looks great and, at the same time, it seems they didn't address the single biggest problem I (and many, many, many other people) reported over the years :-( I even wrote about it here on HN in 2021 and nothing has really changed on that front.
I have a Remarkable 2 and the device is great, software is improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those notes later on is next to impossible.
OCR is very bad and basically makes indexing and full-text searching impossible (and off device)
It's funny, I would have thought that OCR on handwriting on a tablet would be great, because they can capture each individual stroke, rather than just the final pixelated product. In other words, because you're witnessing it being written, there's a lot more information. In fact I wouldn't even call it OCR because it's not "optical", but rather "stroke" -- SCR?
Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet tries to do and fails? Or is it only trying to OCR after-the-fact, in which case I'm not surprised it's terrible.
Apple newton did it. They required you to stroke your letters in a pedantically correct way because it used the stroke path, not the end pixel appearance, to detect letters.
I genuinely liked the Palm Graffiti. It took a couple of days of playing Giraffe to get used to it, but afterwards the speed and precision was quite decent. Of course it's nothing compared to modern swipe keyboards but still.
Agreed, I often miss Palm's Graffiti input, I don't remember it well at all at this point I think I tried a similar input on android and went back to gesture keyboard. Of course, I kind of miss even developing for Palm as well, which was far simpler an experience than what Android and iOS are today.
I had a Sony-Erickson phone with a resistive touch screen and full keyboard and a stylus. Very futuristic for the aughts! They also forced writing letters in a very specific way, in order to trigger OCR.
That got a lot better w/ v2 of Rosetta (also known as Calligrapher).
Recognition for me was about perfect, and I took notes on my Newton MessagePad using a 3rd party outliner in almost all of my college classes (art history was the exception --- used the main Newton app for that, along w/ little sketches and reference folios to the text which I then faxed to the fax machine in the Art Department's office for a student who had a learning disability which prevented his taking notes --- turns out that he then shared them with everyone in the dorms, which I found out about after the course was over when the professor noted how much better everyone's grades were that year and how she had found out when asking other students.
there is no OCR on device fullstop, which in itself would be fine if it happened async in the background.
You can use the OCR feature only in the companion desktop app, explicitly selecting pages you want to run the process on. The result is better than it used to be but still not great and, importantly, it does NOT seem they make any difference if you later on do a search on the device
Well, you can do OCR while using the device but... it's not on device. The device has to be connected to the Internet for OCR to work. I've never checked where does it connect to do it, as I never use it...
This is the biggest issue for me as well.
Seems that the OCR has to be triggered manually, for each page of each notebook. Which of course I don't remember to do and now there are too many.
The search doesn't appear to search across notebooks either.
The experience that I would want (expect) is that OCR happens in the background, all the time, no need to trigger and that I can then search for a word/string and find all the notes on that topic.
I've fallen back to tags and dates in filenames to have any chance of tracking down old meeting notes.
In the old Palm Pilot days the way the OCR worked is you had to do the strokes in a special software approved manner, your natural stroke motion wasn't acceptable, you were expected to learn to write in a special shorthand system called Graffiti.
I'd imagine going by stroke order would be a bit tricky since a lot of people don't write the way their teachers taught them to write. (Think anybody with bad handwriting).
Yeah... New product looks fantastic, but finding your notes will still be a pain. You have to be diligently organized with folders and notebooks to find anything.
Seems like they've improved the processor (at least the latency is lower) and that might help to add new features or improve pdf responsiveness, but they're still lacking on the software side, and even simple QOL features like the ones that rmhacks adds aren't available by default.
I feel like it falls short on the reading side (not searching, dictionary, note management...), and short on the notes side (simple drawing tools, no dashed lines, no shapes, and I think you can't even position text on the wherever you like on the page).
I really liked the initial hackability, as you have SSH access to the Linux inside the device, and people was building software to run on it, but seems like due to some changes since v3.4 of the firmware, it's either very difficult (or not possible) to do it, and the ideas I had for using it aren't feasible right now.
The price for the color model is (at least in Europe) already higher than a Boox Note Air3C, that's a full fledged Android tablet. Of course, the battery won't last as long even with all the optimizations, but is a bit lighter, has more resolution, and you can put whatever software you like that runs in Android. I haven't tested the software, though...
I'm absolutely fine without OCR and searching if they can give us working links. All I want to do is to be able to doodle a star on a page, or a word, and have that work as a link off to another page in another notebook. That's all you need for a zettelkasten-style system to hold your notes in but I've not seen anyone do it.
Supernote has links, as does Boox. There is a specific Star based system for Supernote but I never quite got the hang of that, but I use the linking features extensively to link to pages of PDFs for more extended notes about them, and to serve as a sort of directory / tree structure for notes and subjects. I keep my notes structure fairly flat for that reason, there aren’t many folders.
I’d’ve shelled out $800 first thing this morning for an RM Pro if they added linking across the system.
Agreed. I got the RM2 because I thought it’d be “a notebook I can search.” No. I regret every piece of writing that has ended up locked up inside that device vs on paper notebooks.
I was hoping rM3 will be about improved OCR, and ideally a GPT chat app with integrated pen - just use GPT4v or something. Their AI integrations are shit.
Good to know. Is there a single app that's suitable as both a notebook and reading/annotating pdfs? And would restricting the device to one app affect your ability to transfer files to the device over iTunes?
I find (1) to be the biggest snake oil of electrophoretic displays. The only case where it's remotely true is direct sunlight. In normal indoor lighting conditions they severely lack contrast/whiteness/blackness compared to a good screen or printed book, and are hugely dependent on proper lighting, for example your hand will give it shadow so you're practically forced to use the frontlight if your device has it (reMarkable doesn't), as it's almost impossible to light evenly and match the background otherwise. In other words, when reading indoors they have all downsides of paper with none of the upsides. It just doesn't work as "paper replacement", it's strictly inferior, and feels like a downgrade compared to modern active displays.
(3) is mostly matter of choice, and it's a feel of matte plastic, very far from actual paper.
(2) is the only reason I'm using it. It's thin (although not as thin as a piece of paper) and single-purpose, a physical product.
For what is worth, I am fully convinced that (1) (the paper-like visual feel) is completely true, not a snake-oil claim, even if it is just a perceptual placebo effect that is masking the ostensibly true nature you described. Placebo effects matter ;)
I guess I should also have added (4) this tablet is a lifestyle and fashion statement about having the disposable income to use it instead of an actual high-quality paper notebook.
I use iPad for some note taking (or rather, presentation planning). The responsiveness is good. I can’t deal with any lag in these devices so have never felt the need to try remarkable. Stuff like the surface work well when it’s the high end models but then you’re paying the same price as an iPad anyways!
E-ink is not "paper feel". It's a super low-power display, it only consumes power when the content on it changes. Since it works by moving around physical pigment molecules inside little cells, the screen will continue showing the last thing that you put on it literally forever while consuming no power.
I have an e-ink tablet, the Boox Note Air 3 C, when I use it as an ereader or notetaker the battery lasts for weeks. A little less when I use it for web browsing or apps that change the content on the screen a lot.
While E-ink is a large selling point of the Remarkable, I think parent is talking about another one of the selling points: That it feels like writing on paper with texture, rather than a glossy display (like iPad's display).
It has nothing to do with E-ink, but about how it feels to write on the Remarkable display with the pen.
I have both iPad Air with Paperlike cover and a Boox Note 3C... and the Boox with its color eInk and Wacom pen is SO MUCH nicer to write on and read that it's really not comparable.
