can SSH to root over wifi out of the box!), but I think if you want to connect an external keyboard then it probably isn't for you anyway. You can't even type text in documents.
Disclaimer: reMarkable 2 user, pretty happy with their focus, but I wish the device was more responsive in some scenarios (complicated drawings are very slow) and there's certainly many missing core drawing/writing/reading features.
Let me just add that I am not talking about a powerful all purpose computing device, because I think we pretty much have this with modern tablets/laptops.
But I do feel the computing part could be much more utilized to make taking notes and reading text better. I am thinking of Hypertext, drawing tools like sketchpad, simple programming tools etc.
Not a device that does as much as possible badly, but one that could really push forward computing and text to get something more akin to digital paper we have seen for years in science fiction.
I don't begrudge people who like the extremely limited use case it has today, I personally just don't really get it why I should spend hundreds of dollars on something that I can pretty much get with a notebook and my smartphone camera.
On the other hand, this is a general problem these days that hampers innovation. As hard as hardware seems to be, it is obviously much easier than software, which is why so many devices these days fall short.
> But I do feel the computing part could be much more utilized to make taking notes and reading text better. I am thinking of Hypertext, drawing tools like sketchpad, simple programming tools etc.
The problem is that even those "simple" things are a massive amount of work to get right (where "right" means bug-free, performant, well-documented (or intuitive - pick at least one), flexible, and with an ergonomic interface). Additionally, they're significantly more work than the even simpler restricted feature-set that the reMarkable currently offers.
I believe that the reMarkable developers are shooting for "quality over quantity" - polishing a small feature-set to a blinding shine, rather than trying to implement a larger feature-set poorly - that is, an intentional trade-off. I'm happy with that trade-off, but I know that others might not be - in which case, you'll probably get the Android device that other people in the thread are discussing.
Also, the reMarkable is open - you can add all these things yourself, if you're sufficiently motivated.
> something that I can pretty much get with a notebook
The reMarkable's features, as limited as they are, are still miles beyond what a notebook gives you. You have backup, synchronization, document export (PDF, raster, SVG), undo/redo, multiple documents, digital storage, cut/copy/paste, erasing (pen can't be erased, pencil usually leaves marks and has other problems), multiple brushes, page reordering, multiple page templates (lined, grid, music, blank canvas, and more), layers, really good handwriting recognition, and more.
Yes, it's light-years behind what we could have - but we're stuck in the place we're at because of a number of computing decisions that we made in the past (and continue to make now) that hamper creativity and flexibility, and overcoming those choices requires a lot of resources and the ability to ignore/bypass/counteract a massive amount of market inertia. The reMarkable team simply doesn't have those resources, so they have to make a trade-off - and the trade-off they made was quality over quantity (of features).
> Also, the reMarkable is open - you can add all these things yourself, if you're sufficiently motivated.
Since I had bought (and later returned) the RM2 largely due to misleading statements here on HN about it being "so very open", I'd like to add a warning to anyone reading the parent comment:
The RM2 is open in the sense that anyone with a background in reverse engineering might be able to modify a few things. It is far from being an open platform, though. Remember how some people complain that Android is not really open because Google controls it, source code often gets released with a delay and some libraries are proprietary? Well, I've got bad news – in terms of openness Android is still light years ahead of the Remarkable software stack.
You have to explicitly turn on SSH access, and each device has its own unique SSH password which is only accessible from the device itself. It's not a set of generic admin/admin creds.
One would hope not, but it makes connecting to less trusted networks much more risky than it needs to be. And I'm sure that's something users will regularly do.
Software updates are infrequent and they certainly aren't pushing out standalone security errata that I've seen.
I don't see this as a fair point when the option is disabled by default, like in this case. If you enabled it, then you should be aware of the risks of it, if you connect it to untrusted networks.
But should a more modern, digital paper, not enhance the human intellect? Why should I not be able to jot down a math formula that the computer then solves for me? Why cant I draw a triangle and let it compute the sides? Why not write a letter to a friend and send it directly to them and also read their answer on the same device?
This would be enhancing paper for me. Combining the at this point pretty natural way of writing on paper with many of the modern computers amenities. Sure, you might not need all these, but paper is also cents if you really need "Not features". Minimalism and focus on core features is fine, but artificially limitations in this way does not seem to help remarkable to deliver good software. So what does it achieve?
The RM2 pen latency (20 ms) is double the iPad's (9 ms).
I wouldn't call the RM2 interactive paper. It's digital paper. Remarkable has focused their device to that niche and I think that was very smart of them. It's all about e-ink, crazy battery life, no distractions. I know a lot of people want more functionality - especially in the reader area, drawing apps, and calendar functions. So far Remarkable has managed to stay focused on the core functionality and I think the longer they can remain focused, the better off the company is. Every feature they add is something they have to test and maintain forever and that's a lot for a small company to do and still sell the device for about $400 (which is a bargain IMHO).
What I'd like to see is a bigger option. It would be nice to have at least a full A4/letter size screen. It would make dealing with PDFs a much better experience.
I think that as e-ink gets better and better refresh rates, that having it as a grayscale monitor for things like textbooks/markup and browsing the web will make sense. Having an e-ink tablet to browse HN, check email and read the morning paper sounds pretty nice. I used to get the NYTimes delivered to my Kindle each morning.
That's not this product. The point to a device like the Remarkable is that it can't do those things. I could have an iPad Pro with a better pen, the full power of OneNote, etc., but it's way too easy to go get distracted by HN or email or a news flash. The Remarkable is a focus device.
Forget grayscale, E-ink is going color. Early color devices are on the market already. And there are displays in the works that are fast enough to render video.
I'm really looking forward to the future of e-ink displays.
yeah, call me in 5 years when those devices are no the crap they are today with their own subpixel problems where everything is blurry unless you use giant size font's .
> I think that as e-ink gets better and better refresh rates,
Could you clarify your meaning? Because as far as I know, there hasn't been any improvement in "refresh rates". Typical update times are still around 600ms. Unless you mean tricks like A2 as used by vendors like Dasung which aren't real completed updates.
Well, in theory. One could write an app for that I guess. But the whole complex android stack does not really appeal to me. Simplicity I think, would also be really important. And I think openness goes hand in hand with that.
Boox is easy to root and the remarkable is open. Not sure how well the remarkable would work with a keyboard, but my Boox included a keyboard (it's just a BLE one but it has good support). On the remarkable at least you should be able to run some tiny linux distro with a simple as you want stack. Guess in time we will get something; just not sure how to make sure it's more open.
>I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now.
I think that depends on what you want out of the device. It's definitely limited - but, as other posters note, that's an explicit design choice. A design goal in fact. But what it does, it does pretty well. I've had my RM2 for maybe a year now. And I use it daily. It's become my preferred note-taking & sketching medium, replacing the paper notepads I've used for years.
I don't use it for anything else: but it supports those two use cases very nicely. It's simple but subtle things that I've found useful, for example:
1. Keeping my notes in folders.
2. Being able to add notes to a subject (folder), rather than interleaving in a paper book
3. Being able to move things about when sketching. I'd often get to the edge of the paper in a notebook and need to cram something awkwardly. Now, I can just select and move.
