The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
hanselman.com
hanselman.com
The problem keeps coming back to the fact that I'm absolutely not the type of person who wants to carry that thing around everywhere and who likes or is good at hand writing or drawing. I realize I won't base all my life and processes around this one device that is also supposedly hard to get info off of easily into things like OneNote. If I was somewhere without a computer, then I wouldn't be carrying this big tablet on me. I've bought enough tablets and laptops with writable screens and MS surfaces over the years to know that I still never drew or took notes with the pen, but I still keep buying them hoping I will.
The thing is still so cool and I want it, but maybe I'll wait for version 3 or 4 and extra disposable income that will go to waste on it!
That said, a couple big advantages I haven’t seen advertised:
- I don’t have a dozen notebooks around, just one - easy to start a new notebook, plus the centralization, is sort of an “organized by default” mode - I can’t take notes on my computer, so it’s either this or paper - distraction free is good, and the physicality of the pen and screen is a much better experience than an iPad
Your other criticisms are valid and a little too accurate. It’s still a useful device, there’s just a bit of a premium price because of the fancy factors you discussed.
This is a low-commitment device that still achieves half the benefits of really writing things down.
The effects of pulling out a notepad and jotting notes are markedly different than pulling out a phone or tablet- especially in a conversation or meeting. IME a phone signals disengagement, while a notepad signals the opposite. When I pulled out my pad, I could see body language and word choices change almost immediately. If it was a positive or neutral conversation, people tended to show appreciation for my interest in what was being said. If it was a negative interaction, people started to be much more careful about what they were saying.
Now I carry an attaché case and use larger, more professional looking, notebooks. Even in the age of Zoom, I angle my camera to ensure it’s obvious I’m taking notes. Sure, it’s an extra step to digitize the important stuff, but I think it’s worth it.
Thing is:
* My handwriting sucks (I literally can't read my own; I'm 42yo - don't tell me to practice / it'll improve, just don't be that arrogant ignoramus ;).
* I'll never be organized on paper. Ever. My circles are potatoes, my lines are squiggles, and everything is all over the place and disheartening to read (I love whiteboards but it's a whole other thing, somehow)
* I love love love my typed notes. I can type fast and asynchronously while I listen and look at the speaker. I can search them, retain them, review them, summarize them.
But I'm aware that I'll always look disengaged on my laptop compared to somebody with their notebook :-/
I don't think there is anything equivalent on the Remarkable, I think the idea is handwriting then if you need you can OCR it.
I would definitely work better with Graffiti-style input rather than full writing recognition; but:
a) I am a dorky minority - pretty much always a negative focus group for these things :P
b) even for me it's not ideal and modern lightweight laptops are a better solution -- I type at speed of speech these days; I don't think I could ever write / squiggle that fast.
2011 Every senior manager brings an iPad to meetings and seem to get distracted.
2015 (Tech co) Everybody brings an MacBook Air or a MacBook pro to every meeting
2018 (Entertainment Co) Any electronic device is considered disrespectful in a meeting, especially phones.
I normally make notes on paper and use the computer to fact check myself and the conversation (where it matters). It makes everything waay faster.
I've similarly noticed that interacting with someone wearing a bluetooth headset or smart glasses is off-putting no matter how much they indicate they are paying attention and not watching or listening to something I can't see.
Like you, I prefer to type my notes. I've found that angling the screen down so that I can't see it either and then maintaining normal eye contact with everyone makes the problem mostly go away. Possibly because I'm not constantly breaking eye contact to furtively glance at a glowing screen that they can't see. Or possibly because I wasn't paying as much attention as I felt like I was -- there is some research that indicates that people who can see a screen or TV while they are accomplishing a task often significantly underestimate how much time they spent looking at it and how much it negatively impacted their task performance.
* Remarkable's handwriting recognition is some of the best I've seen (but that's a low bar). Works well even on doctor chicken scratch but it's tied to their cloud stuff. The calligraphy pen setting helps with the aesthetics of bad hand writing
* This is why the remarkable has been a game changer for me. The pen selection tool allows me to draw an arbitrary shape and selects all strokes that fall within it. I can then drag or copy/cut/paste the selection, which I use all the time to rearrange my diagrams and copy/paste bits that I draw with a straightedge as a template. The big missing pieces are shape drawing tools and an infinite canvas so you can infinite scroll to the sides to keep drawing but with pinch to zoom, I usually just zoom way into a page when I open a notebook i know is going to be huge. Even zoomed out the resolution on the display makes it really readable (I can barely identify individual "pixels" with a 10x loupe)
* If the process of hand drawing/writing/annotating doesn't appeal to you or help with retention, the remarkable 2 is a really expensive ebook reader... with ssh.
Plus Koreader itself is in Lua and is relatively easy to make changes to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELXnytHZY2c
It seems Note Air has potential but is not priced well. You might think reMarkable 2 is also expensive, but with Note Air you have to buy additional stylus too. The video above shows how Note Air works with reMarkable 2 Marker and Staedtler stylus.
I personally think if latency and price would get solved, Note Air has much more potential than rM2. I couldn't believe they actually put a lot of thought into designing the software that run Note Air, but the guy in the video explains things in detail.
I think that is like wearable computing input devices such as the Twiddler keyboard: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=twiddler2&iax=images&ia=ima... and the DataEgg was intended to hold notes inside it and be a standalone device.
Related, the classic MicroWriter AgendA which was a PDA with chording and normal keyboards from the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MicroWriter,_AgendA,_and_...
I think it should be possible to build that pattern into a multitouch web page on a tablet and take chording notes on a flat screen.
I am close to 40, 2 - 3 years ago, I re-practiced handwriting with my daughter who wanted to learn (out of school) writing. To my surprise, my handwriting did improve and I was actually surprised by the result (cursive, I am French), hers was miles ahead of mine but really I was damn surprised by how effective it was.
I used to have teachers that refused to correct my copies because of my handwriting, so it's never too late.
|Disengaged <----------------> Engaged|
|Phone Laptop Pen/Paper|
On a side-note, I do this on video calls too, keeping the window near where the camera is located so that there is still eye contact.
Even if some of my notes are difficult (or even impossible) to read, it's still sufficient to help remember what I felt so notable that I wrote it down.
I realize that everyone's not the same, but studies have shown that writing leads to better conceptual recall (but typing tends to record more information)
Wwwwwwwww
Wwwwwwwww
...etc
At the shops, I have no idea but she knows what she wrote.
I think it’s intentional.
We’re being tested somehow...
(I particularly like, when I’m sent to the store, reading “Wwwwwwwww” followed by a legible “etc.”)
ProTip: always bring home some flowers; it seems to distract them.
You can even half-close the lid to make it completely obvious the only thing you could be doing is typing notes.
The notes might come out a bit messy, but you can clean them up later.
[^1] - https://www.tapwithus.com/
I also wish they allowed using two of these things at the same time (on both hands) so that one could type on a "virtual" QWERTY keyboard instead of having to resort to weird multi-finger gestures.
After reading your comment, I decided what the heck and my TapStrap2 arrived Thursday. I know I should just take those 15 minutes a day and improve my typing skills, but where’s the fun in that?
In any case, I’ve got the alphabet memorized, and now (at the end of Sunday) I can consistently get 18 WPM. For extra challenge, I decided to learn on my non-dominant (left) hand. I’m pretty impressed with how quickly basic proficiency can be achieved. I haven’t explored the mousing features, or macros, but I can definitely see myself using this in meetings in the future— if for no other reason than some sweet show-off value.
How do you feel about learning stenography?
AFAIK digital steno depends on steno keyboards (which are very cool), and I haven't seen any portable device with one. I would love to have a laptop with an ortholinear n-key rollover keyboard (it's easy to adapt an ortholinear keyboard to steno mode and switch between modes).
Also I have not seen any software supporting analog steno, but that would be awesome.
There are portable devices https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Supported-Ha...
