I have been contemplating buying a ReMarkable 2 as I prefer to handwrite everything/annotate/. The price tag is a bit hefty given the cost of an iPad and pencil and the zillion other things it does.
I'm curious if you are indeed going to buy one?
The reMarkable hardware is nice, but its stock software is frankly disappointing. The hackability is a "plus", but I don't want to have to resort to unsupported firmware tweaks to fix a $500 device.
Specific feedback:
* Zooming is incredibly coarse. There is no pinch zoom, only a button in the UI that jumps in intervals of 100% or more. On many of my documents it goes from slightly too small to WAY too big with no level in between
* Speaking of zooming, the pen controls overlay the document, often blocking parts of the text. There is no way to scale the document to fit in the remaining space. There's not even a way to have the button backgrounds be transparent so you could still read most of the text.
* It doesn't support in-document hyperlinks in PDF or ePub, so your table of contents and index are worthless.
* If you somehow know what page you want to jump to, that's buried two menus deep and frustrating to get to
* Search is very slow in large (100+ page) documents, and results trickle in gradually so you can never be quite sure when you're looking at the whole list. Given that one of my desired uses for the device is to carry around some PDF textbook-style references, this hurts.
* You can't change the default writing utensil, so if you don't like the grainy mid-width pencil you have to change it every single time you open a new document
* There's no pressure sensitivity in the pen
* The eraser works like a pencil eraser, not a digital one. There is no way to erase a stroke, so you'll inevitably erase more than you want to and have to redraw some of it
The actual drawing and doodling is nice, but there are a number of issues.
First the cloud/sync software will happily let you add lots of ebooks/comics to transfer (I have a couple of comic bundles from humble bundle I've yet to read). The end result is that the disk fills up, and the on-device file manager is anemic and slow. Not only is there no discernable way to clear the sync queue (so as you free up space it gets filled again..) - even if you can sort by file size, you can't actually list file size.
I had hoped to use it, beyond comics, for technical books - but both zoom and reflow of text, and font selection is poor for both Pdf and epub.
Then finally, I had hope it would work for viewing Pdf rpg rulebook - but it chokes pretty badly (on the admittedly quite horrible) white wolf mage 20th book for example.
And to add insult to injury the built in Pdf reader can't be used with the interactive (Pdf form) character sheets.
It can read a "printed" version and allows doodling on top - so it's not all lost. But the end result isn't machine readable, so you're almost better off with a paper sheet anyway.
Finally, reading a standard epub (like "The Star's my Destination") is painful because the limited font/margin/reflow, and the sluggish response for turning pages (a hw button would've helped here). In the end, my aging huawei phone [1] with oled display set to night mode is a better book reading experience both in Kindle and FBreader.
But again, the doodling is pretty good, and the screen is crisp - so I hope something can be done via software. Maybe even just adding a djvu-reader and do the conversion off device if the cpu is truly as underpowered for Pdf as it appears.
[1] p20 pro (wow, it really is a 2018 phone - thought it was older..) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20
* PDF annotations are automatically flattened, so you can't browse them separately or easily extract them on a computer
* sync is terribly, agonizingly, slow and unreliable
The specific points of feedback you have are common with the v1 device. With the exception of pressure sensitivity. The pen for the v1 device was pressure sensitive. Has that been removed? Of the other points, the only one that I've found really bothers me is being unable to change the default writing implement.
I wouldn’t compare it to an iPad. This is much more tuned to helping you think - no notifications whatsoever, no web browser to offer opportunities to do something else. Or, put another way, the fact that it doesn’t do a zillion things is a good thing if your goal is to be able to think deeply.
Kind of like how some writers use ancient equipment that doesn’t connect to the internet to get their writing done.
I've had mine for about 4 weeks now, and I'm still consistently using it every day.
It's fantastic for planning, diagramming (I use this to capture measurements and dimensions for items I'm going to be making in CAD software), getting signed forms, taking notes, and sketching.
The hardware is delightful, even for left-handed folks like myself, where other tablets often make erroneous marks where my hand is resting.
Now, all that said, the software can still come along way. My single biggest gripe is that I haven't found a way to search for text within notes. I'd really love to have an option to automatically convert handwriting to text on save/close and keep that around as meta data for searching.
I may play with implementing it at some point - A large part of the reason I bought the device was because of the open ecosystem. I do software dev for a living, and knowing that I can get into the device as root and muck around REALLY makes it feel like it's mine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/jt41e1/my_max_lu...
Having a Laptop + ereader setup would probably be a mess to set up with the cut+paste stuff. If e-Ink reference materials is your use case I'd probably suggest instead that you either get one of the Boox models that has HDMI in (Max Lumi does) or if you have $ to spend, get the Dasung e-Ink monitor instead, and use it as a 2nd monitor for your laptop. That would be much easier to cut and paste between your coding environment and reference materials.
(Also, Boox tablets aren't easily rootable so auto-inputting stuff into apps isn't easy. You could solve that by building a virtual bluetooth or USB keyboard with an Arduino that your laptop controls, though.)
the cut and paste stuff would definitely be messy but autoinput works without needing root so the only thing i need to figure out is how to transfer the text to tasker. probably something like 'join' would do the job
- Matte screen protector + pencil means reading/writing experience feels just as good as an eink.
- It can comfortably handle large, color PDFs. Other solutions either don't have color, or don't have processors powerful enough to handle rendering large PDFs anyways.
- Both iPad and Remarkable have almost identical pixels per inch - 224 and 226 ppi.
- iPad has polished reader apps. My favorite is Kybook3, which supports auto trimming PDF margins & horizontal scroll locking which makes it super convenient to read PDFs. It can also read epubs and other formats with plenty of knobs to tweak background colors, fonts etc. I don't think the Remarkable is quite there yet.
- Reading, researching frequently means looking something up on the web as you go too. Again difficult to do on a remarkable.
The iPad can potentially be more distracting, but that can be solved by setting it up right IMO. I don't install any TV/Media/News/Games apps on it, turn off notifications for most apps and have a shortcut to limit the colors to black and white.
Duet display (the original app which Apple Sherlocked with Sidecar) supports Windows 10, but as far as I know, if you want to do this on Linux, you're out of luck.
- it looks and feels like paper. No glowing screen, textured surface, it just feels like writing with a pen.
- the always-on display. I use the ReMarkable as my notebook while working and can have it in front of my all day long. You still can see the screen content when it goes to sleep after 20 minutes (sleep can be deactivated) and you can even have it preserve the content when it switches off after 3 hours. So you keep your notes in view. With the iPad, it turns itself off quickly and of course uses way more power.
- overall I think it has the better design for this purpose than the iPad, I have the book-like cover and love it.
- hackability. I need to learn more about that, but you can ssh into it and have a normal linux shell. Try that with an iPad :p. It seems to be very easy to cross compile Go programs for the ReMarkable.
If you're not excited about the very limited feature-set, or because it's hackable, I'd pretty strongly recommend looking elsewhere. Much more user-friendly devices exist at similar prices, but they're locked down / run android (so less battery life, various android benefits and issues) / not as thin.