Also paperlike film for iPad significantly degrades the screen, making it darker and grainy. It's still a better all-around device, but its really not as good as these eInk tablets for writing.
I concur. I switched from the very first remarkable to an ipad pro with paperlike but it's very different and much less paper-like. Also, the paperlike screen protector lost lost 100% of the roughness in just a few months, and now when I write it's basically the same as writing on the glass.
Is this suitable for reading technical pdf textbooks (math, programming, etc)? Last I checked the screen size was smaller than A4 and ReMarkable had a focus on writing and taking notes rather than displaying books...
I've mostly used it for reading textbooks or academic papers (and taking notes on them) and it works fine for me. It can be a little small but you can zoom in if you need
I read arxiv content on the Remarkable 2 and I am satisfied. The reader auto-removes the white margins, so the smaller screen is not a problem. The zoom functionality is snappy for an e-ink device from 3 years ago (slow by modern standards). The quick-view thumbnails used to scroll through far-away pages is sufficient for my workflow. Generally I am very happy with the device for consuming static academic PDFs.
That is the only thing I use mine for these days. Screen size is fine for that.
I miss an API to their cloud storage. It is simply a dealbreaker that it aims to help avoiding distractions but leaves no room for building an automated workflow around it.
depends on source of books I find, and perhaps also if you have eye strain issues, I need to read mine with my glasses often, which is irritating. But the zooming in can often leave you with text being too big to fit on the display.
So I sort of feel like I should love it more, but this bit makes it annoying for me.
It's designed as a reading tablet with good pen support, so yes. And E-ink makes reading more comfortable than LCDs. For technical PDFs, size matters a lot. Normal reading tablets often resize the text to be easily readable, but PDFs cannot do that. So having a tablet of good size becomes a dealbreaker for such use-cases, more so than other features.
Remarkable lacks a backlight, and e-ink displays don't have deep blacks, so depending on your reading environment, it may be a bit low-contrast. I got a kobo elipsa myself for this reason. Kobu is notably cheaper and has a backlight which helps the contrast a bit, but the pen support is waaay worse.
IMHO, it's too small for PDFs. If they offered an 13" / A4 / Letter sized version for a few hundred more, I'd buy it today. Instead I'm using a 13" iPad Pro which has different compromises.
From my past research 13" is the minimum I'd be comfortable with for a tablet that is tailored for research papers. The only one that seemed just right was the Sony DP-1 or (DPT equivalent) though it was around 1000 USD and Windows only compatible (for file sync and what have you).
Kindle Scribe is fine for b/w research papers, while having two paperback book pages side by side in landscape mode (switch to unjustified text with smallest margins, change to size 3 Bookerly text, add a click of line spacing, switch on page numbers instead of location), makes a lovely improvement in book reading.
I know but even moving that to prototype stage this year would be amazing. I’m in no rush just excited, and very prepared to be disappointed by the time estimates
PS Thanks, I was on mobile, I wouldn’t be able to have found the link
It honestly depends on you. I used a Google Nexus 7 as a textbook and paper display during university back in the day and while in some cases you needed to zoom in overall it was fine. I don't have any experience with this remarkable but purely from a screen size perspective, if your eyes are healthy and you're willing it should be fine.
I love my Remarkable, it forces me to stay in creativity mode without jumping to the internet since it doesn't have a browser. That being said, the inability to simply put your own templates in the machine and have them persist through and update is so close to being a showstopper for me that I am not sure I would consider buying a new one.
The RM2 template manager is great, but you have to update your templates after every firmware update and I hate that with a passion!
I have scripted this (well, installation of some systemd units, but the workflow is the same). So I just plug my tablet into my laptop and run my script every time it updates.
It’s not ideal, but not super tedious either.
I’ve been planning to start charging via a raspberry pi so that the pi can automatically tend to the device whenever it’s connected, but haven’t gotten there yet.
Why not script it over ssh (wifi), preference or is not as simple as I imagine? (never used one but the ability to get shell and be able to rsync files is one of the reasons I consider a remarkable).
I could be misinformed though, haven't researched it a lot.
Firmware updates blow away any customizations. So you need to bootstrap things again after each update.
Updates can be deferred, so the process isn’t too disruptive.
Edit: oh, yeah I see what you’re getting at. That direction could work, and I used to do that years ago, as it turns out, but these days I am frequently not on a familiar WiFi network when I’m using the tablet, so cabling has been more practical.
IME IP addresses handed out by my phone’s tethering mode aren’t stable, so it’s sorta more of a hassle than just fishing out the little cable and letting my script run. (The device assigns itself a stable IP address on the USB interface.)
Although I haven’t looked at those addresses in some time; perhaps they are more stable now than they used to be.
It’s easier than that with the remarkable tablet — the device documents its current ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. But it’s several taps away, and then typing on the laptop keyboard, whereas USB is just a connector away. Plus, you need to charge anyways.
Many rM owners (myself included) work around the template limitations by using pdfs as "templates" and writing on them. This covers probably 95% of my use of the device, their notebooks feel very limited by comparison
If you do it this way, can you move pages around within the notebook, across different notebooks, add additional pages, delete pages, change the template for a specific page, etc? Seems like a rather crude workaround
On the reMarkable at least, you can:
* move pages around in the pdf
* add or duplicate pages
* delete pages
You can't:
* move a page to another notebook
* change the template for a page (though you can duplicate a page with that template, and then move it to where the first page was)
There are quite a few samsung pens, which can be but don't need to be charged.
That is, the writing works without charging but "air gestures" etc. additionally work via bluetooth or something and do need additional charging.
That said, due to the fact that it does have an eraser, I would still guess that it is EMR but probably with a softer tip (e.g., the galaxy folds had special pens; other emr pens are "compatible", but might damage the crease, so they are not officially compatible).
E-Inks official specs list the color refresh time as 0.5ms in fast mode, 1 second in standard mode or 1.5 seconds in quality mode. That sounds like it could get annoying when reading full color content (e.g. comics).
At least it's an improvement from Gallery 2 which took 10 seconds to refresh in color mode, no wonder hardly anything ever used that generation...
The main issue I had with my Remarkable 1 was that I couldn't quickly scroll through pages of e-books. If I was looking for something specific in the pages, an ipad allows me to swipe across rapidly. Remarkable was this tedious repeated button press, waiting each time for the screen to refresh. Had to go back to ipad although I loved the device.
Kobo lets you tap and hold a corner (or hold down the page turn button), and after a second it'll start fast-flipping through pages. Not as fast as an iPad but pretty quick, sorta like flipping through a book at a moderate pace.
Both Kobo and Kindle devices allow you to fast scroll page thumbnails, which helps work around the refresh limitations of e-ink. Something like that is still missing from RM's software. You basically have to switch to multi-page view and then scroll that if you want to go quickly through a document.
Onyx BOOX. Set the refresh rate to anything faster than "Normal"/"Regal", and you can page through docs pretty much as fast as you'd care to.
NeoReader (Onyx's book reader app) also has a lightbox / page preview mode where you can see 4, 9, or 16 pages at once. Obviously too small to read at 16 pages up, but good enough to spot figures, diagrams, chapter breaks, and the like. That renders pretty quickly on ePub or generated PDFs, but can be slow on scanned-in books where you're looking at images of text rather than rendered text.
I posted some other comments in this thread - unless they've significantly improved the software in the past year I would 100% recommend against it.