I've tried using a wacom tablet connected to the PC instead, and much prefer the remarkable. The ergonomics just feel so much better.
It's not perfect: live sync can be a bit unreliable, and I'd prefer the "todo" template to be a bit more app-like (move items off the list when complete).
But I can live with those. I like the fact it's focused, efficient, pleasant to use, and doesn't try to be all things to all people.
What I can say is it just works. If you keep a notebook, it is a viable alternative with few drawbacks and many advantages in my experience.
They have been very careful and deliberate with their features. At first it was odd or even frustrating that the capabilities are limited, but over time I have started to understand their approach and wanting to align with their goal of being a focused and distraction free experience.
It seems like they have little real competition in this niche they have carved out, so can take the time to slowly but continuously role out enhancements. It reminds me of how the iPhone has been limited in overall capabilities compared to Android but stays more streamlined as enhancements are made.
> Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now.
It was pretty much DOA for me. Over the years I have learned/trained my hand to keep away from pen and paper. Well, mostly. Asking the same limb to now go back into taking notes by hand or drawing free-hand is a no-go for me. I learned this the hard way. And yes, laggy software makes it worse.
I can tell you my wife absolutely loves her Remarkable 2. I kinda want one myself now, but am not sure I can justify the cost for myself because my technology usage is different.
In her case, the ereader functionality is secondary. She's big on writing in notebooks and the Remarkable's experience there justifies the cost. It's really a device for writing, not reading.
I have a reMarkable 2 for a while now, and I'm super happy with it. I specifically didn't want an Android device because of the obsolescence. The reMarkable doesn't run much in the background and does its job well.
I bought it to read my IT books, works perfectly. I'm also an artist, and even though I didn't expect much from the pen, sketching on it is very fun and I find myself filling a page of sketches almost every day.
Having full access to the underlying OS is also a big plus, even though I didn't do anything with that yet.
There is no point chasing hardware customers who would only pay $120 for a device like this. You're never going to be able to make a sustainable business at that prices and those people are always going to be comparing your product to Amazon Kindle prices yet also demanding way beyond that.
Better to find an audience that is passionate about what you're building and passionate for a new alternative and willing to spend the money that can keep your business sustainable. I understand you'd be more interested if it was Jupiter notebooks tablet but eInk but that's an even more niche product than note taking and would therefore cost way more than the current price.
I love eink devices but got turned off by the first couple of generations because they always underdelivered with PDF display, which seemed like a central use case to me. I should be able to open a random graphics-heavy PDF and have it display perfectly (ignoring color) and in a reasonable amount of time for an eink device to be worth it to me.
This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want to purchase one without being able to stress test in person.
I use the Boox with papers (so almost only PDFs) on the internal reader and on Android readers; it works really well. In the end I keep using the internal reader because it has split view for me to scribble notes next to every page. Disclaimer: I am older with glasses but not reading glasses; I read fine with incredibly small fonts; I prefer it that way. So YMMV but for me and for PDFs it is an ideal device for sure. If the built-in reader is not good enough, you just get one from the Play Store; there are enough very good ones there.
I understand that. I gotta say I was blown away with how well the RM2 handles complex PDFs.
Edit: As a stress test, I just opened the most complex PDF I had on my computer – http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf . I think it works really well on the RM2. The gradients in some of the fancier features look ugly, but other than that everything is quite readable, and flipping pages is quite spiffy (I know some ordinary computer PDF readers sometimes have noticable loading times for certain pages in this document).
I have reMarkable 2 and I think it is brilliant, however it has one deal breaker that is there is no encryption on the device. If you lose it, you risk your documents landing in a bad actor hands.
One may say it's the same with actual paper - sure, but reMarkable 2 can store much more data than a suitcase of documents.
Then I have no idea whether documents on their cloud are encrypted and who has access to it beside myself.
So reMarkable has become an expensive paperweight.
I saw some people tried to get encrypted fs working, don't how well that works though.
I wrote an email to support about this and I never got any reply. Says all...
Their cloud is fully optional - you don't have to use the rM cloud, or even create an account. To me that is itself one of the killer features of the rM, it works as an offline device with local storage.
I pre-ordered the Remarkable 1 and ended up returning it due to buggy software and the battery life not performing as advertised (had to recharge literally every day). I pre-ordered the Remarkable 2 when it came out because it was much more affordable.
I've had it since November and have used it virtually every day. It's light and portable and I think I've charged it three times since November. They've definitely improved their software a lot and I love the OSS community around it.
The only feature I wish it had was full text search on my notes. But I and willing toive without it as I want a lower tech solution for note taking that is still portable.
Interesting. That hasn't been my experience at all with the reMarkable 1. I do agree the software needed some work, but it has improved significantly since I first bought it. I have been debating purchasing the reMarkable 2 and although it looks great, I think I'm happy enough with the first device to keep it for now.
I'm really glad I bought my ReMarkable2 (and Marker "Plus"), as it suits my use case extremely well: replacing stacks of 8.5x11" graph notepads, while adding digitization / sync, undo/redo, select/cut/paste/resize/move, (modest) pan/zoom, etc. Battery life and form factor are great. The writing UX is really something: low-latency, ~perfect hand detection, and the "feel" of writing. Yeah, the software's mediocre, but it's gotten noticeably better since I bought it ~6mo ago. And it's still early days. The OSS community did wonders for the RM1, and I expect RM2 to follow suit. It's not a do-anything kind of device (I absolutely love my Kindle Oasis for reading) but for me it was easily worth the $.
I bought Remarkable 2 and returned it sadly. It does one thing very well which is writing. But not a great tool for reading PDFs. When I figured pinch to zoom was not possible that was it for me. It’s a really polished tool for wiring but they have a lot of room to improve for reading experience.
Pinch zoom is available in PDFs now. I'm on 2.7, but I believe it was added in 2.6. It works really well. Of course it's far slower than on a normal tablet due to the e-ink screen, but it's definitely fine for me.
Yeah, I'm on some facebook reMarkable groups and it's stunning how many people bought it without watching a single video from manufacturer. They though browser, video, dropbox/google drive/others will be available, or that it will integrate with their decade worth of notes from various services...
Those tablet e-ink devices does some of that. reMarkable is just a notepad with very simple cloud sync to their cloud.
That's disappointing to hear. I've been on the fence about way to pick one of these up but I had heard that the reading experience was sub par. I have yet to find an e-ink tablet that's attractive enough to spend money on.
That's interesting, because I read PDFs (and annotate) every single day. Pinch-to-zoom works great, and it's the best PDF reader I've experienced. Can't recommend highly enough.
Although that only helps to zoom in to one spot, if I were to try using that to read a page where the font is too small, having to shift the page left and right while zoomed, it would be a nightmare to read a document.
My gripe is I cannot switch the device to show a PDF in landscape mode. Then at least pretty much all documents' fonts would be large enough, if I use the height of the device for the width of the PDF. Then I would only have to scroll down and only after reading half a page. That would work well, scrolling left-right-left-right-.... while zoomed in does not, unless the page has two columns of text so that I don't have to scroll right-left-....
