>Remarkable 2 looks neat but so expensive. Now there’s choice.
R2 is $399, judging from the EUR retail price of €499 inc. VAT this will likely retail at $499 in US.
It is not cheaper than R2.
R2 is $399, judging from the EUR retail price of €499 inc. VAT this will likely retail at $499 in US.
It is not cheaper than R2.
You’ve got to be careful about this when comparing prices of different products, because they include different things. It sounds like Huawei’s will include a stylus and cover for that price, which does make it a little cheaper than reMarkable’s equivalent bundle.
Which is why hell will freeze over before I purchase a reMarkable.
Incidentally, the free plan offers something called "50-day sync", which is described like this:
"Without a subscription, you can still use the cloud to store and sync your notes. However, files will stop syncing to the mobile and desktop apps if they haven’t been opened in the last 50 days. They’ll still be automatically stored on your paper tablet."
Just to be clear: This is a feature designed for the marketing department, not for users.
The marketing people get to say that "we offer free cloud sync", while reducing users' trust in the cloud sync significantly enough that they feel obliged to sign up for the paid subscription.
It's infuriating.
You don't "have to" for cloud sync. Remarkable is a fairly open platform and there is a vibrant open source community surrounding it.
You can use a tool like the Remote Connection Utility [0], with support for $12pa. "RCU ensures the user's data is never out of their control, completely unshackled from the manufacturer's proprietary cloud.". There are other tools.
I can't speak to handwriting conversion as I don't use it, but I suspect they don't have any secret sauce and that any 3rd party recognition app can deal with the content if provided in a standard format. I sure wouldn't be wanting boox or Huawei clouds to scan my raw text.
Sure, quite a few other people have written software for it or peripheral to it, but it’s all based on reverse engineering, since you’ve got things like xochitl (the UI software that runs on the tablet) being written in Qt with QML so that you can get a certain degree of binary patching (see ddvk-hacks, which customises the UI a fair bit), and their file formats are all sufficiently simple where it matters (some JSON, some plain text, and the stroke data being a painfully unoptimised binary-packed data scheme) that people can approximate most of it pretty well. But I’ve been feeling a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the community on the openness side of things. Many people chose to go with reMarkable because of this ostensible openness and the idea that things would improve, but at least some of it is a mirage, and attempts at extending on-device functionality are decidedly for power-users only who are willing to tolerate various inconveniences.
RCU is… eh. Tolerable. A good bit of work, but weaker than something first-party, mostly because of how it’s built on reverse-engineering and fitting around the whims of the reMarkable team, and how their software is architected. Its syncing is mildly fragile, and I’ve steadily become convinced that its entire approach of doing per-document tarballs containing the files pertaining to that document, rather than just mirroring the device’s ~/.local/share/remarkable/xochitl (which is flat) was misguided, a mistake as a primary approach (use something like that for interchange, sure, but for the typical task of syncing it’s very not good). Its rendering is the best I’ve found among open-source renderers, but it’s still very inaccurate for anything even vaguely arty. I’ve written my own SVG rendering pipeline (which currently means no textures or variable opacities, but only variable stroke widths—and on the point of variable stroke widths I’ve done better than any before me by a considerable margin) that I haven’t yet released, but thinking things through I’ve decided I’m actually not interested in continuing to work in and around a closed tool, so I don’t think I’ll bother going on to a more pixel-perfect bitmap renderer as I had originally planned; I’m more interested in the potential of starting from scratch in a proper open software ecosystem where you can actually add useful functionality to the software, rather than just eating the crumbs that drop from the master’s table. In the mean time, `rsync --archive --verbose --compress --delete $REMARKABLE_HOST:.local/share/remarkable/xochitl/ ~/reMarkable/data/` is excellent for sync.
I look forward to the PineNote getting further. A little way down the line, I’ll be seriously considering getting one and creating good long-form writing and drawing software optimised for it.
> Which is why hell will freeze over before I purchase a reMarkable.
Maker of capital intensive hardware seeks revenue streams to bolster development and hire more engineers.
Chinese MANGA equivalent enters the chat with their own hardware financed from other business units and potentially subsidized.
This is why we can't have nice things.
We complain until the giants eat the market. Wait until you see the lock in they have in store. You won't be able to run arbitrary executables or hack on their devices like you can the reMarkable.
Pay more for products from small companies.
If China wasn't in this conversation, the above would be criticized as an example of greedy MBAs nickel and diming the consumer.
The capability to do file sync for free has existed on computing devices for ages, yet somehow this is an area where rent-seeking is acceptable? At least Chinese vendors like Onyx use Android under the hood, so setting up Nextcloud, Dropbox or Syncthing Fork can be done in a matter of minutes, without any ridiculous subscription fees.
> If China wasn't in this conversation [...]
Substitute "China" for "Amazon" and my point still stands.
> [...], the above would be criticized as an example of greedy MBAs nickel and diming the consumer.
That's exactly my point though. We're too critical of small businesses with expensive products. It's unsustainable and unrewarding for small biz to innovate in hardware or expensive ventures that can easily be cloned and ripped off by big businesses that have fantastically mature revenue streams at scale.
I'll take my point further. Consumer behavior won't change and there is no solution in trying to shore up customer empathy. Instead, top down policy is the solution. Patents need to be given asymmetric teeth in order to fend off the bloodthirsty giants. That way we continue to allocate capital to innovation rather than the act of subsidized carbon copying.
A recent success case is Sonos in their patent litigation against Google's blatant copying of their multi-room audio product.
(Granted, we also need to tamp down on no-product patent trolling. Those people are nothing more than fancy thieves wearing suits.)
Enterprise features like integration with enterprise software, SSO, MFA etc? Totally different, and happy to pay.
Wacom clone styluses are a bit more expensive than resistive styluses, but they can be bought for less than 20$.