(Also, a lot of manga gets distributed through proprietary apps now so an iPad is probably your best bet anyways, at least if you read the serialized version and not the tankoubon releases...)
129,800 JPY to get one to Japan, vs $749 USD in the US. So just by paying in JPY, I am paying $895.10, so $146.10 more. What gives? That's VERY expensive
10% VAT covers half of it. Possibly tariffs are responsible for some of it, or the difference could be due to strength differences of JPY, USD, and NOK since it's a Norwegian company.
We are talking about e-ink without added edge lighting. I found that if I have to crank up the internal lighting of an e-reader to get adequate contrast, then I may as well use a tablet, because it isn’t reflective illumination anymore to the eye.
It's not really a scam but rather a technology that's still in its infancy. I think of it more like the Palm Treo and Blackberry: they're not great but hopefully we're progressing towards the iPhone. I wouldn't buy one at the moment, though.
Depends what your reference is. E-ink displays without a lot of layers (especially Carta 1250) have pretty good contrast, on par with matte paper. Some devices with a thick frontlight layer and a Wacom layer and a touch layer are less impressive.
My Onyx BOOX has at best a background comparable to very dirty newsprint.
I find myself reading with the frontlight on under most indoors circumstances, unless I'm in direct sunlight. With the frontlight, it's fine. Text may be somewhat more washed out, but that bothers me less than a darkish background.
Under sunlight the contrast is actually about perfect, as white paper tends to be too blindingly bright.
My tablet has several layers: capacitive touch, Wacom, and frontlight, all of which probably contribute to the lower contrast.
Mind: I'm addressing your "bad contrast" question. I find the trade-offs reasonable, and for reading ebooks (as opposed to Web browsing or other app use), the frontlight battery consumption is quite reasonable.
If I'm just using the device casually (e.g., listening to podcasts or checking something quickly) it's fine to use w/o the frontlight, but for immersive reading I'll either have a strong reading light, frontlight, or head for a convenient sunbeam.
In ambient light the contrast is worse on the Daylight than the RM2 - the screen background is quite significantly darker.
However, the Daylight has a backlight which increases the contrast enormously. And it’s usable in the dark which the RM2 is not. The much faster refresh rate also gives it a more fluid feel.
What I didn’t anticipate is the difference the screen makes in how I use and perceive them:
As the RM2 is so simple and static it feels more like a notebook or book reader that happens to be battery powered, whereas the Daylight is definitely a gadget.
I’m more likely to use the RM2 to take notes or do some thinking and the Daylight as something to tinker with.
The remarkable is a lot more like paper and has that simple feel.
Daylight was created for the express purpose of being a portable computer you can use in direct sunlight. It can also just be your notebook but it does so much more than take notes.
I may be a little bit biased but I'd personally prefer a non-laggy device with a little bit worse contrast.
The Daylight screen is _amazing_ for reading technical books. The pen isn't anything special, and I don't like it's thickness, but good enough to get the job done.
Afaik we put the same kind of high polling rate Wacom digitizer that remarkable uses.
Any quirks you notice between it and the daylight would be fascinating to note! Wacom is the most fluid digital pen system on the market from what we could find, especially compared to Ntrig, USI and other approaches.
Also you can use other pens other than the one we included in the box
> Any quirks you notice between it and the daylight would be fascinating to note!
Okay, my Remarkable 2 is currently broken (screen breaks more than I wish. They don't have Apple's level of reliability yet .3rd replacement), so I can't test directly at the moment.
> Also you can use other pens other than the one we included in the box
Oh cool! The pen in box is good enough for me, but now I'm going to look into getting a thin one. Thanks!
The reMarkable has better contrast, viewing angle, and resolution, the Daylight has a far better refresh rate. There are other tradeoffs between them of course, but display-wise, those are the main ones
Between them you can pick between multiple sizes and specs. I haven't tried either, but I have a number of Onyx Boox devices (a Palma phone sized one, and Nova Air small tablet sized one) and I'm very happy with their quality.
I've been happy with my 13.3" Dasung Paperlike HD-FT. I can imagine eventually getting a larger color e-ink monitor for office work, and a smaller one for travel.
Well exactly as expected a colour e-Ink version of Remarkable and a much larger internal storage (64GB) instead of the very low 8GB non-upgradeable storage.
Given it now has Colour e-ink as I said before [0], I will buy one right now.
Looks nice to use to write a note, but horrible to use to store/access existing notes. The file browser should recognise the low refresh rate and use something like column view in Finder, rather than a new window when going 'into' a folder.
Looks neat, but not being able to do something as simple as backup and sync without a monthly subscription makes this whole ecosystem a no go for me. Especially for a device that already costs $600-800.
Did they announce they're locking this new device? I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.
This feels like something some Chinese company can put out at much cheaper price, just a barebones large e-ink tablet, for hackers and tinkerers, with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription, where they just supply the HW and the community on GitHub builds the SW for it, a-la RPi.
Could consider a Kobo Elipsa. (I have a different Kobo device.) It runs some sort of Linux and you can install Koreader and a couple of other things. You can tweak a config file and set up the device without an account. Not sure how the writing experience compares to reMarkable, though (probably not favorably).
It comes from the fact that I'm tired of subscriptions, and some SW being "tailored made" is not always synonymous with very high quality. Community developed FOSS SW can sometimes be better quality and more functional than commercial SW.
For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.
Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.
First of all, you are comparing two desktop environments that have been around for almost the same amount of time. KDE is extremely mature, both because of its age and its popularity. This is not the case with some niche e-ink products.
Secondly, you cannot even remotely compare the software needed for document rendering with the one for hand writing. The former is a very mature ecosystem and you can just write a UI on top of muPDF and port it to your platform to have a feature complete solution. The latter instead requires a wealth of expertise in how humans write and draw to develop both the drivers and the user land applications. Take the Librem phone or the PinePhone as exampleS. it took nothing to port Firefox or GIMP or DOOM to them, and yet the feel of their UI is terrible. Writing your PIN to unlock them lags, inputs are laggy, moving across the UI is slow and buggy. They are worse than the first iphone from almost 20 years ago, even though plenty of good developers have worked on them
Why is it fascinating they suck at it? That's what every monopoly does, rentseek. It's not that they can't do better, it's that's there's no incentive for them to do before. Kind of like Google and their search getting worse and worse.
I do really like Plato for its superior performance and design, but it's lacking in features and documentation at this stage. KOReader feels like a flimsy hack written in lua, mainly because it is, but it does support SSH, two columns, grid view, more flexible gestures and extensions.
The hardware is easy for China, but there is a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, or it exists but is too slow to be usable. If you want to work on that software, then the pinenote is a great deal, order one and get busing writing/optimizing code. If you want a tablet that works the ReMarkable has been around for years.
To be honest (and as a reMarkable 2 owner), the software side of reMarkable isn't a "out of this world" experience, it's basically "just enough" to do it's job but not more than that.
For me, it’s not even enough. My remarkable is sleeping in a drawer.
I totally understand the "it’s just a notebook and nothing else" limitation. Like : ok, you can’t do anything else than using it as a notebook. Why not. It’s how it’s marketed and I bought it for that. My issues comes from the fact that it’s actually a really dumb notebook where it could have been a "better" notebook.
I mean, it’s 2024 and they still don’t allow you to create links between pages.
And the global ergonomics are pretty barebones too. Navigation is slow. Ok, it’s e-ink, e-ink is slow at rendering full pages. So maybe at least don’t make your UX be a succession of screens ? It’s like designers forgot that you can create interfaces that don’t require to redraw the entire screen between each action.
