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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the software will be the most important part of the device, not necessarily the screen.

What makes the Remarkable great is that it's functionality (while limited) makes for an excellent experience.

Any more details on what apps will be built in and designed for the device? (not just 3rd party Android apps that will feel like any other tablet).

Also - I would order this immediately to support more e-ink devices, but the display is too small for me - at least 13" to display full page documents.

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Obsidian already announced an update to support it.

- https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1793691977642561952

- https://www.threads.net/@kepano/post/C7UeqwtvHJe

we've built our own PDF parser / renderer, so we have a pretty good beta PDF reader app we're building

next up would be epub reader / support

and then building our own notetaker & typewriter app (though google docs, lex.page, IA writer are pretty good)

and many more services and apps, like actually finally good handwriting recognition

Why PDF first? Isn't reading Ebooks (in ebook format) the main use case for such devices?

Once you're approaching regular paper size, PDF is king.

There are just so, so many documents out there which were laid out with A4 paper in mind, which can't really be converted to any other format with reasonable effort. Just think of every research paper published ever.

People who are primarily reading books aren't really in the market for this kind of device. You can read books just fine on any old kindle and it's far more comfortable on a smaller, lighter device.

Likely to focus on use cases for their display tech. Ebooks are already solved and faster refresh won't meaningfully improve the experience over other devices.

Why not use existing libraries, like Poppler?

Agreed. This screams scope creep.

"We've built our own renderer" would make sense to me, perhaps specific handling is needed for the device's display.

However rolling a parser does not without further context, it screams: "I want to encounter some dumb non-specification stuff and crash for no reason"

Is there an SDK or open source libraries that you've developed for the device that developers could leverage? It seems that you will support the android app store, but will there be a separate Sol:OS store for more tailored apps?

Is the kindle app not supported?

Is Kindle on Android? Yes.

These are the apps they are specifically building. But all Android apps are availabe for it as well.

I mean, did they specifically check that the Kindle app works well on their OS.

KOReader is great for Eink devices. I used it both on my Remarkable and Kindle. It's made for paper like displays. It already has an android version.

Yeah it's so good. I used it on my really old kindle paperwhite and now my kobo Clara, which I've had for years.

I had a remarkable for like a day before I retuned it. Couldn’t write-to-text into a PDF. Could type into a PDF or could write-to-text in their writing app. But not in a PDF. It was also intolerably slow.

Aren't there already Android tablets with eink screens?

Yes. I have a Boox, and I’m quite happy with it. I don’t use many android apps, but the killer app for me (why I got it over a Remarkable or Kindle Scribe) is being able to run a Zotero-compatible app (Zoo for Zotero) with bidirectional sync for reading and marking up PDFs.

There are but OP doesn't appear to be using e-ink, it's much too fast to be that. I would guess it's an unorthodox form of LCD display.

It’s reflective LCD (RLCD).

But with a backlight, which is novel I think?

Reflective LCD with backlight is called "transflective LCD" and they have been in use for years: https://newhavendisplay.com/blog/transmissive-vs-reflective-...

Ohh neat. Like the Playdate

Yeah the Playdate screen is lovely, but pretty rough without a backlight.

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