This! It matters even if you are paying attention; in this day and age pulling a phone strongly signals disengagement. Even if you're actually the most attentive note taker, the rest of the attendees don't know this... and once one person signals disinterest, many will follow. It's like you're "giving them permission" to stop paying attention.
>I'm never going to sit down and review the cards
Well, don't sit down then. Standing up flip through the cards you filled during the day and toss them into garbage, unless one is really important. You're strictly better off than writing down nothing at all during the day, which is the default state for most people.
Later in the day when I pull them out, many do get trashed. Lots of Todo items never make it to my digital Todo list because my brain processed them mostly in the background during the day. I find the physical nature of the cards means I can't avoid that processing step. The times I revert back to digital first, my notes end up everywhere (I input them in the fastest way, rather than finding the right place) and immediately begin rotting because now I have remember and force myself to condense and organize rather than it occurring naturally.
For me, it's a bit more adhoc than the suggested above. Recent uses: jotting down measurements of some furniture; writing for somebody the name of a book I was recommending them; shopping and todo lists; doodles and sketches. notes tend to be odd phrases from conversations. The reviewing is minimal -- under 10% of what I write needs preserving, the cards mostly get a quick glance and then go straight into the recycling.
I use the same index cards when I'm writing something, for paragraphs or ideas which I can visually arrange on a table.
I've been doing this in some form for a couple of years, but just as a low-key background thing. For me it's just the minimal viable equipment for being able to write things.
I could use my phone for almost all of this, but index cards are a lower risk of distraction.
It's simply an an ultra-simplified one destination email client.
One button on your homescreen opens up a little text input window. Hit send, and it emails yourself. That's it, and it has been absolutely life changing, I've retained so much and simplified so many things. Ideas, scheduling, notes, etc.
Then about once a month I copy paste the whole chat into a text file on my workstation PC, date and archive it, and clear the chat. Telegram includes the exact time and date of each message in the paste, and my consistent "tagging" of the notes with the topic means that I can programmatically parse the text files later to organize them, maybe on my website.
After years of note-taking in various forms, I find that I rarely actually need to peruse my notes archive. It's the act of taking notes itself which helps with retention of ideas.
Most everything else in my life organization-wise, I use http://zim-wiki.org for. I just go through them and file them in ideas or todos.
I try to avoid using my phone as much as possible. The rule of thumb there is -- if it's not a real human communicating to me directly/individually or as part of a small group, I should try to just use the computer or not use it at all.
And then I get to referral scheme :). Eww.
But everything else is pretty solid, I will give it a try, love the idea so far.
I found a medium to large binder clip to work better than hole punching and a ring - you can't just open it up and use it while standing, but it holds together better and easier to add/remove cards.
A big advantage of this over journals (Moleskine, Field Notes, etc) is that there's no mental block of "I don't want to write something stupid or trivial in my journal/notebook."
But the core of all this is that the sitting-under-a-tree-habit came after the device. Before, it was a bit of a romantic idea I'd tried with moleskines, but it didn't really scratch my itches.
Voice memos, so you can add some audible context to each diagram
What was awesome though was when my then 3 year old daughter found one of the moleskins and a pen and did a bunch of scribbles on every 10 pages or so.
I truly love that little moleskin.
I just recently (last week) bought an outdoor log with graph paper and some other logs....
Your comment makes me want to prove you (myself) wrong and actually use it.
I've always been impressed with the. Various engineers I have worked with, like John Blair of nerflix... he is really fn today keeping a solid tech journal
I also just bought a super mini and thick notebook for $10 that I haven't used, but was just so cool looking. I still feel like an idiot for buying it, but maybe I will use it someday.
Japan is on a whole other level with writing and stationary. Go to a Tokyo Hands or Muji and you'll feel like the type of person that should be writing constantly. I can't imagine we would fetishize writing so much if computers didn't exist.
I was on the fence for the RM2 for a while for the same reasons you mentioned. Would I really use it?
Well I got it recently after trying a friend’s and I’ve surprised myself by using it daily. We’ll see if the habit sticks but so far the killer feature for me compared to a notebook is being able to erase, move text around and insert pages.
This makes me much more likely to just start jotting stuff down without being worried about “wasting” pages in a notebook.
By the way the device I hear comes with a 30 day trial period for this very reason. Lots of people don’t know whether they would really use it. So you can order it, find out how it fits into your life and return it if it doesn’t.
I do like the idea of no distractions and being able to move stuff around and organize it, unlike with paper, but most of my life is at home (since I'm self-employed) and I already have a computer on all 3 floors of my house that I'm usually at with OneNote and Notepad++ with a ton of tabs on each, so I'm worried that I'll never really use it unless I want to sit on the couch and focus, but then will I be wishing I had all my subsequent notes and such already on OneNote and in my various notepad++ tabs? What happens when I go back and sit at my computer for the majority of the day where I do work, play, research, side businesses etc.? Do I need some stand and will I just be cross copying notes back and forth?
Is it something I can comfortably hold and write on while sitting on a couch, or on some random chair or while leaning against a wall? Or am I going to be doing weird grips and being forced to counterbalance my writing on a floating pad if it's not sitting on a desk? I find writing in a small notebook way harder if it's not just on a table, so even that already worries me. Will I get less legible or not be able to as effectively write on the entire surface area of the device while holding it if not on a desk or having it setup on my lap (which may not even be that feasible without some cushion or stand)?
A 30 day trial could definitely help me figure this out, but I'm leaning towards the fact that it probably won't work out, at least not with the current version and I'm always afraid I won't commit the time I need to really test it in those first 30 days, haha!
If you’re already heavily invested in taking notes in OneNote then this probably won’t help much due to the overhead required to sync back and forth.
Getting OneNote on the Remarkable would be awesome though, I hope this will happen in some future version.
I downloaded some PDFs on how to sketch, and I can sketch right there in the PDF along side the examples..
The futility of hand-written note taking was always my lack of organization, but the auto syncing of this really helps in that department.
I can't say it is for everyone, but while I was definitely not the target consumer for this device, I am more that person now after buying it. I appreciate anything that pushes any of my time from consumption to production, and this helps me to do that.
However I think each of these is much less expressive than actually having the Pencil, Marker, Paint brush etc..
These don't provide nearly the versatility, such as levels of shading, that the real tools do, but the convenience of having some form of all of them in one small "pencil" is extremely nice.
If your end goal is to produce good art on paper, I would probably not start here, but for having fun and developing an interest it's been fantastic.
Now that I think about it, maybe it is the "Undo" feature that sells me =)
Make it easy for your “short-term” self to do the right (from the “long-term” self point of view) thing.
For my part, all my best ideas are incredibly simple, abstract, and writing it down is both incredibly difficult and also worthless. Sometimes I doodle to work through an issue, but that takes little more than a napkin and a crayon.
All that said I really, really love eink. I could almost buy an RM2 just to support eink development.
These guys nailed it!
This stood out "... and who likes or is good at hand writing or drawing."
Over the years many folks have seen me writing in my notebook and said, "Wow I wish I could make notes like that." It motivated me for a time to carry around copies of pages from my early notebook notes which compare unfavorably to cro-magnon cave drawings :-). I would explain to them they are written for an audience of one (me) and serve to help me recall details that I might otherwise forget, so there isn't anyone judging or evaluating them. At the same time, the more you write and draw, you tend to get more capable (this is especially true if you're somewhat self critical of your own results).
So I would agree that something like the ReMarkable is a big chunk of change to spend on something you don't feel you would use, but consider that a 5 pack of quadrule or lined composition notebooks is a couple of dollars/euros when school starts and can be thrown away. A stack of those, a variety of writing instruments (I like 1mm gel pens or the BIC 4 color pens, but others like mechanical pencils or roller ball type pens) And be intentional about writing things down for a few weeks (the various habit books suggest six as a minimum number of weeks but its an experiment right?)
Then at the end of your experiment go back and review your notebook(s) and compare your awareness and "presence" in that time with a time where you were not taking notes.
My guess is that either you will say, "this is a good thing, I should do this more" or you will say "interesting but not my cup of tea." Either way, you have a good understanding of yourself and how note taking and notebooks fit into your life. At which point the decision to buy something expensive or not has the backing of your lived experience of whether or not you find it useful.