I use my RM2 mostly as epub reader. For the price - I got the preorder discount - it was the same or even lower as other pure readers of a similar size.
The software does have some weaknesses, for example sometimes I have to edit the epubs and remove some CSS background color because it ends up black on dark gray (unreadable of course), or it has set defaults for font, line height and such settings and I cannot set new defaults so I end up setting those for each and every document I sync to it anew. Still, it's acceptable for me, it's just a few (now muscle memory) clicks. To sync I sometimes have to start the Windows app to which I added a document a second time before it uploads it to the cloud server. That too now is a muscle-memory action. I hope they fix it some day but it's not a deal breaker.
I did a bit of writing and that just works and feels very good too. Other than the base use cases the software is very barebone. As others have pointed out, that's a goal. The device does everything I expect from it, which is just some basic writing and the epub reading. I can send webpages to the device (while it's online) by clicking an extension icon in the browser, which I do for RoyalRoad chapters, for example. WebToEpub creates epub files for entire Webnovels, which have to be uploaded using the Windows app though.
For me main use case is reading research articles annotate on it and sync it with my desktop and share it with my colleagues. Ideally I wanted a bibliography library tool like mendeley or zotero and keep all my annotations and notes synced. But that is far from possible on any e-ink tablet so far I have tried.
You can get reasonably close. You can use the zutilo extension for zotero which offers you a "move to tablet" option where you just point it to directory. I point it to a fuse mount of the remarkable. When zutilo moves the pdf to the tablet it removes it from the bibliography (just the pdf) and adds a special tag. At a later point you can do a fetch from tablet and zotero pulls back the paper from the tablet directory and extracts the annotations. This is also the biggest issue, because it can't extract text from your handwriting.
I'm using ReMarkable 2 as well and am happy with it, but if I would just wait for other devices to come up I'd consider boox nova or something like that for their completely different (and better) text convertion and so on.
But still - the device is quite awesome and I tough myself some drawing. Use it all the time to prototype diagrams and show architecture. Love it that I can draw some weird system connections on a diagram, copy and paste, and change some parts. Then I send a PDF and use it as a flip-book on zoom cals :)
Opensource tweaks are pretty good now. Some are actually obsolete as ReMarkable did nice improvements to zoom and document links. But most tweaks support RM2 already.
Same here. I had literally dozens of moleskines that I've been writing in for nearly 15 years. I'm a huge fan of paper, but was looking for a solution that allowed me to digitize my note-taking without giving up the ergonomics of paper.
As you point out, the "writing UX" was so astonishing, it was probably the quickest "adoption" of any major tech upgrade for me.
I have a remarkable 2 as well and It's a fantastic notetaker and pdf annotation device. One benefit I didn't think about beforehand but use somewhat frequently is signing documents while working from home. Just print to pdf, copy to remarkable, sign, email back to sender. Way easier than printing, signing, scanning, and then emailing back.
In those cases I usually take the PDF, open it with LibreOffice and paste over my signature, scanned once upon a time. Never got any complaints, but it could be easily discovered for sure.
This is my experience too. I used to keep a stack of notebooks around, and I never seemed to have the right one on hand. Now I just have to keep track of one notebook that will never run out of space. With the most recent updates the e-reading experience has also gotten much better.
At this point the only feature I'd say is lacking is some kind of e-book store integration. I'd like to be able to purchase books from mainstream publishers to read on the device (it's sad how few publishers distribute books in non-DRM, plain ePub files these days).
I was one of the supporters for the first remarkable and pre-ordered with a bundle with case for $350 (I think) which seemed pretty expensive but I really wanted to support businesses developing these larger scale e-paper tablets.
The battery life was really bad in the first software versions but seems to be a lot better now.
I use it for recipes (I like to write my own version out even when working from a cookbook so that I can modify), UX sketches, and most recently I’ve joined a bookclub and has been great to highlight passages and write notes in the margin for discussion.
Overall it’s been useful, but the early bad experiences with battery life/power management really turned me away from more consistent use (after a couple meetings where it powered down and had to go back to my desk to grab a paper pad).
Would be curious to hear from
anyone who got RM2 after RM1 and what their battery life difference has been!
Musicians, are there any tablet you use, recommend, for partitions (sheet music) ?
Someone I know uses a iPad Pro, 13" seems like a good size to get the approximate good size. But it's also very expensive for just diplaying partitions.
I have had my remarkable 2 for a month and really love it. It replaces paper and annotating paper PDFs. It is simple and easy to use. If you currently take notes or write paper PDFs, it is for you (this is enough for many people).
I've got an Onxy BOOX with the optional (and cheap!) Bluetooth keyboard.
As this is an Android device, Termux (a Linux userland for Android) is available (through F-Droid). So yes, both vim and emacs (as well as a slew of other editors).
I've done some light editing on the device, and the display is generally suitable. My main gripe is that there's no way to position the device and keyboard in my lap in a stable format (a kickout selfsupporting folio case, as I have for an earlier Android tablet, would be better).
And: as with all Android devices, the OS chooses to kill what the OS chooses to kill, when it wants, for memory GC purposes. So that shell session may suddenly cease to be at any point (usually when backgrounded and you're tending to other affairs). This is ultimately a dealbreaker. Android is simply not suitable to Real Work.
(You could use Termux + keyboard + ssh + screen/tmux to work on another remote system, of course, but that's not nearly as portable, unless you're carrying that remote system with you at all times as well.)
A little bit too expensive but so cool (because not just eInk but also hackable!) I'm definitely going to buy it. At the same time I would never buy function-limited proprietary thing like Kindle even if it was extremely cheap (I actually bought a PocketBook instead).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadThat being said I wouldn't be bothered at all about a thickness increase, or breaking out of the pen-on-paper "immersion"... Perhaps there's a more technical reason.
First off it's not really a backlight like you see in most LCD displays, it's a front-light, or edge-light that projects directly on to and is reflected by the e-ink display (the transparent top layer of the display acts as a wave guide for the edge lighting, and it's really quite an impressive engineering feat that they got it to apply so evenly on a 13.3" display area).
Obviously this will be useful when ambient lighting is too dim to even read paper, but the fact is current e-ink technology is just not as reflective, or high contrast as regular printed text on copy paper. The front-light illumination at low to mid levels (at least on the Onyx series) goes a long way towards making the screen background look almost as white as real paper. Granted if you are outside in the sun you will not notice the frontlight even at max brightness. But in dim indoor lighting, it's the difference between looking at greenish-grey kinda washed out image, and something that might fool a casual passer by into thinking it really is paper & ink.
1: https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi
I have the fact that especially "pro" tablets are becoming heavier. They're not comfortable to hold.
In my opinion the "perfect" tablet should not weigh more than 250-300 grams, we just don't have the tech for a flagship tablet that can weigh that much, yet.
Experimentally, I've found that my Kindle (320 grams including case) hurts a lot less than my iPad (470 grams) which hurts a lot less than my Surface Pro 4 (790 grams) when dropped on my face.