This thing is both a really beautiful and enjoyable object (the writing feeling is truly incredible) and a daily frustration of intentional limitations and laziness.
For those curious, the PineNote is currently $399 + shipping, but out of stock (and has been for some time, not even mentioned on the store home page that includes just about everything else).
As someone who's been following #pinenote for the last ~3 years this isn't true, it's "not dead yet" but Pine64 refuses to ship a second batch until they have a stable community distro to ship pre-flashed. Currently the hardware support itself is sorted, and the desktop integration just needs to be sorted out.
> with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription
I am also not a fan of the subscription model & pricing scheme but I guess that is how they want to pay back their investors. However, besides this they are (relatively speaking) also a pretty open company with a sizable community on github maitaning a lot of custom tools / applications. They do not provide official support for these modifications, but these tablets are definitely not locked-in like an ipad or impossible to tinker with because of obscure undocumented chinese hardware
The reMarkable company has been super adversarial to a lot of these tools, and the file standards and API have been moving goalposts for years. MOST of the tools on that Awesome list are defunct because the primary open source tools for getting data to the reMarkable cloud (rmapi and rmapy) are no longer maintained — the primary maintainers both cite reMarkable's moving target API as the final dealbreaker. SUPER sad.
I've been hoping to write my own now that the dust has settled, but it's definitely a MAJOR project yet to be done by the FOSS community.
I started tinkering with their cloud API and it's not a major work at all to create a client to it, I managed to create a POC uploading and managing files on their cloud in a weekend. I still need to polish it a little bit and make sure I cover all the possible operations but definitely doable.
> I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.
Could you for example mount a NFS or CIFS directory on the LAN, then access .PDFs and documents in other formats without signing to any external service? I was looking for something like that and have been waiting for years for the PineNote to become ready, usable and available, but have given up. Unfortunately all readers out there are tied to this or that cloud service subscription, and I would use them only locally.
(I call them readers because I don't need the note taking feature; being able to place bookmarks would be more than enough)
Probably. One bit of jank is that the rm2 api names pdfs with descriptor ids, and has a custom directory setup to track inking. I’m not sure if it will load ‘named’ pdfs easily or not, but an alt e reader should.
It’s open enough that I ran a Tailscale client node on it for a while. You do get root of a limited but not nerfed Linux machine when you buy one. What you don’t get is any support for maintaining your changes: they wipe most of the os on each update.
If you don’t mind a little bash scripting, I think it would be fairly easy to keep modifications synced up. Upshot : expect friction, not locks.
This is my stance. I'm increasingly just not buying anything that isn't have FOSS. Artificial constraints that try to force a subscription are a hard no.
Good news for you! The ReMarkable is build on Linux and you can direct access to the whole system via SSH!! They even give you the su password so you can do _anything_ you want with it!
You can break the custom integrations that they created or even brick the whole device.
But nothing is stopping you from logging into the system and modifying anything you want. There's actually a whole ecosystem of 3rd party mods and software for the ReMarkable!
You can easily sync your handwritten notes to your computer and phone for free using the app. Once synced, you can back them up with your preferred method. The cloud service is designed to be a convenient, set-it-and-forget-it option.
Asking for a perpetual cloud synchronization at no cost is bold.
Bingo, Boox support WebDAV or FTP file sync and it's a breeze to use. It pains me how much of modern tech doesn't support the very standards half of it's built on. All to moat users into their domain.
Why is there need for their cloud in the first place? I mean if I already own a Google Drive account, why should I need a pair of hands in the midpoint to drag my data around?
The Google drive integration is completely different to the connect one.
It’s not automatic, it’s manual.
It works essentially in the same way that the ‘send to email’ feature works. Which means if you make a change to a file, you have to delete the file on gdrive and reupload it.
Of course it's different. reMarkable are trying to leverage their own solution. It pays for them to make the user journey a little more awkward. But 3rd party integrations still exist and they do still work.
You do know that Apple provides 5GB free cloud synchronization right? And Google also has 15GB free. For those who value convenience this is now table stakes to provide free cloud sync for small amount of data. And frankly 5GB is enough for handwritten notes.
i tried to use it a few months ago for the real time share of the screen. it didn’t work and also the files were not syncing with the service i am paying for. it wanted an update, but the update failed each time.
after digging (which is something i shouldn’t have wasted my time on), it seems that it lost the correct time because i didn’t power it for a while and there was no way to set the time manually. because of that, the signature for validating the firmware update was failing (it uses the time).
there was nothing i could do. it fixed itself few days later, after i gave up.
this is still unpolished so many years after the first release. i’m not sure i would recommend it to anyone. i’m sure i will trust it to work next time i will give it another chance.
Yeah, the subscription and the fact that it can’t handle simple tasks pushed me away from buying the reMarkable 2. I opted for a more convenient tablet instead. Without those features, it’s just a fancy toy that can easily be replaced by a sheet of paper. Plus, it’s heavier and needs more care. Why spend almost a grand on a device when paper does the same job for free?
It’s amazing for reading technical papers, and I can store reams of them on there. Useful to be able to mark them up as I go. Also textbooks. So for me, it ends up being much lighter than what it replaces.
This makes perfect sense. I remember working with a pile of datasheets years ago, but my use cases have changed a lot since then. Now, I can’t find any other purpose for the device besides writing. Even if I cloned myself ten times, I still wouldn’t be able to justify the price tag.
When will someone else make a device with this display? (I'm looking at you Amazon)
Could we get this display in a larger size on a general-purpose tablet w/ stylus? (I still haven't found a replacement for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 and its daylight viewable transflective display)
A smaller size for a cell phone? (with a stylus please)
How about a dual-screen device like to the Lenovo Yogabook which had an e-ink display for the lower half which would toggle between keyboard and other uses?
I'm paying $2.99/month. Got mine last year, and used it, then didn't, and started again earlier this year - was using it daily for about 4-5 months. My daily routines changed and I've not used it as much, but will be picking it up again shortly. Was more for daily journaling and planning, but not as much 'in the workday' use. I think $29/year is an annual plan (looks like a new offering) - I may switch to that.
A feature I was using some is the 'desktop connect' thing - drawing on it is synced to the desktop app pretty much live (<1s delay, ime). Doing a screen share and letting people watch me draw using it has been useful, but not something I need a lot. But... considering some of the discussions I've been having lately, perhaps I do need it more. Trying to get data relationship concepts across to people seems to do better with pictures for some folks.
EDIT: Works fine without it and paid account. I think you even get a small amount of 'sync' data for free if you create an account (5meg or something?). I seem to remember I still had some stuff synced between desktop and device even before paying. I used it for months just as a standalone device with no issues.
The OCR stuff does send the data out to the cloud, and my experience is it's not that great, but my penmanship stinks, so it's more me than it.
I'm a Remarkable 2 owner and yeah, this is a "make or break" feature to even start considering a potential upgrading, but found nothing online about if the Pro version has this or not.
I use it everyday at work (handwritten notes and reviewing short PDFs like resumes and white papers). It’s one of the biggest professional ROI investments that I’ve ever made.
The people who hate the Remarkable seem to be either zealots for openness or people who want to read ebooks on it or people who hate subscriptions. Those 3 things don’t matter to me at all so I’ve been extremely happy.