So this kind of tablet looks really nice...
The reason I prefer to write on my moleskin rather than my laptop is because if I have my laptop, I get distracted and I do stuff I'm not supposed to.
Additionally I find it rude to be on your laptop when you're in a meeting, because people might think you're doing other stuff, and also because having your screen between you and other people creates a kind of "barrier".
Why you gotta be a hipster about it?
In some classes where we used Excel, I would do a mix of an iPad Pro (with pencil) and on the computer excel.
I like the simplicity of the Remarkable2, but it doesn't handle all my needs, but it does many.
But I don't and I won't because that's just not how I work however much I'd like to. And that's OK. In fact, it's good to accept that about one's self.
Now that I know I have ADHD, I at least have an explanation why my desire to be something I'm not has always failed, but even without the diagnosis, we all have our personality quirks that mean that certain things just won't work for us. It's nice to have beautiful notebooks to give away as presents for other people though. :-)
Bizarrely, I've ended up using the RM exclusively for work-related notes, and still keep all my personal ideas in a paper notebook. Aside from a subconscious desire to work through my stationery backlog, I have no idea why.
RM is nice to use and I'd definitely recommend to note-taking gadget lovers, but the software quality prevents me from calling it a more general must-buy device.
Lately I'm using Notion though for journaling and I really enjoy it. I'm keeping up a journaling streak.
The beautiful part of the remarkable 2 is that you can erase and redraw. You can also copy and paste. When making diagrams, the arrows will look identical. Recently, they added zooming in.
I used to take notes on paper. I bought thick, quality paper. I used a nice Japanese made fountain pen. I loved taking notes that way. I still miss parts of it.
When I started, my writing was not very beautiful, but I used a couple of cheats that helped. I write in all caps and I write quite small so that there is some padding above and below my letters. I write slowly so as to have consistent lettering. Even if they are imperfect, they look consistent. The focus should be on letter spacing.
Before covid, people used to come up to my desk and say it was the most beautiful writing they have ever seen. It wasn't, but the techniques do work.
As far as the feel of the notebook. I let my kids play with it. They love it.
I have never been more organised, I used to scribble notes on random bits of paper that would get lost - now o can refer back to meetings weeks ago.
Small(ish), syncable (bit of a learning curve to do so, but it is possible), and even comes with a physical keyboard if you want to really type things out rather than just use a stylus.
In my experience its OCR software is on-par with the Remarkable, if not better.
Good times.
Anyway, I claimed the coins, transferred them into dollars (just before the recent crash) and bought a remarkable for "free".
Honestly, it's a nice tablet, but, I'm glad I got it for free ;)
A few weeks of practicing 10 minutes a day or so will give you good handwriting.
A few weeks of a basic drawing course with a small amount of practice will give you decent enough skills to get your ideas down on paper.
People naturally do the things they like to do. I actually enjoy the process of writing with fountain pens, calligraphy, taking notes, etc. Strangely, I also really enjoy the experience of typing.
Taking notes and drawing don't make me cool. Carrying a notebook and a fountain pen made people think I was kind of eccentric more than anything. Carrying an iPad Pro 12.9 with a stylus made people think I was a geek. No one was mean about it or anything, but it definitely doesn't make a person cool. Just be who you are and do the things you enjoy.
If you think you would enjoy writing/drawing, put a little bit of effort into it and you will have pretty good results.
As far as the e-ink tablets go, I'm hoping the large format ones become more affordable and more polished. I would love to have one but the value proposition vs an Ipad is terrible. Single-purpose devices can frequently be better than a more generalized device, but in the case of these E-ink tablets the few things they do (reading, writing, drawing) generally offer a worse experience than doing that same thing on an Ipad. The only upsides are battery life and the e-ink screen.
Drawabox.com has some good free stuff too.
If you'd prefer books I think Andrew Loomis books might be public domain. Fun with a Pencil is a good one. If they aren't public domain you can get them for $10-15 on Amazon because they started reprinting them.
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is also a really good introduction to drawing. Don't let the title fool you though because its one of the best beginner's drawing books regardless of the genre.
Those are just examples though, there's tons and tons of great resources and everyone has their favorites.
was out jogging today and had a thought and popped it in. is in gthub right now so i think of it as safe.
But yes. I completely understand - i too want to be one of those people.
in fact watching this i thought there is a market for business pads - that look like your are taking notes and updating tickets not thumbing thorugh facebook in a meeting.
Slap a specialised JIRA client on this and I think you have a package winner.
On the other hand, I've got boxes and boxes of notebooks (Strathmore sketchpads and Moleskine-equivalents) that will outlast me -- to say nothing about cloud providers, backup media or outdated file formats -- unless I suffer a house fire or natural disaster.
Notebooks are cheap, and even terrible ones will last decades with little or no care. You can toss them into backpacks, lend them, get them (a little) wet, leave them in the sun, sit on them, forget them at the coffee shop, and even lose them permanently and basically not worry too much. If I was using a $400 gadget instead, I'd never carry it to the places I currently carry paper. My note-taking and scribbling would go down. I'm not even going to talk about battery capacity anxiety.
The gadget-lover in me would probably be happy with one of these things. My practical side and experience tells me that in the long run they are more trouble than they're worth.
That was me until I started bullet journaling. My notebook becomes whatever I need at the time. Todo list, calendar, journal. Flexibility with structure.
This works well when I'm working 100% at home or at the office, my notes are where I work, but my company plans to have a hybrid workplace with employees working from the office 2 or 3 days a week, now my notes will be scattered between home and office. (well, worse, the office might move to a "hoteling" desk format where no one has a permanent desk, so I can't leave my notes on my desk at work).
So one of the electronic paper products seems like a good solution - write my notes in epaper, and I can access them from work (or vice versa).
Though they are still pretty expensive so more likely, I'll just switch to keeping notes in a notebook that I carry back and forth.
I'd love a sketch book with layers and an undo button, but at the same time, I appreciate the simplicity and realness of a physical notebook. I can smoothe lines with my thumb, or use colouring pencils.
When I finish a notebook, I scan its pages. It takes about 15 minutes. I suspect I'd spend a lot more time building a system around a digital tablet.
The really good thing is that it's open. Like you can ssh into it from day one. No cloud forced on you. refreshing.
I think my #1 use is to jot down notes during a phone call. It is like an infinite stack of post-its. Jotting does not get in the way of a phone call.
#2 is reading ebooks and pdfs. It's a little slow working with .epub books, but with pdf files it is fast.
Actually I convert ebooks to pdf format using calibre. It's a pretty good experience. I've figured out the fonts, font sizes, margins and so forth, and made that my calibre conversion default. Works well for me.
On a serious note, this comment resonates so well. I actually bought a RM2 but returned it since the transcription & syncing was nowhere near what I expected. But, also what you wrote. Turns out, I'm near a laptop often enough that typing in Notion works pretty damn well for me. Coupled with all of Notion's rich document structures and fast navigation there's no way a RM2 can compete.
Also, for the record I have an iPad Pro and basically have one, very specific use case. I'm a private pilot and use the iPad extensively for flying. Writing down instrument flight rules clearances which I get over the radio from the tower has been the only persistent use case for the stylus that I've found. Cockpits are too cramped for the keyboard and there's too much information to write it with a finger.
The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.
I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me, are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).
Are you aware of the web interface? It's only available over USB, and requires flipping a switch in the settings. That interface is so simple that I imagine that an scp replacement is just an novice-level curl invocation away.
Also, it requires storing your stuff on reMarkable's servers ('cloud').
Its probably possible to create a Calibre addon to do this, but its already makes syncing pretty easy.
- Setting up a bit of metadata
- Restarting the system service
it's not quite as simple as `scp file remarkable:/folder`
Maybe 20, the metadata format is a bit verbose.
Screen more than flashes, it exits to the entry screen, navigation state isn't saved.
I personally prefer to mount the cloud via some fuse-based solution though.