(Have an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi with Frontlight. The display is good in strong light, but even under fairly-brightly-lit indoor conditions, the Frontlight is useful.)
A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption are so low as to be indistinguishable from paper
B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
Maybe someone who's an expert in display tech can chime in? My money's on A) since so much is invested in it.
My money's on C: a new display tech which works similarly to color E-ink, but isn't actually E-ink. Qualcomm's Mirasol technology looked amazing for this, but sadly it never made it into any mainstream products and they've basically shut it down at this point.
I suspect that it might be easier to improve reflective displays, but I have no expertise in this field so maybe I'm completely wrong about that.
Uniform emission is fine because paper has close to Lambertian reflectance. "The apparent brightness of a Lambertian surface to an observer is the same regardless of the observer's angle of view." [0]
> and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).
Or make sure that the display itself has close to Lambertian reflectance and take into account its color in the emission calculations.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambertian_reflectance
Not all LCDs are backlit. Some are purely reflective or 'transflective' (eg. the screen used on the old Gameboy.) That's not to say they look like paper now but it's not 100% impossible.
Edit: Also the screen used on the Pebble Time watches looks reasonably close to a colour print-out with the backlight off. These are a "memory LCD" made by JDI (although they were somewhat confusingly marketed as "e-paper" despite being an LCD.)
I thought in relation to eye strain and ability to read in sunlight the quality would be theoretically impossible to ever be indistinguishable?
> B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.
There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.
E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the industry to buy in and start making products using this technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their production to then start producing 7 color panels in much smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it will be a commercial success.
When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display tech when they could invest in some new internet services startup or AI/ML startup instead.
As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.
LCD doesn't have to be emissive. Black-and-white LCDs are most often not. It's unlikely but not impossible for there to be some breakthrough in colors LCDs
http://calculators.torensma.net/files/images/casio_cfx-9850g...
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-has-developed-ace...
I tried the Remarkable 2 for a month but ended up returning it and ordering the Supernote A5X instead – I couldn't be happier! Its main advantages (IMO):
- The Supernote acts as a regular USB mass storage device, so syncing files (w/o resorting to the cloud) is not as hard as with the RM2 (which serves a really buggy web interface over USB, pretending to be an ethernet device). Sure, the RM2 gives you SSH access but that doesn't help much because it's using a shitty proprietary file system, so you can't just scp your documents but need to convert them first.
- The Supernote comes with much better PDF reading and annotation capabilities. (The RM2 has pretty much none.)
- The Supernote's soft non-glass surface is more comfortable for long writing sessions – writing on it feels like writing with a gel pen. Plus you'll never need to replace your pen tips as they're made from ceramic.
- The Supernote A5X is running Android instead of a barebones Linux system, meaning that it comes with more features out of the box and it'll be much easier to extend it in the future when Ratta opens up their platform. (Sure, you can "hack" your RM2 but the chances that the next official update will then completely brick your device are rather high – /r/RemarkableTablet/ is full of these stories.)
- The company behind the Supernote actually values the community's input, see https://www.reddit.com/r/Supernote
I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty much none" when it comes to PDF reading and annotation capabilities. That's pretty much exclusively what I use my RM1 device for and it works great.
EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to the RM2, it's very enticing. (Once you throw in the folio and the pen for the RM2, the A5X is comparable if not cheaper.) Since my old Kindle Keyboard died a while back, I haven't replaced it. Looks like the A5X can also read Kindle books which is a huge draw for me. Do you know if there's any API that allows me to write my own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I want to be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically that will be eventually synced the next time I use it.
Well, all you can basically do is scribble within a PDF. The RM2 doesn't offer proper PDFs annotations and it doesn't even come close to the Supernote in terms of other useful features like bookmarking, digests, etc.
> EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to the RM2, it's very enticing.
Yup, exactly. It seems more expensive upon first sight but it's actually a pretty good deal.
> Do you know if there's any API that allows me to write my own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I want to be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically that will be eventually synced the next time I use it.
This is exactly what I'm waiting for, too! My hope is that once they open up their platform I'll be able to install the Syncthing Android app and sync my Supernote with all my other devices over WiFi.
This is true and I don't really mind that personally although having read up a bit more on the Supernote, the annotations it generates do seem much nicer.
> it's actually a pretty good deal
Pricing seems about the same really. Especially when you consider the bundle of table, folio, and pen together for each. I was disappointed to see that the standard Supernote pen does not include an eraser and the LAMY pen which does lacks the ceramic tip and instead requires replacing nibs just like the reMarkable pen.
Fair enough. On the other hand, the Supernote comes with more features than the RM2 and gets updates much more frequently, so one would have to price that in, too.
> I was disappointed to see that the standard Supernote pen does not include an eraser and the LAMY pen which does lacks the ceramic tip and instead requires replacing nibs just like the reMarkable pen.
True. I hear that Ratta (the company behind the Supernote) is working on a pen with built-in eraser, though.
I've been wavering on a RM2. I already have an iPad with the Paperlike screen cover. And I absolutely love writing on it. However, it has two downsides for me that keep me from using it all the time for notes:
1) It's still pretty heavy
2) It does too much. Seriously, I also have a keyboard for it, and there are tons of apps that I can use. This is the problem -- because it can do so much, I can't just use it for only notes.
I never heard of the Supernote until today, but it sounds great. I'm just worried that it might do a little too much? I'd love to have a note taking device that I used as much as I used to use a paper notebook.
It has an excellent note taking app, a quirky way to create word docs, a calendar, ability to read and annotate pdf/epub, an email app (which I found impossible to set up), and kindle. That's it. You cannot install/side-load apps.
So, it is a perfect device for no distraction note taking.
As for the Supernote, it comes with quite a few features I love but also a few ones (email, cloud sync, OCR) I don't really use. But that's fine as they never get in my way, so I don't really notice them.
One exception where the RM2 is (still?) superior feature-wise: Brush styles. The Supernote doesn't come with a lot of options here and is still missing a caligraphy pen and a pencil. It hasn't really bothered me but it might bother people who want to use their e-ink tablet for drawing.
No... they're approximately 0.
The next update will wipe out your modifications, everything outside of the home directory is wiped, but the device will still work.
People bricking their devices are people actively doing things that brick their devices, not updates coming along and bricking them later.
... such as flashing their own bootloaders or overwriting the system partitions. This isn't required for any of the fancy mods :)
For me, lack of android is more of a feature for this kind of device.
Here's why I prefer Android over plain Linux on anything that's not a laptop or desktop computer (or a server):
- Much more secure. Every app is running in a sandbox and permissions are clearly defined. (This is a big one! I don't want to have to trust the apps I'm running.)
- Data encryption by default
- Clearly defined ways for apps to talk to one another (intents etc.), for user data to be separated from app cache etc, for user data to get backed up via Google Backup / Seedvault. Anyone who's trying to do the same on Linux needs to re-invent the wheel here. As Ratta is planning to open up their Supernote platform for 3rd-party apps, this is crucial.
