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Comment by ahmedbaracat | Hacker News Reader

I am considering getting a Remarkable tablet just to be able to have the best of both worlds: hand writing and searching. Has anyone used Remarkable extensively and want to share their experience?

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I use the Remarkable. I love it for marking up documents and writing brief notes/sketches. Also (you may already know this if you've researched it) it exposes ssh and you can get root, so you can pretty much put any program you want on it. I've used https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable to write some basic apps for it.

One thing I'll note is that the hand-writing -> text converter never really worked that well for me. I have messy handwriting so YMMV. I would still recommend it, but if that's the killer feature for you it's something to keep in mind

I'll second this; I love mine, but have written off OCR and searchability completely.

I bought it to be an e-reader, but ended up taking a ton of notes in it. I have notebooks for projects, for recurring meetings, a single-page "task list" and a page-per-week notebook tracking what I plan to do, what I did, and what I learned, which I use to inform my part of weekly standup meetings.

I prefer to keep most notes ephemeral; if it matters, I should be transcribing it elsewhere (preferably to something typed; I have some shame about my handwriting quality). I do keep all past weeks of my standup notes, and I expect to draw on them heavily to inform performance reviews and promotions, but I can go through them in order, so even there searchability is not a big loss.

It's good to see someone mention they use it and they're happy with it. The aggressive marketing they do kind of puts me off, coupled with the fact that they just released the ReMarkable recently and are already taking pre-orders for the version 2 later this year?

I've been thinking about getting an iPad to take notes on, but I see the ReMarkable tablet pop up all the time (thanks to their marketing, I guess it's working), have you tried taking notes on something else?

I'm mainly just thinking that if I'm getting a tablet for notes, should I get one that's practically _only_ for taking notes (ReMarkable) or one that has much more functionality (iPad). I guess that also depends a little bit on the "syncability", does the ReMarkable have integrations to sync notes and documents to third party services or do they roll their own thing?

I had one preordered, but I cancelled my order once I got a Rocketbook. I usually phone-scan everything from the previous day the following morning. Their handwriting transcription is 98% accurate for my handwriting and the process of checking for and fixing errors helps remind me of what I’d just written. Then it all goes into either a text file or, more recently, WorkFlowy. I even can handwrite Markdown and use hashtags for searching later. Best of both worlds for me.

I currently have the remarkable V1 and have used it "extensively" (211 pages in 19 notebooks, plus 10 books like PHB 5e, CISSP guide book, and various other nerd things and white papers). I am super happy with the product as it solved my use case of wanting to keep my notes handwritten yet on my person without having to carry around multiple notebooks. I also love the fact that I can have a notebook that goes from us legal lined paper background to large grid background, and back multiple times.

It's PDF capabilities are fine, and you can write on the pages which is nice, but I've not really tried to access any of these notes outside of the device. The did roll their own cloud sync capabilities though so you can use their apps on devices for that. There's also the 3rd party options that exist for that too.

As mentioned by jagraff they expose ssh and allow you to login as root. The whole device is a linux machine so if you want to setup syncthing to run on it you can[1]. If you want something else like zotero, or google drive, I suggest checking their wiki[2] and the github repos[3] dedicated to curating some of the stuff written for it

TLDR; Super happy with remarkable v1. So happy pre ordered V2. It gives you root on a linux box.

[1]: https://github.com/evidlo/remarkable_syncthing

[2]: https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start

[3]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

I'm also curious to know if anyone has used the Remarkable in depth, especially with their second model coming out. From what I've read it seems like it has some limitations, but it seems like if it was a bit cheaper it'd be a great buy.

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