For LAN devices you want to access as a server, I think it's usually easiest and most reliable to just designate a permanent IPv4 address for them with your router's DHCP server, like what OP suggested.
Your SSH client will probably prefer static IP addresses, too, for the record-keeping it probably does about which servers it knows and at what addresses.
https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_syncthing
I don't have a remarkable, and have therefore not experimented with this software. But it's the approach I'd prefer if / when I get a device like this.
Edit: But yeah, I love the hardware. It just isn't functional enough for me to use it regularly, which is a bummer.
Nova devices are android so kindle, safari reader, and any ePub, pdf etc. book are a breeze to install.
The result was this: https://gitlab.com/afandian/pipes-and-paper
Blog post https://blog.afandian.com/2020/10/pipes-and-paper-remarkable...
It's kind of abandonware now, but some others have made some great forks!
With that context, I love reading PDFs on my remarkable 2. Zooming and panning also works pretty well (given the slow refresh rate of e-ink).
Unfortunately you have to send the file to their servers, which is probably a no-go for many.
I agree with you. If you want something that can be reflowed, get the ePub version. Or, if it's meant to be made from images, get the CBZ version.
Probably quite long. I remember a discussion here on HN a while ago where it was said e-ink displays are expensive since there's no economy of scale and there are only a few manufacturers. Now for larger displays the demand is even lower, so prices tend to be even steeper.
A bit unrelated, but I’ve often wondered if I’m in the minority that hates writing by hand. Compared to typing, I’m much slower, and it looks terrible — I print in caps just so that it’s remotely legible.
I avoid handwriting at all costs, and loath the few times it’s required.
Perhaps consider changing your writing technique?
The drawing maybe.
That essay was a complete mess. I was even thinking of that as I wrote my above post. Hilarious that someone else mentioned it.
My wiki entries range from little "cards" of a few short sentences to longer entries written while analyzing or designing something.
Cursive I think is really more just about getting a feel for the flow of script. There are some technical aspects, like the letter forms themselves, and the rules of joining them -- not all letters in a word can or should be joined, which is obvious to long-time cursive users but was not to me!
But mostly it comes down to knowing the letter forms, and then just using cursive. Write a dear friend a sweet note. Write a couple pages in your diary on occasion. Your forms will become clearer and will flow better with practice. Embellish! Draw huge risers and tails on your letters and pretend you're writing in elvish or something. haha.
But, last year I got glasses. With them, my hand writing quickly improved. As an aside, I can type a lot faster on a touch screen now too. Presbyopia snuck up on me somewhere when I hit 40...
Also fountain pens are shiny and you can get all sorts of inks and accessories!
After introspecting about it, I realized that, for me, it’s because of low grade stress during handwriting, as my attention is constantly churned between thinking about the content and about legibility.
Unless you're filling out a form or writing an essay in school, handwritten things should use more symbolic language. Use a shorthand of words and images and arrows and circles that are meaningful to you. Whether or not someone else (or even you later) can read it is really a secondary concern.
The other thing about handwriting is that you remember things better. The act of transmuting something you've heard, put it into a thought, then taking that thought and stroking out words on a distinct location on a physical page taps into all these levels of comprehension and processing that you just miss if you take the stenographer approach with a keyboard and transcribe directly what you hear, or even writing digitally on the exact same 8x10 screen day in day out. I've fallen asleep in lectures with my hands on the keyboard mid sentence typing up some note, because the effort required by your brain is so much smaller and you are not nearly as engaged as when you are actually stroking out words and in the background thinking about how to fit relevant information on a unique 8'x11' sheet of paper.
You have a multitude of background-guides (lines, grids, etc.) for easier aligning.
The only features you have that you don't get with pen&paper are a layer system and a select tool which you can use for copy/paste/cut or move parts around.
Page management is pretty basic, but ok. You have notebooks which are folders of pages and you can change their order.
It's a common question in the community Discord, and the official patches have been accelerating and implementing a lot of long-asked-for features (e.g. pinch to zoom), but nobody really knows what's on their roadmap. So hard to say if it'll ever get side-by-side.
Do they support document delivery through email like Kindle? Recently I showcased[1] 'HN to Kindle' here and someone asked for Remarkable tablet support, But I didn't get an answer regarding email delivery.
Update: A quick search on their website says documents can be emailed out of the device i.e. sharing, But there doesn't seem to be a way to email content to the device.
https://github.com/remailable/remailable
The rM is a delightful product to hack on.
So for including support for reMarkable in HN to Kindle, All I need to do is host your project and ask for reMarkable device id from my users?
I also have a public free version hosted at https://remailable.getneutrality.org/ if you prefer not to run one yourself, which you and your users are welcome to use. (it's tricky if you haven't worked with AWS serverless tech previously!)
I'm currently in the process of validating my project and if there's enough need for reMarkable support I'll definitely use your project with due credits + donation(If my project makes any money).
Because if ssh does work - you can always ssh tunnel, and pipe into netcat. A nice trick to impress junior devs BTW :)
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-...
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+.
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.
My kid has been doing remote learning during the pandemic and using my RM1 for her school work. Wrote some scripts that sync the handouts her teacher posts online to the RM1 and she can work on them as if she was drawing on paper handouts like she would in school. This is much better than what the teachers were trying to teach her to do: using Adobe's PDF reader and marking up the PDFs using all those menus and buttons and typing things in.
I enjoy writing long-form especially when I need to think. I find that I get a lot of subtle anxiety and distraction using a modern computer these days that I can't just sit and think deeply about a problem anymore while using one. Instead I can take the RM2 to a quiet place, take my notes, and I can use the transcribe features to email myself plain text later or send a copy of individual pages where I've scribbled diagrams, etc. I then refine and edit my thoughts down later on a computer.
I want to be able to do more of my computing this way to be honest. Document-oriented, using long-form writing, being able to step away into different physical spaces without missing anything.
Overall though I am really happy with my RM2. It doesn't replace my paper journals... I still prefer those for longevity/archiving -- but it does great for ephemeral notes, books, marking up papers, etc. It's great for capturing the seed of ideas and letting me work without distractions.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Positives:
* Build quality feels great.
* Screen is super responsive when writing. And responsive enough when flipping pages (although I am not familiar with the state of the art ebook readers).
* Pen feels really good against the surface. After one day of getting used to it, it started feeling as natural as paper for me.
* Hacker friendly: Tick a box under "settings" and it gives you the root password, and you just plug in a USB cable and SSH in as you please. Inside is a pretty standard Busybox-based Linux. All the cloud gizmos are optional. See also https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
* Eternal battery life and perfect viewing angles and everything else you'd expect from this kind of screen.
Negatives:
* I would have like the screen to be just a liiiittle bit bigger. Some papers on A4 paper with smaller fonts cause me to squint a little unless I zoom in to crop out the margins (and if the margins aren't the same on each page, that's annoying).
* The upselling price of the nice carrying cases and the "fancy" pen are a bit ridiculous. Thankfully, the fancy pen isn't really that useful to me, because I prefer the fill-erase mode anyway.
* I often accidentally hit the power on button when carrying the thing.
* I know they're trying to minimize physical buttons, but I would personally have loved a physical button (preferably on the pen!) to flip into (fill-)erase mode.
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).
Does anyone have a model to suggest with 10" screen size? I don't have many other requirements, other than:
Decent speed, storage space and battery life. Support for beefy pdfs and other e-book formats. (this is important, one of my old readers took like forever to load a big book, then 15 seconds to turn each page). I would connect it only to my network, so it must not rely on cloud services et al. Color not needed, grayscale will do if well implemented. Taking notes not needed, although being able to fill pdf forms might be handy, but it's not a requirement.
I've been using a 7.8" Nova 3 myself for a few months now, and it's a dramatic improvement over the 6" Kindle I was using before. I love having a screen that's closer to the size of your average hardcover page, and it's just large enough to make PDFs readable at 100% zoom. It's also very fast, though there's always a bit of perceivable e-ink related lag unless you put an app on the fastest refresh rate. The warm frontlight is also the best I've experienced on an ereader, even better than what I've seen on Kindles.