- A/B updates – it's hard to break your device
- Bluetooth & fingerprint support. I wish the Supernote came with a fingerprint reader but it does allow you to use a bluetooth keyboard (though typing comes with a rather long delay)
In a lot of ways that's the opposite of Android. It doesn't mean that an Android implementation as the base OS has to be bad, but it requires extra effort to constrain it to be good. I've also had performance issues with Android in the past, but maybe that's better now.
That why they could preinstall the Kindle app, however they don't let you install apps and have a bad experience in the Play Store, bad experience with apps that work but are clunky on an e-ink display...
But then I noticed that I also read substantial amount of soft skill/self help/popscience books and they're easily obtainable in epubs. I pulled te trigger and bought supernote a6x. It size is perfect. I can read and annotate on the go, I can jot during coffee breaks. I take notes on the meetings and then I can put supernote on the stand beside monitor and see bullet points/todo lists for this day.
Supernote support and community is very helpful and constant upgrades take user requests into account.
If I want the Lamy pen, and don't want the "nebula" cover, I have to buy the lamy pen separately, but I'll also still get the standard set, which I don't want? Or can I choose the Lamy set but change the cover?
Also, the Lamy pen has a function button, but also doesn't have the ceramic nib. This is weird since they go to such great lengths to convey how valuable the "never wear-out nib" is on the regular supernote pen. Also, does the Lamy pen need to be charged somehow?
Also, apparently, Canadians have had to pay ~$95 in duty, and shipping already isn't cheap. 95$ in duty is insane IMO.
Seems like an interesting product, but the website needs a huge overhaul IMO. I've been looking to replace my Kobo H20 Aura for a while, and I wouldn't mind ponying up a more for the supernote, but the website leaves me with more questions than answers.
I dunno, it's cool
There are only two downsides about it: The vendor does not respect FOSS and does not publish the sources for their modified Linux kernel, and the device constantly phones home to China. However, the device can be rooted easily [1], and you can install a firewall to stop the preloaded apps from phoning home (verified it with Wireshark).
[1]: https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-note-...
[1] https://syncthing.net/
This is why I'm leaning towards the Note Air. The Kobo Elipsa is coming out soon but it syncs with Dropbox only.
It runs Android. You can just sync things through the cloud provider of your choice. Put the Dropbox, OneDrive, NextCloud etc. app on and just download it from there.
Most eReaders don't have upload by email just Kindles and that doesn't let you send a more recent better formats like KFX or AZW3, just ancient mobi. Ditto Bluetooth.
And guess what? At least with Android phones "Nearby Share" works too (although that may require setting up Google Play Store.
Apart from Kindle, Firefox and safari books online reader?
I’ve found that 3rd party drawing apps don’t work well with the screen.
The fact it runs Android is vastly better than some custom software (like Kindle and others) because of this reason.
I can just see me working on a brilliant invention (one can dream , right?) and putting my notes into the note boox, only to realize it gets patented before me by a Chinese company.
About 1 billion Chinese customers think the same like you, except they refuse products that phone home to USA.
This anxiety is not just China as a destination, but it just as relevant if it phones home to any company in any _country_.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttxapps.dr...
P.S. I own a rm2 but I'd be interested in an e-ink android tablet.
In the UI, you can choose if the device should communicate to Chinese or US servers. Both of them are available under the boox.com domain, so I assume they are both controlled by the Chinese manufacturer. The device uses this to check for firmware upgrades, to sync notes, for their own book store and IIRC to send some basic usage statistics. As per firmware version 3.0 (v3.1 is current), this traffic was only partly encrypted.
Besides this, the software seems to include some kind of Tencent SDK, which tries to contact Chinese servers quite aggressively, regardless of which setting you choose in the UI. The traffic is encrypted, so I couldn't figure out what it does. The servers seem to belong to Tencent's QQ service [1], so they supposedly use it for their on-device support feature. However, because the device tries to contact the servers immediately after startup, I assume it does some kind of analytics tracking as well. Blocking the service's domains on the DNS level doesn't work though, as the SDK will start to contact fixed IP addresses if DNS resolution fails.
Luckily, all of this traffic can be blocked after rooting and installing a firewall (see my post above), since all of this is implemented under Android user ID 1000, which makes it easy to block in AFWall+.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ
Because yet another Chinese company flagrantly flouting a licence is really going to help with that situation…
I was considering one of their devices. I am now not.
Seems like just cause for a multinational import ban. This is flagrant law breaking and theft.
Is there an IP list anywhere?
And, do you know what data they send?
Personally, I don't need it to translate my handwriting, I just like the act of writing and like being able to design my own paper types on demand, with infinite paper. For me, it meets my needs. I put hands on a variety of devices at Yodobashi Camera and this was the only one that felt natural to write on. Everything else had a perceptible lag, or the pen was weird, that I couldn't handle for long.
Of course, leave it to HN to make me feel like a total shithead for not looking into FOSS and other things (it didn't cross my mind even once). Guess I'll be rooting it this weekend; I really hate sinking the time/effort/risk into doing stuff like that.
Considering the hackability of the device, and how all the cloud services are opt-in, I don't see how that would do them any good.
Don't mistake a lack of advanced features for a lack of software effort. reMarkable is making an intentional trade-off - more feature quality, less feature quantity.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27516894
Prior to the latest updates I actively regretted my reMarkable 2 purchase. Now it's back to "a decent device that I would never recommend anyone pay full price for"
Let's start with eReading: Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF didn't work. As such, your table of contents and index are worthless, you don't have quick access to footnotes, and so on. They only very recently finally added this in the 2.6 update.
If links don't work they must have some way to jump between pages easily, right? No, wrong again. Jumping to a page number is 3 clicks deep (pretty sure it was 4 prior to 1.17): Upper left corner, page overview, "Go to page". You then have to move from the top of the screen to the bottom to enter the page number and then back to the top since they couldn't be bothered to put an enter/OK button with the other buttons.
Then there's the controls in general. To switch between writing utensils, you need the left menu. This covers your document content and there's no way to just scale the content into the remaining space. This means that to work on an entire document you need to be constantly opening and closing that menu. There's not even a way to have the button backgrounds be transparent so you can read what's behind them without interacting.
Search is very slow. It takes FOREVER to index a book, and you're given no indication of if it's done. Instead, if I open a large PDF and search, I will be told that there are no results rather than that it hasn't finished looking yet. If I wait 15 seconds, things may magically appear on my screen unexpectedly.
eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size requires you to wait while the entire book is rerendered (losing your notes in the process since they're image-based rather than proper annotations)
This is primarily a drawing/creation device. A basic tool that would help here is stroke-based erasing. They have stroke knowledge since Undo supports that, but the eraser is a clumsy mess that reminds me of the worst cheap elementary school supplies.
While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in "light mode" except for the settings app which is inverted into dark mode with no way to change it to a normal UX?
Those are all off the top of my head. I have a much longer list of thoughts in a document somewhere. My overall point is that my expectations a full Android device with fancy editors. My expectations were an optimized focus/creation device, but the software lets the hardware down in a bad way even for their core scenarios of reading, annotating, and drawing.