I had a reMarkable 2 and gave up it almost solely because it didn't support USB mass storage (like Kobo devices do), making it really annoying to transfer files. Also, their software update made the reader worse, since I went from being able to manually crop the page to fit the viewport to having to carefully pinch-zoom with a bunch of latency and really weird sensitivity. And they seem oddly insistent they're not a reading device anyways; if they supported ePub 3 (particularly ePub 3 fixed layout - again, Kobo supports this) that would have made it a nice comics machine, but no. (And their weird web interface choked if you tried to transfer "large" books.)
100K JPY too, which is in the range of an iPad Air. I hope some of these software issues get ironed out and maybe I'll consider it again...
Similar experiences with the reMarkable 1. The USB interface really bugs me. It's nice for annotating and highlighting PDFs, but pretty bad for reading. Great for taking notes, but awful at extracting them, unless you get an expensive subscription to their "cloud" garbage, which feels extortionate considering how expensive the device is.
I've switched to exclusively using SSH on my Kobo, because I find it less effortful. The connection procedure consists of enabling wifi on the Kobo and clicking on the sftp bookmark in my file browser.
What's wrong with the USB web interface of the remarkable, though? It is quite spartan, but I haven't updated mine in ages, so I imagine they have improved it.
The workflow is plug -> web browser -> remarkable IP -> drag and drop.
That's still quite a bit more than just plug -> drag and drop, also especially because sometimes I had to manually bring up the interface, and remember some IP that I might only use every week or two at most. (I guess I could set up a bookmark, sure.) Also, it chokes on large-ish files (it would just never upload, no indication in the UI), so I had to split up books.
Anyways, I think I could have dealt with it if it handled large books fine.
What does the customer gain from having a web interface you have to navigate to by IP rather than a simple external storage device that shows up like a flash drive?
I think one reason for the web interface is that the device stays usable. If it would export a block device then it would need to unmount the file system on itself or at least block changes. If I remember correctly in the old days before MTP, all Android did this, making storage on the device itself unavailable while making it available via USB.
Yeah, that would be an issue with presenting the device as a block storage device.
The web interface also has a couple of other advantages: the tablet simultaneously listens for ssh connections, and can be used over Wi-Fi, IIRC? Though it could also expose a "USB HUB" with both the network interface and block storage.
I just wish we had a more ubiquitous "network file storage" protocol. The tablet itself could offer NFS, but mounting it under different operating systems would be a pain, requiring manual user intervention.
But, afaik, they keep an index and some extra files in their own format to track them [0], so you can't "just" upload the files. You need a tool to do that additional work.
> Remarkable 2 and gave up it almost solely because it didn't support USB mass storage, making it really annoying to transfer files
We had hoped to buy these for all our paperless office employees, and gave it up almost solely because it was far too easy to transfer files.
If they deliver a device with on-device encryption (as this claims) and sync or manual transfer tied (and locked) to company-owned storage, we'd buy them for all our Pro(fessionals).
To your point, instead we give our professionals iPad Air with Paperlike™ for pencil-feel and a keyboard for on-the-go use. We'd rather (for reasons) give them Remarkable Pros if it was capable of meeting Professional data-loss-prevention (DLP) needs.
If you can transfer gigabytes of data with a paper notebook then I’m really impressed! But seriously this is similar to banning usb flash drives and the like, it’s not that unusual.
I used to work at a federal contractor. Any paper you bring to the building /never/ leaves again. I liked to keep notes in a legal pad and would just shred them.
I worked at company that required all paper notebooks to be handed in and destroyed. There are entire companies based on destroying sensitive paper documents.
There are jobs where producing a paper notebook is the primary deliverable. Fewer than there were, due to y'know, computers. But it still happens.
It's odd to describe that as confiscation. A lab notebook belongs to the lab, not the researcher, this is understood by both parties. They may or may not have permission to leave the lab with it, but making personal copies of the pages would be espionage.
It's perfectly reasonable to want comparable properties in a paper-replacing device. I can see where you might find that jarring if you haven't been exposed to work conditions where it's normal and expected.
Not the OP, but eInk tablets are banned at our work for the same reason, and paper notebooks don't get destroyed.
I one of the reasons is it's easier for a malignant actor to get access to notes without you knowing when it's electronic. At least with a paper notebook you can tell if it's missing.
As you see in sibling replies, in many industries where a given hand writable concept has intellectual property value readily assessed in the millions to billions, and/or the deliverable itself may be in written or sketch form, it's quite often true that:
(a) employees aren't allowed to have/use their own paper notebooks in the first place
(b) if they do, then, yes, the notebooks don't leave unless Security reviews (if removal is even allowed)
However, any number of such traditional approaches stop working when remote work is a thing.
Technologies are needed if a firm wishes to retain the same level of awareness of what's happening to its IP while allowing employee flexibility (which, hopefully, firms are learning they should strive to allow).
The DPT-RP1 line was acquired by Fujitsu and is now sold at the Quaderno. The hardware has been updated a bit in the Quaderno Gen 2, including a Wacom digitizer. They're still great devices, and the same open source software for the DPT-RP1 (dpt-rp1-py) works with both Quadernos.
You're linking to dpt-tools. I've never tried that software.
I have a Quaderno Gen 2 and personally use dpt-rp1-py (https://github.com/janten/dpt-rp1-py), so I can confirm that at least it works. (When I first set it up, I had to run the "dptrp1 register" command twice because I got an error message the first time, but that hasn't come up again -- you only have to register it once on a given computer.)
You can see the price on this thing. Large e-ink screens are expensive, colour large e-ink screens even more so. How many people do you think would pay 900EUR+ for a device 2cm larger on each side?
> You cannot sideload any apps, so you are stuck with the defaults, but the most damning thing, is that you cannot sideload PDF files, since the MooInk 2C lacks a PDF rendering engine.
What does the ReMarkable really excel at? You can make notes, but the software is not that great from what I've seen. It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important. You can read PDFs but typing notes is much faster on a desktop/laptop, and for nontechnical books a kindle is much better form factor. You can use it to draw, but e-ink is inferior to a wacom tablet or iPad pro. e-ink is great in bright environments, but in most places where people work that's just not an issue. And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?
It's a cool product but I don't get it. I don't get who needs this.
Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.
> It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important
Don't use the cloud sync and instead manually sync things between your own hardware, encrypt at rest if you feel like it.
> e-ink is great in bright environments [...] And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?
Living in a country with lots of sunlight and as a person who sometimes visits the beach, this is exactly what I want.
One of the main variables I look at when I buy laptops is "How well can I read from the display when I'm in sunlight?", I'm sure I cannot be the only one who likes to sit outside with my computer, or have windows that let in sunlight.
I don’t think anybody gets real work done at the beach, and if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues. And if I have to sync my notes manually it’s easier to use pen and paper and snap a picture afterwards. The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.
> I don’t think anybody gets real work done at the beach
Writing notes is not just about doing "real work"...
> if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues
The ambient brightness does matter, even if you put the laptop in the shade, having anti-glare and a display that works well is really necessary in those cases. If you haven't tried it before, I urge you to try it, because it seemingly works differently than you think.
> The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.
Within your parameters of what "real usage" looks like, then yeah. But if you take a look at the real world, you see there are plenty of use cases.
I learn best via writing things out by hand in my own words, and almost never read the notes afterwards. I am also profoundly disorganized :) Before I got a reMarkable I had accumulated (and thrown out) dozens of bulky paper notebooks. Now those are all digital.
Despite reMarkable's marketing around high-quality hand-drawn professional notes, I suspect crappy "transient" notes to aid memory and mental organization are the most common use case. For me it's really a thinking device rather than a writing device.