IMO, 10" might be a smidge too large for comfortably reading in bed -- the Note Air might feel a bit too large physically and heavy to hold up if you're reading for long periods of time with one arm holding it up. If that's a common use case for you, you should really consider the Onyx Boox Nova 3, like I have, or maybe the Kobo Forma, which is a bit cheaper and reading-focused.
I'm using my Nova 3 completely disconnected from the internet most of the time, though I do occasionally find it useful to fire up Firefox for random browsing (and to sometimes transfer files with https://snapdrop.net/, which is like Apple's Airdrop on your local network). I don't think using the Nova 3, Forma, Elipsa, reMarkable 2, or Note Air offline most or all of the time would be a problem, though from what I can tell reMarkable has invested a lot in sync functionality that you might not necessarily want to turn off. Though the reMarkable probably wouldn't be for you, since it's focused on note-taking, rather than reading.
The problem with working online is that most of these devices phone home regularly, and while I wouldn't mind if they read with me an electronics magazine or book, that would be different since I'd also use a reader for displaying medical prescriptions and/or other personal documents.
Broadly speaking, device manufacturers (TVs, home appliances, etc.) became obsessed with making users sign in to their own cloud and downloading their own app; no thanks, I'd rather buy a device that lets me browse shares on the local network I'm connected to, and/or save documents into their storage using a USB cable. If the reader and the media are both within my house walls, I don't see reasons to connect outside.
I just wish they would put out a 12 or 13" one, and wish the aspect ratio was a bit more square to fit more PDFs perfectly.
I'm happy with my purchase, though with experience, I'm happy to suggest trade-offs.
Onyx's product line is based around 7.8", 10.3", and 13.3" e-ink screens. Those are what their vendor offers, so it's what Onyx bases its builds around.
My previous experience was with a 9" emissive (OLED) Android tablet, which saw principle use as an e-book reader (the only application to which it's well-suited), with portrait-mode presentation of books and articles working fairly well. It was hard to read in bright light, with overhead lighting (screen glare), or, of course, outdoors.
The jump to 13.3" e-ink at 220 ppi makes even low-quality scans of small-print materials readable at full size (without zooming). There are a few specific cases that really impressed this on me. Many books can be read landscape mode, 2-up, which is also good.
The device is large, about the size of an A4 or Letter-sized paper tablet. This is just about at the maximum size for comfortable in-hand viewing, and you might prefer a smaller device. It packs easily into my courier pouch.
If you don't wanto to spend the $800 (over $900 when you include stylus and cover), you can shave a a few hundred on a smaller device with some compromises in reading convenience. There's an in-page navigation that will scroll either in "reverse-N" or "Z" mode, for articles or comics, respectively, dividing the page into four regions (a 2x zoom). This makes virtually any material readable, at a cost of not being able to see the full page in a single glance. Even with a 10" or 8" device, you'd likely only have to engage this for a portion of your reading. Most books are readable at 100%, and even many articles. You can also trim margins to increase the size of the actual text on the page.
Battery life is quit good (I get a couple of days per charge, but use the device for much of the day, what I'm spared is any battery anxiety), performance is quite good, the display is delicious.
The notetaking feature wasn't something that attracted me to the device but it has turned out to be surprisingly useful and appealing.
It's the 10" Kobo Elipsa.
The problem is that Boox is a Chinese/HK brand with no customer support depot overseas. So if you get a lemon, you might be able to return it, but it'll be expensive, and your refund might be subject to a restock fee depending on the vendor.
The Kobo Elipsa is coming in a few weeks, and looks similar to the Note Air, and is cheaper as well. It would be well-supported in Canada, but it's running a custom Linux OS that's pretty locked down and only integrates with Dropbox, Pocket and Kobo's e-store. You can't sideload apps.
When I received my Remarkable 2 I had an issue with the WiFi card as it would connect and then after syncing once it would disconnect and required a restart to get it working again. So I emailed support to discuss a replacement. The support had me adjust MY router to specific channels so that the WiFi card could work (the only device I've had to do this for, and I have my channels tuned to not interfere with the neighbors). The problem persisted for the first few months I had the device and after I made the adjustments. I even offered to use my software engineering skills to help diagnose this issue on the device.
Worse still, the customer support agent stopped responding to my emails. I don't know if there was a software update that fixed this issue, but the way the customer support black balled me and gave up, I will probably not buy another device from them again, especially if there are similar devices on the market.
Why? I tried to support this company by preordering and go through the proper channels and it lead me to a place where a customer support agent decided my questions and time were better shoved into the abyss rather than address my concerns. That doesn't happen from a customer support agent actions, but rather how management and C-suite trains customer support agents.
I've actually been saving the emails from companies that do this to me. Anyone know somewhere I can report and share my poor experiences with companies (ex BBB)?
There's nothing wrong with saying:
"We have found that your problem is common and are working on a solution. We will reach out in a few weeks once this has been resolved."
Then the company can gather like problems and triage for later resolution.
I mean really sometimes it seems like companies act like support is a mystery and they have the first buggy product ever on the market.
I was pretty ok with the "it's just note taking" paradigm. But the problem for me is that it should be "just a note taking" device but with advanced note taking features, not just "nothing more than a sheet of paper".
The number one issue for me was the poor navigation experience. Going from one page to another was a pain if they were not contiguous. This could have been solved by allowing to create "links" between pages for example. But I the end, I found myself writing everything on the current page because getting to a new page in the right place was too long.
Let apart my issue, which maybe is really personal, Remarkable is a remarkably (!) engineered experience. Particularly , the writing experience is impressive.
It's obviously better than paper since you don't end up with stacks of printed articles. The feel of reading and writing is also exactly like paper, which is great. You get some basic select/cut/paste functionality, which improves on paper. But.
I used it to take notes at work, create simple TODO lists etc. The issue with this is that the resulting notes are way harder to navigate than a simple paper notebook, as the software doesn't support even basic bookmarks. Whereas with paper I can add bookmarks as I please, a paper organizer notebook allows me to navigate my calendar easily etc. I'm still amazed that the RM software offers absolutely no functionality for such navigation. This is a huge drawback for me.
When using it to annotate PDFs, the app offers you a few tools (pencil, pen, eraser, etc). Ideally you'd like to fit the article on the remaining portion of the screen, possibly cropping the margins if your the article is created for a different page size and your eyesight is as bad as mine. But the support for this sucks, as the toolbox always covers a piece of the document, so you end up having to hide/unhide it constantly.
Next, while the pen feels quite good, and feels almost as precise as a real pencil, I find the eraser quite hard to control. It erases an area somewhere around the end of the pen, but unlike a physical eraser, you don't see its boundaries. There's no support for stroke-based erasing. Finally, stating the obvious, the device is black-and-white. But I find different colors helpful when annotating papers, or creating sketches of systems etc.
So right now I can't really recommend the device, but I'm still holding onto mine hoping it will improve. I think the hardware can serve as a basis for better paper - but I think the software would need many of the features of http://www.styluslabs.com/ to get there
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.
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...
Pros:
1. A single charge lasts a WEEK!
2. I used to write a lot of notes on white sheets, add addendum here and there. Now, its all on reMarkable.
3. My table clutter has reduced significantly.
4. I'm writing a lot more!
5. It syncs to cloud and I can immediately read the notes on my computer, mobile.
6. It's so thin and lightweight. Definitely doesn't feel cheap. It has a nice premium feel to it.
7. New updates like Pinch and Zoom functionality has made it easier to read PDFs.
Cons:
1. Battery life sucks if you're connected to WiFi.
2. Expensive - Product + Sleeve + Marker with Eraser sets you back $500+.
Strongly recommend to anyone who writes a lot.
