ReMarkable Paper Pro

I've owned a rm2 since xmas 2020 and really used to love it. I even brought an old obsidian plugin for it back from the dead. But the power button gave up 13 months in and they were dicks about it, and then when the pen nib holder disintegrated and they insisted it wasn't a known defect, I just gave up and it's been sat on my shelf ever since.

For anyone still into them though, a Lamy EMR pen coupled with the Wacom felt pen nibs (pn ACK22213) is an incredible upgrade which makes it feel like a real fineliner. Similarly, I found the various titanium nibs that you can get off amazon made it feel like a real ballpoint [0].

[0]: https://reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1545mn9/excel...

I'm typing this on my Boox Note Air 2 Plus. I absolutely love this device. I usually use it without the backlight, but sometimes at night I'll use the backlight and the adjustable blue light filter is an absolute must. This is my fifth or sixth E-Ink device, and probably my favorite. It's an Android device, so everything that I was already using works on it. Notably Firefox when properly configured, and Ankidroid.

Every single update has made my reMarkable tablet worse. I’ve stopped using it as a result.

I have absolutely no idea why they went all in on keyboard input, when the whole freaking point of the tablet was that you could write on it like paper.

100 times this. The hardware is great. The software sucks.

I literally can't believe in 2024 it's still not straight forward to "send a blog post from my phone to my remarkable" without some mangling happening along the way. It was genuinely jawdropping for me, I ended up contacting an employee on LinkedIn to confirm that this wasn't a well supported workflow

I have a ReMarkable 2.

I 100% agree with this - hardware is great but the software is terrible and it isn't being improved. They think of themselves as Apple in terms of the design but they forget that Apple also has decent software.

A couple of other things: - The Connect subscription: you don't need to use it if you use a USB connector to your computer and run the reMarkable app (but it's annoying). Because they use a custom OS they can't have a Dropbox, Google Drive, or One drive app. If they used Android than they could have this. - They have a document type called Notebook. You can create a Notebook and it comes with different templates for page designs (lined, graph, etc..). The galling thing is that they don't allow you to load your own template. You can do so if you ssh in and modify the OS but then any update destroys everything. I contacted them about this and the answer was basically "we don't give a crap".

I will NEVER buy anything from this company. They like to naval gaze at their hardware and they don't care about the software nor their users.

I excitedly went to that channel. I'm overwhelmed! Can you tell me the top three devices he recommends so I can review those videos? Man, he makes a lot of stuff!

If anybody else is wondering whether you need a Connect subscription to use the device, it seems the answer is no[1].

I watched the linked video and got kind of excited about buying one, and I was wondering about whether they'd pull the move of making me pay them a subscription to even use the thing I already paid them to own. That would basically make the whole device a non-starter for me.

Somewhere in the midst of this, I realized the actual reason I won't buy it is that I have no real use case for it, even though I think the technology is cool. Your mileage may vary.

[1] https://support.remarkable.com/s/article/Using-reMarkable-wi...

I regret buying mine. I like my Sony dpts1 much better which was 13 inches (a great size for reading book pdfs) while managing to be lighter somehow. I also used that to take university notes and do university cs homework.

I just can't recommend an e-book reader that's smaller than a piece of A1 paper if its purpose is to replace A1 sized paper (either books or notebooks)

Last time I shopped for an e-ink device (as a gift for my brother), I considered the remarkable, and even purchased one. Ended up returning it. It's just too limited in too many unnecessary ways.

I got a supernote instead. He couldn't be happier with it.

I've just ordered the Supernote Nomad. Small but my first experience with these things. Hopefully I haven't made a mistake!

Which device would work better than the remarkable for its intended purpose of note taking?

Supernote is a good choice!

I believe what you say is true for the average HN reader. I also believe the subscription is kind of ridiculous.

However, I also believe there is a market out there for a device like this that is 1) extremely limited and 2) very focused on a few specific tasks (handwriting and document review workflow)

Sometimes the other stuff is a distraction. My wife owns the remarkable 2 and it is really good for what she wants ("just" a replacement for paper).

Is it just me or the camera man has Parkinson !?

Pretty classic enshittification. I expect one response might end up being 'contract' developers who sign a contract of 3 years to develop an application and then after three years they go out and find a new contract.

I reason to this because software in hardware produces revenue only during hardware sales which typically fall off after the initial wave. Without continual revenue your business model goes upside down when you have developers for whom you don't have any work. So we get bullshit work and eventually we get 'RMR' or recurring monthly revenue because well we need to pay these folks.

Of course building an enterprise like that would require retooling your process with massive emphasis on sustainable build tools that are 'done' and similarly libraries. We massive documentation on taking the product firmware out of the archive and re-createing the entire build / test workflow with new developers.

A company like that might have 500 developers during initial product development and first shipments, that then reduces down to 10 or fewer for maintenance needs.