If I actually need to reference or organize my notes I will
type something out in emacs.
I find it very useful when doing CAD (with intent to 3D print something). It lets me quickly sketch rough shapes and note measurements I've taken, visualize ideas to show them to colleagues, do geometry "math" with less chance of messing up. Paper would work just fine, I guess, but RM has editing and undo, so reworking large regions doesn't result in attempts of striking out with more ambiguous lines.
So, to generalize, I'd suggest it for people that do bespoke construction of some sort often.
I have the RM2, and my answer to that question is: nothing. Even when handwriting - which is their core feature - the screen is very imprecise at times - up to 1 mm. You can't search in notes, not even after converting them to text.
Anyone that has one of these - does it work with Linux? From Googling it looks like at best it works via wine, but even that is questionable with the latest version. Pretty ready to buy, but this is a pretty big turn off.
I can access my RM2 with SSH via WiFi or USB-C, if that's what you mean. But the official reMarkable client is not available for Linux, which I find a bit odd, since it is a Qt-app and the founder of the company apparently is an avid linux user.
I have got it working via Wine, but it keeps breaking after updates. I do not use it often though, as I mostly just upload new files via the website.
> But the official reMarkable client is not available for Linux, which I find a bit odd, since it is a Qt-app and the founder of the company apparently is an avid linux user.
If I had to guess it's probably because they want to keep it closed-source and that is a nightmare with linux distro packaging. I have also used the tables via the webapp like you for many years.
These days they could package it as a Flatpak and cover a lot of distros with out a lot of duplicate work. I mostly use Flatpak for those types of apps these days.
This is actually ... remarkable in that it uses color particles. From what I know most color E-Ink displays on the market today have b/w particles and a color LCD on top.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadI have a Remarkable 2 and the device is great, software is improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those notes later on is next to impossible.
OCR is very bad and basically makes indexing and full-text searching impossible (and off device)
And no, "labels" do not address this problem.
Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet tries to do and fails? Or is it only trying to OCR after-the-fact, in which case I'm not surprised it's terrible.
Then again, rose colored glasses and all.
Recognition for me was about perfect, and I took notes on my Newton MessagePad using a 3rd party outliner in almost all of my college classes (art history was the exception --- used the main Newton app for that, along w/ little sketches and reference folios to the text which I then faxed to the fax machine in the Art Department's office for a student who had a learning disability which prevented his taking notes --- turns out that he then shared them with everyone in the dorms, which I found out about after the course was over when the professor noted how much better everyone's grades were that year and how she had found out when asking other students.
You can use the OCR feature only in the companion desktop app, explicitly selecting pages you want to run the process on. The result is better than it used to be but still not great and, importantly, it does NOT seem they make any difference if you later on do a search on the device
The search doesn't appear to search across notebooks either.
The experience that I would want (expect) is that OCR happens in the background, all the time, no need to trigger and that I can then search for a word/string and find all the notes on that topic.
I've fallen back to tags and dates in filenames to have any chance of tracking down old meeting notes.
reMarkable does Online Handwriting Recognition with MyScript running in the cloud, not on the tablet https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2
I'd imagine going by stroke order would be a bit tricky since a lot of people don't write the way their teachers taught them to write. (Think anybody with bad handwriting).
I feel like it falls short on the reading side (not searching, dictionary, note management...), and short on the notes side (simple drawing tools, no dashed lines, no shapes, and I think you can't even position text on the wherever you like on the page).
I really liked the initial hackability, as you have SSH access to the Linux inside the device, and people was building software to run on it, but seems like due to some changes since v3.4 of the firmware, it's either very difficult (or not possible) to do it, and the ideas I had for using it aren't feasible right now.
The price for the color model is (at least in Europe) already higher than a Boox Note Air3C, that's a full fledged Android tablet. Of course, the battery won't last as long even with all the optimizations, but is a bit lighter, has more resolution, and you can put whatever software you like that runs in Android. I haven't tested the software, though...
TLDR: not sure about this :(
I’d’ve shelled out $800 first thing this morning for an RM Pro if they added linking across the system.
It’s like an anti-discovery device.
(1) e-ink for both paper-like visual texture (the pixels are not square) and eye comfort (impossible with traditional screens)
(2) single-purpose note-taking without distractions (although some hate that)
(3) paperlike haptic feel (the only thing that can be addressed by screen cover on an ipad)
You can get very close to that by locking your iPad down and setting it in kiosk mode.
If you use Apple Configurator, you can even have it boot into a single app. See https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/apple-configurator-mac...
(3) is mostly matter of choice, and it's a feel of matte plastic, very far from actual paper.
(2) is the only reason I'm using it. It's thin (although not as thin as a piece of paper) and single-purpose, a physical product.
I guess I should also have added (4) this tablet is a lifestyle and fashion statement about having the disposable income to use it instead of an actual high-quality paper notebook.
I use iPad for some note taking (or rather, presentation planning). The responsiveness is good. I can’t deal with any lag in these devices so have never felt the need to try remarkable. Stuff like the surface work well when it’s the high end models but then you’re paying the same price as an iPad anyways!
I have an e-ink tablet, the Boox Note Air 3 C, when I use it as an ereader or notetaker the battery lasts for weeks. A little less when I use it for web browsing or apps that change the content on the screen a lot.
The paper-feel comes in large part from the physical part of the screen the pen touches not from the display itself.
The person I was replying to thought it had entirely to do with the viewing experience which I don’t believe to be true.
It has nothing to do with E-ink, but about how it feels to write on the Remarkable display with the pen.
Also paperlike film for iPad significantly degrades the screen, making it darker and grainy. It's still a better all-around device, but its really not as good as these eInk tablets for writing.
So any suggestions here?
I'm really looking forward to installing Zed on this thing!
I miss an API to their cloud storage. It is simply a dealbreaker that it aims to help avoiding distractions but leaves no room for building an automated workflow around it.
But writing is where you notice how small the screen really is.
It’s down to the size difference between printed text and handwriting.
So I sort of feel like I should love it more, but this bit makes it annoying for me.
Remarkable lacks a backlight, and e-ink displays don't have deep blacks, so depending on your reading environment, it may be a bit low-contrast. I got a kobo elipsa myself for this reason. Kobu is notably cheaper and has a backlight which helps the contrast a bit, but the pen support is waaay worse.
It still says this year!! :fingers-crossed:
For those not in the know, here's the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Supernote/comments/rxddxj/some_info...
PS Thanks, I was on mobile, I wouldn’t be able to have found the link
I'm particularly interested in refresh latency and color gamut. You can get a feel for these here.
Afaik, e-ink screens don't use any energy to display, but only to refresh.
It’s not ideal, but not super tedious either.
I’ve been planning to start charging via a raspberry pi so that the pi can automatically tend to the device whenever it’s connected, but haven’t gotten there yet.
I could be misinformed though, haven't researched it a lot.
Updates can be deferred, so the process isn’t too disruptive.
Edit: oh, yeah I see what you’re getting at. That direction could work, and I used to do that years ago, as it turns out, but these days I am frequently not on a familiar WiFi network when I’m using the tablet, so cabling has been more practical.
Although I haven’t looked at those addresses in some time; perhaps they are more stable now than they used to be.