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 want something that allows me to do math problems while laying down horizontally, mostly before bed. With a book and paper, it's a mess trying to do this, and I require e-ink. So I need good support for reading PDFs _and_ writing on screen, which is a niche apparently. I need split screen functionality or something like it, so I can have half my screen be scratch paper, and in the other half I can flip through the text (and I need a reasonably sized screen to accommodate all this). If I cannot do this, the device is not usable enough to purchase imo. I have no desire to take notes, draw or convert my writing to text. It would be a big plus if it could also read epubs as then I wouldn't need my current ereader.
I'm leaning toward the Remarkable 2, mostly due to it shaping up to be 'hacker friendly' (so I can lean on the community to write some features) and the writing supposedly feeling real, but I don't like how expensive the little pencil nubs are and having to replace them is kind of a drag. I tend to binge research my options a couple times per year but haven't pulled the trigger yet. I get frustrated because I feel like I want something so basic that it should already exist - just a book and scratch paper in one device, with a screen that doesn't keep me awake at night or distract me with a web browser. Anyway, last I checked the Remarkable 2 didn't quite have a splitscreen feature or anything close enough, so I opted to wait.
Would appreciate any input, I'm probably going to break down and buy one this month.
Yeah I have it in landscape mode in the screenshot.
I think the price has to do with the fact that E-Ink sells these screens for a lot of money.
and what is this price? what volume? I am curious what this is based on since you state that "fact" with a lot of confidence.
I'd recommend the remarkable2 as the hacker friendliness makes quite a difference
This is what my research told me last I looked too, thanks for the confirmation that this is still true. I believe RM will deliver long term, hacker friendliness goes a long way. Not sure if it's worth the price atm, but I'll look out for a cheap used one. I could do so much more critical reading if I could do it while lying down.
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.
Is there a way completely turn off analytics so it never connects to a remote server at all without my permission? Can I disable updates without disconnecting it from the network? Or is there a replacement OS/hack that can disable any data collection?
I get nervous around proprietary software, even if it is extensible. I like that I can SSH onto the device itself, I like a Linux base, but I want to know that I'm not going to be fighting with their UI layer for control in the future.
I guess KoReader exists, but as far as I know from other e-readers KoReader doesn't actually replace anything, it just runs automatically after the normal OS has booted. I want the ability to completely disable any part of the OS that would be reaching out to a remote server without my permission.
I can quarantine everything, but I don't want to quarantine the device, I want to be able to connect it to WiFi and take advantage of its networking features while trusting that it won't send a bunch of data somewhere.
I could be wrong, but I don't think it sends any analytics. I'd be very surprised if it did for devices not connected to their cloud service.
They're covered by the gdpr, and the privacy policy doesn't mention any... https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000041647...
If it does you could certainly set up iptable rules to do so... but that would admittedly be a bit of a pain.
> Can I disable updates without disconnecting it from the network?
Yes, there's a toggle in the UI
> Or is there a replacement OS/hack that can disable any data collection?
Again, not sure if there is any data collection or even outgoing network traffic if you have the cloud services off. The hard part of a replacement OS would be controlling the screen, I don't think anyone has done that.
But in recent years, many musicians decided come back to stand-alone hardware devices, there is even a term for this: it's a "dawless" setup.
The most commonly mentioned reason for this is "I want a distraction free environment", or something along the lines of "I don't want to create music on the same device where I receive social media notifications".
To me, devices like reMarkable are basically responding to the same need, but in a different field (note taking as opposed to music production).
I wonder if this could become a more general trend, where people at least partially move away from general purpose devices.
For my use case, it's lovely (reading and annotating technical books and papers, meetings, writing, even the drawing experience is better than expected).
Right now there are things that I could imagine myself wanting but not really _needing_. Maybe plugging in a keyboard would be appreciated.
I can really recommend it if you enjoy "thinking" with paper and writing by hand. I am barely use traditional notebooks anymore. Plus: it's a very open and hackable device.
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.
These no-name Chinese Android e-ink tablets are actually really great devices, when it comes to hardware. Where they fail of course is the questionable software. I find the Likebook actually works well enough, but I'm sure it's got untold security issues that prevent it from being useful for anything serious.
I don't really understand why there really aren't any reputable companies in the Android e-ink tablet space, and I also don't understand why Google themselves seem to have absolutely no interest in Android for this use case. An e-ink Pixel tablet seems like it would be a real win.
Just guessing, but maybe they did the market research and the audience isn’t big enough. After all, e-ink devices are primarily for consuming large amounts of text, and most peoples’ reading these days is short form, multimedia content (articles, blogs, lists, slideshows, social media posts, explainer videos, etc.) which is better suited to existing phones and tablets.
I’m still among those who read book-length content, but far less than I did in years past. I’d say the actual number of words I read every year has gone up, but the number of 300+ page books I read has gone down.
The upside is, I’m much more selective about the books I do read and mostly only read excellent ones.
* Taking notes is really great, the notes app is highly customisable to personal needs. Handwriting to text is quite powerful as well.
* Searching for text in your handwritten notes is a quite cool and useful.
* You can use the Kindle Android app and it's just perfect.
* The browser is quite powerful and offers a great reading experience.
* Keyboard is surprisingly good, I like the write-to-text feature very much.
In 2014 I picked up a Galaxy Note Pro 12.2" - an android(ish) device, good pen support. Slightly laggy, but the ability to sync my notes and colour drawings (in SVGs, typically) back to my computer was valuable. Samsung notoriously ceased supporting this flagship product soon after release. (They're now on my list.)
The Remarkable2 looks great, but I'm wary now. I'd want to be extremely confident about inter-op of content between my computers (Debian, mostly) and the device - in both directions - before wanting to make a long-term commitment to yet another platform.
[0] http://www.pocketbook-int.com/au/products/pocketbook-pro-912
The sync story is itunes like (transfer+metadata), which I somewhat dislike, but the use of rmapi plus other mechanisms to transfer data to it (e.g. plug in via usb and then post/curl a file vs. using their somewhat silly front end directly) has made it work for me.
I use their app as an easy way to look at my notes on my work+personal laptop plus also use the send-as-email functionality to share notes. I also transfer content from my chromebook to it via the chrome plugin.
All in all, the storage limitation is my biggest criticism but in general the other improvements it's brought to my life have been much appreciated.
PS: I use the Staedtler Noris Digital Jumbo stylus instead of the stock due to the built in eraser. The writing experience is less realistic with this though but the eraser is handier; I wish I had bought the marker plus when I preordered.
Edit: I didn't really answer your 2nd question: I don't know of good approaches to share data with a Linux desktop in this case though I think rmapi would do well for it. It would be nice if they had a webapp vs platform dependent apps for sharing data. Some of the hacks people have developed for it might help in that case. I recommend joining their discord or checking out remarkablewiki.com
WRT 20GB - I'd just assumed it had a microSD slot. Your comment led me down a spiral, to find a guy who pulled the v1 device apart and soldered in socket for one. That's extra frustrating then that the electronics are already there, but the socket + hole is not. [1]
WRT pen - yes, I splashed out for the 'extra good' pen for the Samsung, and was glad I did. The bundled pen was serviceable, but things like the ersatz eraser, and thicker / heftier feel, made it worth while. When ogling the remarkable2 shop page I've kind of assumed I'd get the better pen at the same time, so it's good to have further confirmation on that gut feel.
Sync - sounds like that SyncThing project I found earlier, if it's still viable, might be a better option for us Linux users. If the data is coming across as SVG's or similar then I guess any native apps (Krita, etc) should work, but how good the interoperability on that actually is ... is not well blogged about. (A doubly niche market, I fear.)
I haven't checked out the remarkable-syncthing solution you mentioned in a different comment but it seems like a good idea.
I also have the original Remarkable, an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, a Boogie Board (2011), an iRex iLiad (2007), and I used Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing back in the '90s.
The use case I've long wanted to digitize -- quickly working out problems -- is one I still do on paper. The Remarkable2 hardware is finally there, but the software makes it useless to me.