I don't think that the rest of your comment substantiates this. You don't have any arguments that the core functionality is lacking in some way - everything you say seems to be about non-core things.
> Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF didn't work.
Note the "didn't", and also PDF hyperlinks is not an "essential" feature for the purpose of the rm2, which is writing and annotating.
> If links don't work they must have some way to jump between pages easily, right?
Not core to writing and annotating. You're looking for a document-navigation system, which the rm2 is not.
> Search is very slow.
See previous comment about the rm2 not meant to be a document-navigation system.
> eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size requires you to wait while the entire book is rerendered (losing your notes in the process since they're image-based rather than proper annotations)
This might be the only valid complaint here, although it's still a non-essential feature. An essential feature is the ability to take notes, which you can.
> This is primarily a drawing/creation device.
That's literally how it's marketed - "Writing, reading, and visualizing only".
> A basic tool that would help here is stroke-based erasing. They have stroke knowledge since Undo supports that, but the eraser is a clumsy mess that reminds me of the worst cheap elementary school supplies.
The eraser tool is perfectly functional. I use it continually with no problems. Could it be better? Yes, like almost every piece of software ever written. Is it "a clumsy mess"? Not even close.
> While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in "light mode" except for the settings app which is inverted into dark mode with no way to change it to a normal UX?
That's a single UX issue, among many things that they got right, that has little impact on the usability of the device.
You neglected to mention how the drawing, cut/copy/paste, convert-to-text, eraser, templates, and almost every other feature "just work". You do get all of those "polished features" - your stretch goals are not core functionality.
>Not core to writing and annotating. You're looking for a document-navigation system, which the rm2 is not.
Document navigation is absolutely a core part of reading. When I read a book, I page around it because that's how books work. When I reference a book I've already read, I want to look in the index or the table of contents and go there.
There are 6 things that reMarkable claims the device does on their homepage. "All your notes, organized and accessible on all devices" and "Take handwritten notes, read, and review documents" are two of them. Reading and searching are core scenarios.
This is a stretch. "Reading" means reading. You open a book and read it cover-to-cover. "Document navigation" is extra stuff beyond reading - it is not core. When you read a novel, you are not expected to jump back and forth between different chapters or sections, and the vast majority of people don't.
When you teach your child to "read", you don't teach them to click on PDF links (that's "web searching" or "computer literacy" or whatever) or to flip to arbitrary pages as fast as possible, or to search through a file - you literally teach them the English alphabet, how to parse words and sentences, and that's it - they know how to read. One knows how to "read" even if they've never seen a computer in their life, and if they don't know how to cross-reference books and articles, and if they don't know how to use an index.
> When I read a book, I page around it because that's how books work.
That's irrelevant. You can write on the margins of a book "because that's how books work", yet that's totally unrelated to "reading". I can clip out fragments of a book and put them on my refrigerator - that doesn't mean that a core part of reading is the extraction of inspirational quotes.
> When I reference a book I've already read, I want to look in the index or the table of contents and go there.
And yet, that's not a "core part of reading", and doesn't need to be optimized as such. The core parts of reading are reading words and flipping pages. Indices and tables of contents, while important, are not a core part of reading - they're important, sure, but if you remove them, you can still read things. That's what "core" means - "core" means "without this element, you cannot do the activity".
Let me repeat that again - if you remove the ability to flip to arbitrary pages (but keep the spot you were last reading in - which the reMarkable does), remove the table of contents, and remove the index, you can still read a book.
Will you be able to perform research effectively? No. But that's not what the reMarkable is for. I'll be the second to admit that the reMarkable 2 is terrible at research - but it's not meant to be used for research, it's meant to be used for simple reading, and note-taking while you do research on another device.
> [...] searching are core scenarios.
False. Their homepage literally never mentions "search" or "index". It's simply not there. Would search be useful? Heck yes. Is it necessary for reading? Absolutely not, see above.
As feature-limited as the reMarkable is, it is upfront about those limited features, and it executes on the features that it does promise at least better than most other pieces of technology.
[1] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks
https://sammorrowdrums.com/e-writers-remarkable-2-v-s
I've had the opportunity to use a reMarkable in person, and it's the first and only digital writing device that I could tolerate to write notes. The MS Surface, iPad Pro and Samsung tablets have never cut it for me. It's difficult to quantify why - a combination of pen-to-display distance, latency and screen texture perhaps.
Reviewers seem to agree that the Supernote and Note Air have higher latency, and higher pen-to-display distance, so I wonder if I could work with them or not.
The reMarkable seems to to be the go-to device as a digital notepad, but doesn't do anything beyond that, whereas the other devices offer a (near) full Android experience, which would be more useful to me as a dwevice that costs £400+.
Personally I don't get a lot out of the Android (as I really try to avoid DRM e-books), but they are both nice devices. Haven't tried Note Air.
I have! See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27513499
> Reviewers seem to agree that the Supernote and Note Air have higher latency, and higher pen-to-display distance, so I wonder if I could work with them or not.
The Supernote does come with slightly higher input latency but not by much – I got used to it pretty quickly and honestly don't really notice it anymore.
Being able to read my emails, manage my calendar, read my RSS feeds, access my documents from Google Drive and optionally annotate them (a copy of it in PDF form) would be what I'd have in mind to justify buying one.
The Note Air felt like drawing on plastic. Like using a ballpoint pen on a projector screen. It was easy for me to drift around the page. And my already terrible handwriting suffered. The transcription wasn't clean, and had many errors based on my handwriting. The RM2 feels like writing on paper. It has fantastic recognition for my handwriting, and the transcribing has one or maybe two weird words per page.
The only thing with the RM2 is there is no way to tag and search your pages. So you have to be very strategic with how you organize your notebooks, otherwise it's easy to just have a mess of a million pages you can never get through to find what you need. Tagging and searching would make the RM2 just AMAZING.
OCR is very bad and basically makes indexing and full-text searching impossible (and off device)
OCR could never work with my handwriting.
Clearly it's a very different look and feel. However, using GoodNotes, it immediately finds whatever I've written (even in my sloppy handwriting) on any page I wrote it. It's kind of amazing actually.
I'd have preferred eInk, but notes that I can't find are not useful to me.
If you're looking into an LCD panel and the light it's emitting is not adjusted to match the environment you're in, too bright or too dull, then you will strain your eyes.
With an e-ink screen, anything printed, or even a cinema screen, it doesn't usually emit light and therefore relies on the light emitted from other things around you to reflect off of the surface, illuminating the surface of the thing you're looking at. This is more natural and provides less strain on your eyes.
On a personal preference side of things, I can't look at bright sources in the evening. My wife is a terror for looking at her phone at 100% brightness, it's blinding if she hands it to me to look at. Where as my devices are setup to dim and be as low as possible in the evening, even the profile on the TV.
Until then, I am skipping it since I don't think it is worth the price.
Downvoters: So I disagreed with the HN hivemind with a point I made about saving money for a better version and now I get downvoted for wrongthink? So somehow, this device is worth $400 to spend on a 32 bit machine with 8 GB of space and 1 GB of RAM?
