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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

One thing I love about my reMarkable tablet is that I get all the benefits of manual handwriting and sketches, enhanced by and combined with digital flexibility (copy/paste, resize, undo/redo, tags/metadata, search, retrieval, PKB integ and interop, etc).

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The only thing I miss is the ability to spread my papers in front of me to think with a global view and mix them and play with them with ease.

This is something I never found in any digital product where paper is unbeatable.

This could be achieved with VR although I don’t know of anything product doing this now.

VR resolution is far too poor at the moment in my opinion.

At the office, I use 7200x2560 @ 144Hz (5x 27" vertical). It'll be a few years before we see VR as a competitive alternative.

> I don’t know of anything product doing this now.

I suspect there is no technology really capable of doing this well yet, let alone product.

But then you have to wear a VR headset.

which we might all be wearing in a few decades or have it integrated in our eyes.

It would be amazing to have a VR app that allows you to write virtually anywhere in the space and be able to manipulate virtual papers and organize them around ourselves. It's actually a good product idea.

With the evolution of the hand tracking mechanism that could probably be done today.

The resolution of the screens doesn't scare me, the evolution since the first headset from Meta for example has been pretty amazing and the refresh rate as well.

I've seen so many sci-fi concepts of smart ink on paper. Something you can leaf through like a book, but the ink can be changed electronically. I wonder if we'll ever get that.

I love my eink tablet, and it's definitely better and more comfortable than my laptop screen or phone. But for some reason, actual paper still seems even better. I'm an academic: if I really want to study a difficult paper hard, I print it out.

As a big reMarkable fan, my first thought was how much the results would apply to "digital paper". I can't think of any reason why writing on its paper-like surface wouldn't confer the same benefits.

Would love to hear how your PKB integration works!

Interesting. How is the integration of the reMarkable into other ecosystems? Can notes be converted to text and used elsewhere easily? (e.g. Nextcloud or Markdown docs)?

They have their own cloud service, but the remarkable runs some kind of *nix. You can ssh to it over usb-c. They even give you the root password.

Check out awesome-remarkable. I’m sure there’s a way to get next cloud syncing working

I self-host rmfakecloud. Let’s me back it up and not share the data. Lots you can do with it from there, though I mainly do it for privacy.

https://github.com/ddvk/rmfakecloud

How does an iPad with an Apple Pencil compare?

I haven't used the remarkable but I bought a screen protector for my iPad that's intended to yield a paper-like writing and drawing experience when using the Apple pencil. It gets pretty close I think.

N.B. if you go this route you'd need to replace the Apple pencil tips a bit more regularly than you otherwise would given the rougher surface you're "writing" on.

Interested in which one you’ve found works best to recreate the paper experience?

They both have pretty good palm rejection and stylus pressure sensitivity.

For writing feel, the iPad gives you a lot of options from slick glass (the default) to many different screen protectors with different trade offs for writing friction, glare, and screen clarity. The Remarkable screen doesn't have as many options, but you might not miss them. The screen is very nice to write on.

For functionality, the iPad is much more advanced. It's faster (less pen latency), has fantastic text recognition, built in camera (which is great for capturing whiteboards), color, slightly higher resolution, etc... You also have more options for note taking apps. I personally use GoodNotes and Procreate for almost everything.

The biggest drawback for me with the Remarkable is the small screen. The big iPad has a screen close to A4 size which is fantastic for reading and marking up documents. The smaller Remarkable screen forces you to either shrink the document or do a lot of panning. There are 13" eink screens (like the Quaderno) and I hope the next generation of Remarkable devices offer it as an option.

I thought for a long time that I’d like some sort of Epaper tablet. But I eventually gave up on that idea because I realized I like my particular (not even that fancy, just familiar) mechanical pencil that I’ve been using for ages.

I wonder if that is a well known or widespread phenomenon. The people who would be most enthusiastic about a particular type of device are the most invested in the previous solution, so replacing it for the seemingly “best” customers is a surprisingly high bar.

I'm 100% in agreement with you.

After decades I finally settled on my preferred mechanical pencil brand. I'm not usually into new technology but these tablets have brought out a sense of excitement I rarely get. After trying them out though it's just not quite there for me. I still prefer my mechanical pencil and sketchbook.

A quality e-ink tablet simultaneously feels so close and so far away.

FWIW the mechanical pencil I've gravitated to is the pentel graphhear series

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