I followed a link at the bottom of this article to a product I'd never heard of before, Supernote [1], and something there caught my eye. Namely on the accessories tab, there's a link to a LAMY Series stylus [2]. For those who haven't heard of LAMY, they're a pretty big name in the fountain pen world. The page is pretty light on the details, but AFAIK this is the first ever collaboration between fountain pen giant & writing tablet. It even has their iconic pocket clip design... Definitely piqued my interest.
Although interestingly, the tip of the Supernote pen that comes with the A5/A6 series looks more like something that would produce more of a pen-to-paper feeling with its 0.7mm tip.
[1] https://www.supernote.com/ [2] https://www.supernote.com/#/part?id=SP-05
For example: it comes with its own cloud sync. Which is extremely slow and unreliable: if you upload a pdf from a laptop, it might show up right away, or it might show up tomorrow, there's no way to tell and no reliable way to force synchronization.
Or this: the software is super clunky. For example, there's no direct switching between documents. If you're reading a PDF and trying to take notes in a separate file (a good idea because it is also really hard to just get annotations out of a PDF), it takes a looong time to close the pdf, open the other notebook, take the note, close the notebook, and reopen the PDF again.
Honestly, the remarkable experience has soured me on the entire class of products. I really want to get that color onyx book thing, but I'm too skeptical.
Wait a few generations until color eink tech is fleshed out.
In case you haven't seen it already: https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks
The ddvk hacks are easy to apply and reversible. They add a bunch of gestures like instantly flipping between documents. One of my other favorites is a quick swipe gesture to switch to the last-used tool.
I don't want to annotate PDFs and then only save the annotations, but it sounds like biff would help with that if you don't mind another tool in the chain: https://github.com/soulisalmed/biff
RM2 is fine as a note taking device but is suboptimal for reading.
As many other have said the Remarkable 2 hardware is impressive but the default software is weak for basic reading tasks.
With Koreader RM2 is quite decent.
Latest RM2 update seems to have bricked Koreader though so I will have to reinstall it.
Still, I prefer the original Sony DSP-1 13inch e-reader or even Kobo 6.8 inch e-reader for long reading sessions.
This is a popular anecdotal claim, but as far as I know there is zero research to solidly back it. There is research showing there's little difference, however. One example:
1. I get eyestrain and find it hard to concentrate.
2. The bright screen seems to be very "addictive" and I find myself browsing hacker news, reddit etc. instead of working.
I wonder if an e-ink or RLCD screen might solve these problems. There are some new 25" screens coming out this year.
Disadvantages: -Only BW so need to look at normal screen for graphics -Needed two eink screens otherwise two small to work (but ordered now the 25inch one)
Here is a pic of my setup (actually Dasung featured it): https://twitter.com/DasungTech/status/1391693381726658561/ph...
The 25 inch screen is already out and ordered mine, can't wait for it to come: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-253-the-first-2...
If the current RM2 had tagging, and an 8.5"x11" functional screen, I would be obscenely content with the product. It might be the perfect daily driver tool for my job at that point.
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.
I thought it would be great to read online articles as I read books on remarkable, check email and etc. so I ordered another Android eink tablet. It was a great purchasing mistake which I barely use today.
The morale is that eink screen is very limited with it's refresh rate and lack of color making software as significant as hardware.
It probably is important that we both don't really code that much, it's only a smaller part of our studies.
I've worked out that for almost 100% scaling of a magazine PDF, I need about a 13" screen, in 4:3 ratio (or thereabouts). 16:9 ratio is just too tall and thin.
e-ink devices seem too expensive for this single use-case, as does the iPad Pro, which although ideal is massive overkill.
I've even started going down the crazy route of trying to design something with a Raspberry Pi zero, and a HDMI LCD panel, but the power draw seems too prohibitive to make it viable.
Does anyone have any other suggestions here?
Most e-book readers have an option to specify in-page navigation of a document, generally into four quadrants, read either in "ᴎ" or "Z" flow (first is "article", second is "comic book" navigation"). This effectively quadruples screen resolution, at the cost of a slight decrease in fidelity to the original experience. Given the cost trade-offs in devices (~$340 for 7.8", $800 for 13.3") this may be acceptable.
That said, I splurged on the 13.3" Max Lumi. The first time I was faced with a less-than-perfect scan of a three-column article first published in the 1970s that I could comfortably read at full size (with just a smidge of margin trim), it was worthwhile. If your budget constraint is stronger, you still have options.
Most book texts read fine at 8", so the compromise is not something you'll be seeing all the time.
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
The E Ink display has two advantages over LCD: it consumes very little power and it looks great under bright sunshine. I also get less eyestrain reading eBooks and RSS on the matte E Ink display.
I love E Ink so much I doubt I am ever going back to LCD, but the E Ink display is not perfect: it is black and white (there is a color version but it is very grainy), and the E Ink display is also less responsive than an LCD.
I love the distraction free writing and this is the main reason I bought it along with school. I put on some Brain.fm and I tend to get lost in my focus and I don't realize hours have gone by.
I have heard that their customer service isn't very good and that devices are hard to get repaired. I haven't had an issues yet and fingers crossed because this is my biggest worry. Something breaks and I am out $600.
AMA...
What I also used it for during the lockdown was to switch it for the tablets my kids use to control their screen time (not so much fun in black and white) while allowing them to listen to music and audio books...
I like this trend also because I observe myself using the device different than my mobile or tablet... I am just starting out but I think it definitely has a niche to fill.
It could use a dedicated "page turn" button.
My BOOX cover has a stylus loop.
"The Onyx Boox M96 is an Android-powered ereader with a 9.7-inch E Ink screen. Up until recently it was only available with a touchscreen that requires using a stylus pen for input."
Textual information is perceived more clearly and less noisy/biased due to E Ink screen.
Great for navigation under sunlight and lasts very long with backlight disabled.
It's always a small shock to temporarily use a regular Android/iPhone, so noisy and glaring in my eyes.
Wouldn't want to switch back to an OLED phone. Only reason would be color video/photo viewing.
I got my reMarkable2 6 months ago to sketch some infrastructure stuff and keep a TODO list. It did help a bit in organizing! U lose the papers u take notes on, but this stays longer and can be helpful
It's just linux. It has ssh installed (it tells you the password in the "copyright and licenses" menu, and you can private keys on the device like normal). It connects to wifi. You can write a script that runs on the device and periodically syncs notes somewhere (I have this setup with restic for backups).
Handwriting recognition is done by cloud, and, I mean, unless you want to set up your own software for handwriting recognition (doesn't sound easy) you would need to give up that feature (I have)...
Not sure trading out remarkables cloud for microsoft's cloud is exactly what OP wants though ;)
www.emailnewslettertracker.com if you're interested in being a beta tester.
That’s exactly what I like about my paper notebooks. 20 years worth, visible on a shelf. And they never run out of batteries. No backups though.
It's e-reader software is a bit meh, so I still read books (fiction, mostly) on my Kindle Paperwhite.
Reflow is one of the worst things to happen to digital publishing, IMO. I get it that it makes ebooks readable, but typesetting is an art, and one we haven't even come close to nailing in the digital realm.
Maybe that should be my side project...
We're all different, and I disagree. It's replaced all of my notebooks and pens.
I just wish it had a faster processor so that the UI was snappier.
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...
The pens were fat and they should have invested in making really nice form factors.
1) you wrote on their special dot paper. I filled many moleskin notebooks
2) You could record at the same time that you wrote
3) the writing was digitized
4) You could touch anywhere in the notebook and the audio that was recorded at the time you were taking notes would play.
Livescribes are really amazing, but I think their marketing was crap. Every college student, business analyst etc should be using one by now.
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.
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 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.)
I've often wondered if they always say that, or only in 100% of the cases where they forgot to trim 'this part' out?
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.)
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.
To date, I have used pen and paper because taking such notes in a text editor is too difficult and time consuming. To deal with the risk of losing my physical notes, I take photos of the pages and back them up to my Google Photos (text search through photos works decently well actually), but I would much prefer to have the notes in digital form to begin with.
The display is gorgeous. 1650x2200 pixels at 207 dpi 16 shade greyscale. It reads wonderfully in direct sunlight, and well under any interior lighting conditions with the "Frontlight" to assist. Unlike emissive displays, frontlight + increased room light increases readability.