That is more like spending $400 on an over powered Raspberry Pi 2 just to read ebooks. (In black and white). You also might as well buy the latest iPad then.
I can't comment on the other tablets mentioned her as I haven't used anything else but ipad previously and now the remarkable 1. gen.
Because of this device I now have the weird hallucination of my perfect device; seems it would be a surface pro x lte (but later gen; it needs to at last get closer to usable software wise) but with a color eInk screen. I know they will never make this but yep, that would be basically my daily driver. The Boox people could come quite far but they focus on eReaders.
Outside of that edge case, I love it and it's indispensable and I use it at least 3 times a day for meetings and other to-do lists for myself.
Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technical sketching, email or even interactive notebooks like Jupiter on, you get a really over engineered piece of paper.
Now, it's pretty open, which is great, but I am not that convinced it will necessary remain so, and at that price, buying it only in the hopes of some people making better software in their free time always seems like a bigger gamble I like to take. I accept that for me ~120€ ereader, but for 5 times the price?
I really wish they would embrace mobile computing. Combining an e-ink tablet optimized for text with a moldable operating system like on the old xerox machines could be so incredibly good.
By the way, does the hardware allow connecting an external keyboard?
But it is absolutely very opinionated- entirely oriented around hand-writing use cases, specifically those that involve being away from power and network. So its power budget is low and it has amazingly robust synchronization.
You can read and do some other things on it, but that's not what it solves for.
Remarkable you can hack in keyboard support. They are just focused on making a good digital notepad. Even their reading software is sub-par.
I've seen it mentioned that someone got an USB keyboard working, and the device is pretty hackable overall (you can SSH to root over wifi out of the box!), but I think if you want to connect an external keyboard then it probably isn't for you anyway. You can't even type text in documents.
Disclaimer: reMarkable 2 user, pretty happy with their focus, but I wish the device was more responsive in some scenarios (complicated drawings are very slow) and there's certainly many missing core drawing/writing/reading features.
But I do feel the computing part could be much more utilized to make taking notes and reading text better. I am thinking of Hypertext, drawing tools like sketchpad, simple programming tools etc.
Not a device that does as much as possible badly, but one that could really push forward computing and text to get something more akin to digital paper we have seen for years in science fiction.
I don't begrudge people who like the extremely limited use case it has today, I personally just don't really get it why I should spend hundreds of dollars on something that I can pretty much get with a notebook and my smartphone camera.
On the other hand, this is a general problem these days that hampers innovation. As hard as hardware seems to be, it is obviously much easier than software, which is why so many devices these days fall short.
The problem is that even those "simple" things are a massive amount of work to get right (where "right" means bug-free, performant, well-documented (or intuitive - pick at least one), flexible, and with an ergonomic interface). Additionally, they're significantly more work than the even simpler restricted feature-set that the reMarkable currently offers.
I believe that the reMarkable developers are shooting for "quality over quantity" - polishing a small feature-set to a blinding shine, rather than trying to implement a larger feature-set poorly - that is, an intentional trade-off. I'm happy with that trade-off, but I know that others might not be - in which case, you'll probably get the Android device that other people in the thread are discussing.
Also, the reMarkable is open - you can add all these things yourself, if you're sufficiently motivated.
> something that I can pretty much get with a notebook
The reMarkable's features, as limited as they are, are still miles beyond what a notebook gives you. You have backup, synchronization, document export (PDF, raster, SVG), undo/redo, multiple documents, digital storage, cut/copy/paste, erasing (pen can't be erased, pencil usually leaves marks and has other problems), multiple brushes, page reordering, multiple page templates (lined, grid, music, blank canvas, and more), layers, really good handwriting recognition, and more.
Yes, it's light-years behind what we could have - but we're stuck in the place we're at because of a number of computing decisions that we made in the past (and continue to make now) that hamper creativity and flexibility, and overcoming those choices requires a lot of resources and the ability to ignore/bypass/counteract a massive amount of market inertia. The reMarkable team simply doesn't have those resources, so they have to make a trade-off - and the trade-off they made was quality over quantity (of features).
Since I had bought (and later returned) the RM2 largely due to misleading statements here on HN about it being "so very open", I'd like to add a warning to anyone reading the parent comment:
The RM2 is open in the sense that anyone with a background in reverse engineering might be able to modify a few things. It is far from being an open platform, though. Remember how some people complain that Android is not really open because Google controls it, source code often gets released with a delay and some libraries are proprietary? Well, I've got bad news – in terms of openness Android is still light years ahead of the Remarkable software stack.
Yeah. Let me rush to put that on my main network.
Software updates are infrequent and they certainly aren't pushing out standalone security errata that I've seen.
The documentation makes it sound like it only exposes ssh through it's ethernet over USB interface.
That being said, a deal breaker for me is lack of encryption.
What you consider an "overengineered piece" of paper might be intentional. Maybe you don't need paper - some people do.
This would be enhancing paper for me. Combining the at this point pretty natural way of writing on paper with many of the modern computers amenities. Sure, you might not need all these, but paper is also cents if you really need "Not features". Minimalism and focus on core features is fine, but artificially limitations in this way does not seem to help remarkable to deliver good software. So what does it achieve?
Sustainability. The device isn't for everybody. The constraints are features.
Sounds like you want something more like an iPad.
I think the "interactive paper" vision is very different from the "ipad" vision.
I wouldn't call the RM2 interactive paper. It's digital paper. Remarkable has focused their device to that niche and I think that was very smart of them. It's all about e-ink, crazy battery life, no distractions. I know a lot of people want more functionality - especially in the reader area, drawing apps, and calendar functions. So far Remarkable has managed to stay focused on the core functionality and I think the longer they can remain focused, the better off the company is. Every feature they add is something they have to test and maintain forever and that's a lot for a small company to do and still sell the device for about $400 (which is a bargain IMHO).
What I'd like to see is a bigger option. It would be nice to have at least a full A4/letter size screen. It would make dealing with PDFs a much better experience.
I wonder if people happy with their Remarkable had seen what onyx devices are able to do.
I'm really looking forward to the future of e-ink displays.
Could you clarify your meaning? Because as far as I know, there hasn't been any improvement in "refresh rates". Typical update times are still around 600ms. Unless you mean tricks like A2 as used by vendors like Dasung which aren't real completed updates.
I think that depends on what you want out of the device. It's definitely limited - but, as other posters note, that's an explicit design choice. A design goal in fact. But what it does, it does pretty well. I've had my RM2 for maybe a year now. And I use it daily. It's become my preferred note-taking & sketching medium, replacing the paper notepads I've used for years.
I don't use it for anything else: but it supports those two use cases very nicely. It's simple but subtle things that I've found useful, for example:
1. Keeping my notes in folders. 2. Being able to add notes to a subject (folder), rather than interleaving in a paper book 3. Being able to move things about when sketching. I'd often get to the edge of the paper in a notebook and need to cram something awkwardly. Now, I can just select and move.