You can't: * move a page to another notebook * change the template for a page (though you can duplicate a page with that template, and then move it to where the first page was)
This may be the first legitimate color e-ink tablet with good (EMR; see: S-Pen, Wacom, old style Thinkpad) pen input.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uyh6KSYVJ4
Perhaps something from the Universal Stylus Initiative?
https://universalstylus.org/
That said, due to the fact that it does have an eraser, I would still guess that it is EMR but probably with a softer tip (e.g., the galaxy folds had special pens; other emr pens are "compatible", but might damage the crease, so they are not officially compatible).
At least it's an improvement from Gallery 2 which took 10 seconds to refresh in color mode, no wonder hardly anything ever used that generation...
NeoReader (Onyx's book reader app) also has a lightbox / page preview mode where you can see 4, 9, or 16 pages at once. Obviously too small to read at 16 pages up, but good enough to spot figures, diagrams, chapter breaks, and the like. That renders pretty quickly on ePub or generated PDFs, but can be slow on scanned-in books where you're looking at images of text rather than rendered text.
(Also, a lot of manga gets distributed through proprietary apps now so an iPad is probably your best bet anyways, at least if you read the serialized version and not the tankoubon releases...)
EPUB rendering is slow the first time you open it, and notes and highlights get lost when you change text size.
On the other hand, PDF rendering is excellent. I make it a point to buy PDF versions of ebooks and have had no issues using it like that.
I find myself reading with the frontlight on under most indoors circumstances, unless I'm in direct sunlight. With the frontlight, it's fine. Text may be somewhat more washed out, but that bothers me less than a darkish background.
Under sunlight the contrast is actually about perfect, as white paper tends to be too blindingly bright.
My tablet has several layers: capacitive touch, Wacom, and frontlight, all of which probably contribute to the lower contrast.
Mind: I'm addressing your "bad contrast" question. I find the trade-offs reasonable, and for reading ebooks (as opposed to Web browsing or other app use), the frontlight battery consumption is quite reasonable.
If I'm just using the device casually (e.g., listening to podcasts or checking something quickly) it's fine to use w/o the frontlight, but for immersive reading I'll either have a strong reading light, frontlight, or head for a convenient sunbeam.
In ambient light the contrast is worse on the Daylight than the RM2 - the screen background is quite significantly darker.
However, the Daylight has a backlight which increases the contrast enormously. And it’s usable in the dark which the RM2 is not. The much faster refresh rate also gives it a more fluid feel.
What I didn’t anticipate is the difference the screen makes in how I use and perceive them:
As the RM2 is so simple and static it feels more like a notebook or book reader that happens to be battery powered, whereas the Daylight is definitely a gadget.
I’m more likely to use the RM2 to take notes or do some thinking and the Daylight as something to tinker with.
The remarkable is a lot more like paper and has that simple feel.
Daylight was created for the express purpose of being a portable computer you can use in direct sunlight. It can also just be your notebook but it does so much more than take notes.
I may be a little bit biased but I'd personally prefer a non-laggy device with a little bit worse contrast.
To each their own!
Remarkable screen and pen latency is much better.
I hope they both succeed. Both awesome. I'll probably get this new Remarkable as well.
(That being said, I use my pen and paper bullet journal ($30) more than both of these combined).
Here is a photo I took from earlier this week: http://hub.scroll.pub/daylight2/
Any quirks you notice between it and the daylight would be fascinating to note! Wacom is the most fluid digital pen system on the market from what we could find, especially compared to Ntrig, USI and other approaches.
Also you can use other pens other than the one we included in the box
Okay, my Remarkable 2 is currently broken (screen breaks more than I wish. They don't have Apple's level of reliability yet .3rd replacement), so I can't test directly at the moment.
> Also you can use other pens other than the one we included in the box
Oh cool! The pen in box is good enough for me, but now I'm going to look into getting a thin one. Thanks!
The reMarkable has better contrast, viewing angle, and resolution, the Daylight has a far better refresh rate. There are other tradeoffs between them of course, but display-wise, those are the main ones
* Onyx Boox Mira and Mira Pro: https://shop.boox.com/products/mira
* Dasung Paperlike Monitors: https://shop.dasung.com/
Between them you can pick between multiple sizes and specs. I haven't tried either, but I have a number of Onyx Boox devices (a Palma phone sized one, and Nova Air small tablet sized one) and I'm very happy with their quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_compliance
Given it now has Colour e-ink as I said before [0], I will buy one right now.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295884
For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.
Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.
First of all, you are comparing two desktop environments that have been around for almost the same amount of time. KDE is extremely mature, both because of its age and its popularity. This is not the case with some niche e-ink products.
Secondly, you cannot even remotely compare the software needed for document rendering with the one for hand writing. The former is a very mature ecosystem and you can just write a UI on top of muPDF and port it to your platform to have a feature complete solution. The latter instead requires a wealth of expertise in how humans write and draw to develop both the drivers and the user land applications. Take the Librem phone or the PinePhone as exampleS. it took nothing to port Firefox or GIMP or DOOM to them, and yet the feel of their UI is terrible. Writing your PIN to unlock them lags, inputs are laggy, moving across the UI is slow and buggy. They are worse than the first iphone from almost 20 years ago, even though plenty of good developers have worked on them
OTOH Kobo's Epub reader is very nice, if you convert your books to kepub – use callibre.
The hardware is easy for China, but there is a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, or it exists but is too slow to be usable. If you want to work on that software, then the pinenote is a great deal, order one and get busing writing/optimizing code. If you want a tablet that works the ReMarkable has been around for years.
I totally understand the "it’s just a notebook and nothing else" limitation. Like : ok, you can’t do anything else than using it as a notebook. Why not. It’s how it’s marketed and I bought it for that. My issues comes from the fact that it’s actually a really dumb notebook where it could have been a "better" notebook.
I mean, it’s 2024 and they still don’t allow you to create links between pages.
And the global ergonomics are pretty barebones too. Navigation is slow. Ok, it’s e-ink, e-ink is slow at rendering full pages. So maybe at least don’t make your UX be a succession of screens ? It’s like designers forgot that you can create interfaces that don’t require to redraw the entire screen between each action.
This thing is both a really beautiful and enjoyable object (the writing feeling is truly incredible) and a daily frustration of intentional limitations and laziness.
https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/
I'll be first in line to buy when they do a second batch.
For completely OSS, pine64 pinenote.
I am also not a fan of the subscription model & pricing scheme but I guess that is how they want to pay back their investors. However, besides this they are (relatively speaking) also a pretty open company with a sizable community on github maitaning a lot of custom tools / applications. They do not provide official support for these modifications, but these tablets are definitely not locked-in like an ipad or impossible to tinker with because of obscure undocumented chinese hardware
https://github.com/reMarkable
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
I've been hoping to write my own now that the dust has settled, but it's definitely a MAJOR project yet to be done by the FOSS community.
Could you for example mount a NFS or CIFS directory on the LAN, then access .PDFs and documents in other formats without signing to any external service? I was looking for something like that and have been waiting for years for the PineNote to become ready, usable and available, but have given up. Unfortunately all readers out there are tied to this or that cloud service subscription, and I would use them only locally. (I call them readers because I don't need the note taking feature; being able to place bookmarks would be more than enough)
It’s open enough that I ran a Tailscale client node on it for a while. You do get root of a limited but not nerfed Linux machine when you buy one. What you don’t get is any support for maintaining your changes: they wipe most of the os on each update.
If you don’t mind a little bash scripting, I think it would be fairly easy to keep modifications synced up. Upshot : expect friction, not locks.
You can break the custom integrations that they created or even brick the whole device.