The stock bookreader software ("Neoreader") is good at reading, less so at organising (more below). Well-processed books directly rendered from markup can generally be viewed landscape at 2-up, for a more booklike experience (ePubs of course as well). Even lower-quality scans of 3-column articles from before the age of computer typesetting are readable without having to zoom the page. (Most recently I've been going through the Whole Earth Catalog's back-editions --- the pasted-in layout, often with patterned or coloured overlays, is ... almost always ... readable. It's a good test of bad quality typography.)
I'd written a bit recently on the fact that tablets are for the most part not a viable device cateogory, with far too many design compromises. The notable exceptions being ebook readers, baby pacifiers, and watching videos. For any other task, a laptop (even a small and cheap one) is far more capable. See the following, most of the meat is in my subsequent comments: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e1002590d8e...
My principle uses are as a book/document reader, accessing my Pocket archive (more below), and some Android use (Web, podcasts, Termux). I hadn't expected to use the note-taking feature at all, but that is actually surprisingly good and habit-forming.
The BOOX is, of course, a tablet, but it's one with a few interesting twists.
- Display: Pixels are cheap, paints are expensive, persistence costs nothing, viewability increases rather than decreases as ambient lighting increases, and colours are nonexistent. (There are colour e-ink devices, performance is middlin', price is not ... too outrageous, sizes tend to the smaller.) Contrast is lower than paper, though it's good. Video is possible, if far from optimal. Issues with colour-discrimination can be an issue in apps and websites. Multiple modes trading increased quality for faster refresh. Video can be viewed, though it's not pretty. Line-art and halftone rendering is excellent.
- Battery: Claim is a month of standbye, a week of normal use. I am not a normal user, my goal was to not have range-anxiety. I can go a day or two between charges, and charging is fast (1--2 hours to full), whilst using the device for much of the day. This is more than sufficient and exceeds expectations.
- Storage: My goal is to have a portable and well-organised library (more on the 2nd bit below). I have well over 64 GB in texts alone, and also use devices for podcasts. I've already chewed through most of the capacity of the BOOX (system and apps also require some space), and would prefer a 128--256 or larger storage option. The fact that Remarkable2 is limited to 16 GB given the pitifully low costs of storage, for a device principally aimed at reading, is ... inexplicable.
- WiFi: 2.4G & 5G (unsure what specs). Slightly less range than my earlier tablet, though still adequate and reliable.
- Bluetooth. Mostly for the optional $35 keyboard, though also capable of sharing audio to speakers.
- Touch: Works better than expected. Note-taking in particular is excellent. The display depth is slightly increased (due to various layers?), so drawing may be difficult, but for text notes and rough diagraming, it's actually pretty addictive.
- Audio: Two speakers and (counter to my initial belief) an onboard mic. More than sufficient for listening to podcasts.
- Camera: None.
- Security: A mixed bag. Device password is only available with Onyx's Cloud service, which is inexcusable. No device encryption. I treat the device as largely untrusted.
- Interface: Usable, with some kinks and personality. Occasional instances of Engrish / Chinglish.
- Android: On basis, this was a strike against the device, though given it's reasonably Google-Free, the Google App store does not work, and F-Droid offers a useful selection of much-better-behaved applications, a feature. Access to some Android settings (e.g., device UUID reset) aren't provided. The device is actually a rather better tablet than I'd hoped (which increases distractions).
- Stock apps: The bookreader, storage manager, a web browser (re-badged and e-ink optimised Chromium AFAICT), clock, calendar (with no alarms!), calculator, and a few other stock apps exist. Most are specifically designed for e-ink and benefit by this. Features are fairly spare.
- Note-taking: Surprisingly good. This wasn't a key interest, but the ability to simply write what I want to capture, as well as diagram and annotate freely, makes up for much of the keyboard lack.
- Apps: Supposedly the Google App Store can be enabled, though I've found this doesn't work. I consider this to be a feature. Instead I rely on F-Droid and APK Mirror to install Fennec Fox, EinkBro (a browser, more below), Pocket, Termux, a Feeder (RSS), VLC, Wikipedia, and a very small handful of other apps.
- EinkBro Browser: (Additional install, not stock.) This is a web browser specifically engineered for e-ink devices. It features full-screen immersive mode (no app or device menus), paginated navigation (fewer paints), a Reader Mode, print-to-PDF, a verticle-text mode (for Japanese text). It is lacking an Incognito mode, and some of the features are rough (adblock, JS, and cookie whitelists can be added, but not edited or individually removed). For pages which are painful in Fennec Fox, it's a very handy fallback option. I still principally use Fennec as a browser. As an exemplar of eink-aware UI/UX, it's excellent.
- Pocket: Installed via APK Mirror (the F-Droid version is woefully obsolete). All my standard frustrations exist, though at least it's available. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763106) But at least it's there.
- Termux: The Linux-environment-on-Android utility lives up to its reputation of the one Android App That Does Not Completely And Specifically Suck. It also continues to be periodically garbage-collected by Android, though that's not Termux's fault. There's a black-on-white eink display style which suits the BOOX wonderfully, and "Speed Mode" display seems to work best on text. The Onyx hardware keyboard does NOT include an "esc" key, which is quite frustrating for this vim addict.
I do have some complaints.
Storage. I'd prefer 128 GB -- 512 GB available -- enough to store thousands of books and audio episodes, without any concern for running out of storage. It's less a factor of "what's sufficient" and more "why allow a few dollars in cost stand in the way of sufficient storage?" 512 GB microSD now costs about $50. I paid more than that for the cover for the device.
Root. I'd prefer a rootable device. AFAICT the BOOX is not.
The bookreader and storage utility don't facilitate organising and managing content. This seems to be a weak point of many ebook tools. In particular: - I'd like to be able to edit / add metadata to documents from within the document itself, based on the Dublin Core metadata + tags. I'm mostly be interested in title, author, publication, and date, though other fields also prove useful. Search should be metadata-aware. The storage utility should also provide for metadata managment. I'm interested in media / library management tools that integrate with tablets.
Android management tools are generally lacking. Onyx's rebranding of Android removes most of the configuration tools.
Instability. The device does crash and kill apps from time to time. That's probably on Android, but increases certain types of anxiety. Restarting every few days isn't a bad idea. No worse than any other Android device I've had. But I've rarely had printed books crash on me.
Keyboard: Please include "esc" on tablet keyboards.
This page contains a list of free software for rM on github:
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
And this amazing guy even made a full alternative GNU/Linux OS running on rM:
http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
Still I have some unresolved issues. When I say 'unresolved issues' I mean I tried a few things but didn't found something comfortable 'enough' to use. I need something that 'just works' without me dealing with it constantly.
* How would you sync notes between rM and Mac quickly?
Of course syncing through their online service/apps is out of the question due to the privacy.
* How would you sync quickly books with it?
I know you can connect it directly to a computer and use Web Interface. It's too slow and not always works. I perhaps works for one or two books but not very practicle for everyday use. Besides my new Mac doesn't come with normal usb port (thanks apple) and dealing with adapter is too much of a headake each time.
* How would you use it as second monitor for Mac to read some web articles and work?
I know there is: https://github.com/matteodelabre/vnsee I've managed to configure it as second screen for linux virtual machine running on Mac but this is not the same as running it as second screen to the Mac itself.
Also since my last model of macbook pro (2016) had successfully died lately due to the quality of this garbage I had to buy a M1 model. The virutal machine configured for this purpose was based on Virtual Box which is if I understand correctly doesn't work very well on M1 and so far there are no plans to make it work there. So I am still looking for good alternative option to make it run at least this way. If you have some advice I would be happy to hear.
* What is the 'safest' or 'correct' way to backup the whole rM and be sure that you can restore it without a danger to brick it completely.
* How to connect BT Keyboard and configure it properly.
* All these 'issues' basically about how to make it usable for programming.
If you have any good solutions/ideas about those issues please share.
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.