I've tried using a wacom tablet connected to the PC instead, and much prefer the remarkable. The ergonomics just feel so much better.
It's not perfect: live sync can be a bit unreliable, and I'd prefer the "todo" template to be a bit more app-like (move items off the list when complete).
But I can live with those. I like the fact it's focused, efficient, pleasant to use, and doesn't try to be all things to all people.
They have been very careful and deliberate with their features. At first it was odd or even frustrating that the capabilities are limited, but over time I have started to understand their approach and wanting to align with their goal of being a focused and distraction free experience.
It seems like they have little real competition in this niche they have carved out, so can take the time to slowly but continuously role out enhancements. It reminds me of how the iPhone has been limited in overall capabilities compared to Android but stays more streamlined as enhancements are made.
It was pretty much DOA for me. Over the years I have learned/trained my hand to keep away from pen and paper. Well, mostly. Asking the same limb to now go back into taking notes by hand or drawing free-hand is a no-go for me. I learned this the hard way. And yes, laggy software makes it worse.
In her case, the ereader functionality is secondary. She's big on writing in notebooks and the Remarkable's experience there justifies the cost. It's really a device for writing, not reading.
I know for sure that RM1 hardware does allow you to connect external keyboard becase I have done it.
I can't tell about RM2 as I do not have it.
I bought it to read my IT books, works perfectly. I'm also an artist, and even though I didn't expect much from the pen, sketching on it is very fun and I find myself filling a page of sketches almost every day.
Having full access to the underlying OS is also a big plus, even though I didn't do anything with that yet.
There is no point chasing hardware customers who would only pay $120 for a device like this. You're never going to be able to make a sustainable business at that prices and those people are always going to be comparing your product to Amazon Kindle prices yet also demanding way beyond that.
Better to find an audience that is passionate about what you're building and passionate for a new alternative and willing to spend the money that can keep your business sustainable. I understand you'd be more interested if it was Jupiter notebooks tablet but eInk but that's an even more niche product than note taking and would therefore cost way more than the current price.
This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want to purchase one without being able to stress test in person.
Edit: As a stress test, I just opened the most complex PDF I had on my computer – http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf . I think it works really well on the RM2. The gradients in some of the fancier features look ugly, but other than that everything is quite readable, and flipping pages is quite spiffy (I know some ordinary computer PDF readers sometimes have noticable loading times for certain pages in this document).
Then I have no idea whether documents on their cloud are encrypted and who has access to it beside myself.
So reMarkable has become an expensive paperweight.
I saw some people tried to get encrypted fs working, don't how well that works though.
I wrote an email to support about this and I never got any reply. Says all...
Might be worth taking a look again
I've had it since November and have used it virtually every day. It's light and portable and I think I've charged it three times since November. They've definitely improved their software a lot and I love the OSS community around it.
The only feature I wish it had was full text search on my notes. But I and willing toive without it as I want a lower tech solution for note taking that is still portable.
I'm surprised they pulled this one off.
I just refereed a research paper with complex (color!) graphics on the thing. It was an absolute breeze!
Those tablet e-ink devices does some of that. reMarkable is just a notepad with very simple cloud sync to their cloud.
Although that only helps to zoom in to one spot, if I were to try using that to read a page where the font is too small, having to shift the page left and right while zoomed, it would be a nightmare to read a document.
My gripe is I cannot switch the device to show a PDF in landscape mode. Then at least pretty much all documents' fonts would be large enough, if I use the height of the device for the width of the PDF. Then I would only have to scroll down and only after reading half a page. That would work well, scrolling left-right-left-right-.... while zoomed in does not, unless the page has two columns of text so that I don't have to scroll right-left-....
I use my RM2 mostly as epub reader. For the price - I got the preorder discount - it was the same or even lower as other pure readers of a similar size.
The software does have some weaknesses, for example sometimes I have to edit the epubs and remove some CSS background color because it ends up black on dark gray (unreadable of course), or it has set defaults for font, line height and such settings and I cannot set new defaults so I end up setting those for each and every document I sync to it anew. Still, it's acceptable for me, it's just a few (now muscle memory) clicks. To sync I sometimes have to start the Windows app to which I added a document a second time before it uploads it to the cloud server. That too now is a muscle-memory action. I hope they fix it some day but it's not a deal breaker.
I did a bit of writing and that just works and feels very good too. Other than the base use cases the software is very barebone. As others have pointed out, that's a goal. The device does everything I expect from it, which is just some basic writing and the epub reading. I can send webpages to the device (while it's online) by clicking an extension icon in the browser, which I do for RoyalRoad chapters, for example. WebToEpub creates epub files for entire Webnovels, which have to be uploaded using the Windows app though.
But still - the device is quite awesome and I tough myself some drawing. Use it all the time to prototype diagrams and show architecture. Love it that I can draw some weird system connections on a diagram, copy and paste, and change some parts. Then I send a PDF and use it as a flip-book on zoom cals :)
Opensource tweaks are pretty good now. Some are actually obsolete as ReMarkable did nice improvements to zoom and document links. But most tweaks support RM2 already.
As you point out, the "writing UX" was so astonishing, it was probably the quickest "adoption" of any major tech upgrade for me.
I wrote some notes on my experience and the transition from paper here: https://jessmart.in/articles/remarkable
At this point the only feature I'd say is lacking is some kind of e-book store integration. I'd like to be able to purchase books from mainstream publishers to read on the device (it's sad how few publishers distribute books in non-DRM, plain ePub files these days).
The battery life was really bad in the first software versions but seems to be a lot better now.
I use it for recipes (I like to write my own version out even when working from a cookbook so that I can modify), UX sketches, and most recently I’ve joined a bookclub and has been great to highlight passages and write notes in the margin for discussion.
Overall it’s been useful, but the early bad experiences with battery life/power management really turned me away from more consistent use (after a couple meetings where it powered down and had to go back to my desk to grab a paper pad).
Would be curious to hear from anyone who got RM2 after RM1 and what their battery life difference has been!
They also improved a lot of my complaints with RM1 such as difficulty erasing.
Someone I know uses a iPad Pro, 13" seems like a good size to get the approximate good size. But it's also very expensive for just diplaying partitions.
https://www.padformusician.com/en/products/19-21-padmu-3-lum...
https://www.gvidomusic.com
As this is an Android device, Termux (a Linux userland for Android) is available (through F-Droid). So yes, both vim and emacs (as well as a slew of other editors).
I've done some light editing on the device, and the display is generally suitable. My main gripe is that there's no way to position the device and keyboard in my lap in a stable format (a kickout selfsupporting folio case, as I have for an earlier Android tablet, would be better).
And: as with all Android devices, the OS chooses to kill what the OS chooses to kill, when it wants, for memory GC purposes. So that shell session may suddenly cease to be at any point (usually when backgrounded and you're tending to other affairs). This is ultimately a dealbreaker. Android is simply not suitable to Real Work.
(You could use Termux + keyboard + ssh + screen/tmux to work on another remote system, of course, but that's not nearly as portable, unless you're carrying that remote system with you at all times as well.)