But nothing is stopping you from logging into the system and modifying anything you want. There's actually a whole ecosystem of 3rd party mods and software for the ReMarkable!
Edit: here's one of the big sites for 3rd party software for the remarkable https://toltec-dev.org
Edit2: Here's someone running doom on the RM https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/gkktxy/de...
Asking for a perpetual cloud synchronization at no cost is bold.
Nobody is asking for a free sync server.
Remarkable supports Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive integrations.
I use the Google Drive integration regularly.
It’s not automatic, it’s manual.
It works essentially in the same way that the ‘send to email’ feature works. Which means if you make a change to a file, you have to delete the file on gdrive and reupload it.
It's capitalism, baby!
For fairness, I bought a Remarkable 2 and works fine, but I do not use it anymore because it does not fit my needs.
after digging (which is something i shouldn’t have wasted my time on), it seems that it lost the correct time because i didn’t power it for a while and there was no way to set the time manually. because of that, the signature for validating the firmware update was failing (it uses the time).
there was nothing i could do. it fixed itself few days later, after i gave up.
this is still unpolished so many years after the first release. i’m not sure i would recommend it to anyone. i’m sure i will trust it to work next time i will give it another chance.
How well does the machine work w/o it?
When will someone else make a device with this display? (I'm looking at you Amazon)
Could we get this display in a larger size on a general-purpose tablet w/ stylus? (I still haven't found a replacement for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 and its daylight viewable transflective display)
A smaller size for a cell phone? (with a stylus please)
How about a dual-screen device like to the Lenovo Yogabook which had an e-ink display for the lower half which would toggle between keyboard and other uses?
A feature I was using some is the 'desktop connect' thing - drawing on it is synced to the desktop app pretty much live (<1s delay, ime). Doing a screen share and letting people watch me draw using it has been useful, but not something I need a lot. But... considering some of the discussions I've been having lately, perhaps I do need it more. Trying to get data relationship concepts across to people seems to do better with pictures for some folks.
EDIT: Works fine without it and paid account. I think you even get a small amount of 'sync' data for free if you create an account (5meg or something?). I seem to remember I still had some stuff synced between desktop and device even before paying. I used it for months just as a standalone device with no issues.
The OCR stuff does send the data out to the cloud, and my experience is it's not that great, but my penmanship stinks, so it's more me than it.
I use it everyday at work (handwritten notes and reviewing short PDFs like resumes and white papers). It’s one of the biggest professional ROI investments that I’ve ever made.
The people who hate the Remarkable seem to be either zealots for openness or people who want to read ebooks on it or people who hate subscriptions. Those 3 things don’t matter to me at all so I’ve been extremely happy.
Not a programming job but I do a few hours of coding a week for work — generally building internal tools to improve processes.
100K JPY too, which is in the range of an iPad Air. I hope some of these software issues get ironed out and maybe I'll consider it again...
The workflow is plug -> web browser -> remarkable IP -> drag and drop.
Anyways, I think I could have dealt with it if it handled large books fine.
The web interface also has a couple of other advantages: the tablet simultaneously listens for ssh connections, and can be used over Wi-Fi, IIRC? Though it could also expose a "USB HUB" with both the network interface and block storage.
I just wish we had a more ubiquitous "network file storage" protocol. The tablet itself could offer NFS, but mounting it under different operating systems would be a pain, requiring manual user intervention.
I use RCU [1] for that.
We had hoped to buy these for all our paperless office employees, and gave it up almost solely because it was far too easy to transfer files.
If they deliver a device with on-device encryption (as this claims) and sync or manual transfer tied (and locked) to company-owned storage, we'd buy them for all our Pro(fessionals).
To your point, instead we give our professionals iPad Air with Paperlike™ for pencil-feel and a keyboard for on-the-go use. We'd rather (for reasons) give them Remarkable Pros if it was capable of meeting Professional data-loss-prevention (DLP) needs.
For a science/engineering firm, this sort of arrangement isn't uncommon, because stuff you do in the lab leads to customer deliverables.
Of course, people can also do things electronically, which they increasingly do.
People are talking about their experience in sensitive areas, and so restrictions on devices you can bring in/out is fairly typical.
It's odd to describe that as confiscation. A lab notebook belongs to the lab, not the researcher, this is understood by both parties. They may or may not have permission to leave the lab with it, but making personal copies of the pages would be espionage.
It's perfectly reasonable to want comparable properties in a paper-replacing device. I can see where you might find that jarring if you haven't been exposed to work conditions where it's normal and expected.
I one of the reasons is it's easier for a malignant actor to get access to notes without you knowing when it's electronic. At least with a paper notebook you can tell if it's missing.
(a) employees aren't allowed to have/use their own paper notebooks in the first place
(b) if they do, then, yes, the notebooks don't leave unless Security reviews (if removal is even allowed)
However, any number of such traditional approaches stop working when remote work is a thing.
Technologies are needed if a firm wishes to retain the same level of awareness of what's happening to its IP while allowing employee flexibility (which, hopefully, firms are learning they should strive to allow).
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/design/stories/DPT-RP1/
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/sony-digital...
I've been following this issue[1] on GitHub that seems to suggest people are still holding out for a solution.
[1] https://github.com/HappyZ/dpt-tools/issues/181
I have a Quaderno Gen 2 and personally use dpt-rp1-py (https://github.com/janten/dpt-rp1-py), so I can confirm that at least it works. (When I first set it up, I had to run the "dptrp1 register" command twice because I got an error message the first time, but that hasn't come up again -- you only have to register it once on a given computer.)
It's a cool product but I don't get it. I don't get who needs this.
Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.
> It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important
Don't use the cloud sync and instead manually sync things between your own hardware, encrypt at rest if you feel like it.
> e-ink is great in bright environments [...] And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?
Living in a country with lots of sunlight and as a person who sometimes visits the beach, this is exactly what I want.
One of the main variables I look at when I buy laptops is "How well can I read from the display when I'm in sunlight?", I'm sure I cannot be the only one who likes to sit outside with my computer, or have windows that let in sunlight.
Writing notes is not just about doing "real work"...
> if you like to work outside you can use a laptop in the shade without issues
The ambient brightness does matter, even if you put the laptop in the shade, having anti-glare and a display that works well is really necessary in those cases. If you haven't tried it before, I urge you to try it, because it seemingly works differently than you think.
> The use-cases for this tablet seem contrived to me.
Within your parameters of what "real usage" looks like, then yeah. But if you take a look at the real world, you see there are plenty of use cases.
Awful/barely functioning OCR kind of eliminates one of the main advantages it could have over paper notebooks, search and indexing, though.
Despite reMarkable's marketing around high-quality hand-drawn professional notes, I suspect crappy "transient" notes to aid memory and mental organization are the most common use case. For me it's really a thinking device rather than a writing device.
If I actually need to reference or organize my notes I will type something out in emacs.
However it would be good if it OCR'ed in the background and created a searchable index.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
So, to generalize, I'd suggest it for people that do bespoke construction of some sort often.
I have the RM2, and my answer to that question is: nothing. Even when handwriting - which is their core feature - the screen is very imprecise at times - up to 1 mm. You can't search in notes, not even after converting them to text.
I have got it working via Wine, but it keeps breaking after updates. I do not use it often though, as I mostly just upload new files via the website.
If I had to guess it's probably because they want to keep it closed-source and that is a nightmare with linux distro packaging. I have also used the tables via the webapp like you for many years.
It's not an LCD on top, it's just a static stained-glass checkerboard pattern.