The surprising thing is that a lot of open source is actually kind of like this, a new 'thing' is out there and the number of people making contributions grows, and then it is 'shipped' or 'done' and the number of contributors reduces down to a handful, sometime zero, developers. Growing again when a zero day or CVE needs to be fixed and then back to zero. Because its OSS nobody is paying them, or maybe they are being paid by another company that uses the package and needs a fix, but the whole software development model is going to be completely changed over the next 10 - 20 years.

I have a remarkable 2 but don't use it much anymore, mainly because it doesn't have a backlight.

Oh, and page turning swipes were hit or miss. that was annoying.

I bought it for the same reasons you allude to - open, not locked down, cannot enshittify something you don't have to update. I didn't really buy it for the pen.

I tried a 6" kobo klara 2E for a while. You can mount it as a USB device, but you have to hack it somewhat to get "sideloading" of books to work. Nice device, but 6" was a little smaller than I wanted.

But then I found the Pocketbook Inkpad Lite.

It is my primary reader now. 9.7" screen with backlight.

No account, no subscription, no hacking to get it to work.

Out of the box, just hook to usb, transfer yoru files, start reading.

Also, it will read most file formats directly - so if you want to use .mobi instead of .epub, that works. It also says .azw, but I haven't tried it.

note it doesn't do handwriting. But it is $185.

Japan Display Inc showcased e-paper like LCD 11 years ago. It even has e-paper features like retained pixel at low power consumption. With further work notetaking will be possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=mdXu9jmTI2A

This makes you wonder if they are hitting some sort of physical limit regarding e-ink technology and color representation. If they are forced to dither them like they are doing now, will we ever get good saturation with e-ink?

> Remarkable 2 and gave up it almost solely because it didn't support USB mass storage, making it really annoying to transfer files

We had hoped to buy these for all our paperless office employees, and gave it up almost solely because it was far too easy to transfer files.

If they deliver a device with on-device encryption (as this claims) and sync or manual transfer tied (and locked) to company-owned storage, we'd buy them for all our Pro(fessionals).

To your point, instead we give our professionals iPad Air with Paperlike™ for pencil-feel and a keyboard for on-the-go use. We'd rather (for reasons) give them Remarkable Pros if it was capable of meeting Professional data-loss-prevention (DLP) needs.

Similar experiences with the reMarkable 1. The USB interface really bugs me. It's nice for annotating and highlighting PDFs, but pretty bad for reading. Great for taking notes, but awful at extracting them, unless you get an expensive subscription to their "cloud" garbage, which feels extortionate considering how expensive the device is.

You can ssh into the remarkable and copy files via scp.

I have scripted this (well, installation of some systemd units, but the workflow is the same). So I just plug my tablet into my laptop and run my script every time it updates.

It’s not ideal, but not super tedious either.

I’ve been planning to start charging via a raspberry pi so that the pi can automatically tend to the device whenever it’s connected, but haven’t gotten there yet.

Many rM owners (myself included) work around the template limitations by using pdfs as "templates" and writing on them. This covers probably 95% of my use of the device, their notebooks feel very limited by comparison

> My needs are mostly note taking and reading technical PDFs, and for that the reMarkable is fantastic.

I do both of those and I dislike the RM2. There's little space for notes above and below the PDF page, no infinite canvas. I have more space on the back of a printed PDF (to the left of the current text page) than in the RM2. So, all note taking in a PDF for me is just keywords, while I would much prefer to put text and drawing,s graphs, etc. all around the PDF page.

So, for the last few months I have barely used the RM2 and have gone back to pen and paper.

Pass it on to someone else then. It looks like you can get ~$300 for it on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=remarkable+2&rt=nc&LH_S...

Same story with my reMarkable 2. It's one purchase I still regret years later. I take a lot of handwritten notes and bought the reMarkable to keep them organized and indexed for full-text search. Well, the writing recognition turned out to be too imprecise and clunky to use, with many manual steps required and nothing even close to transparent background indexing that lets you search handwritten notes (okay, expecting that is a failure of expectations and product research on my part, but still, it felt like an obvious feature to go with the sync subscription...). Worse, having to put up with e-ink latency when typing out a search query quickly proved to be too tedious, and the software doesn't help, as you can't even do text search across all notebooks, only within a single one (what's the point of having directory and notebook hierarchies, then?) And that's the core functionality, secondary stuff like reading ebooks is even worse. It kind of exists, but the experience compared to say the recent Kindles is absolutely subpar. It's not just software though, I also couldn't get used to the feel of the pen, it's too taxing to use for any non-trivial note taking and the lag, while impressively short for an e-ink device, is still there. Honestly, I regret getting swayed by all the positive reviews I'd seen on HN. I'm sure there are use cases where the reMarkable works better, maybe PDF annotation or sketching, but I don't feel it measurably improves on the paper note taking experience, and I don't feel it justifies the steep price if that's what you buy it for.

Same here, and PDFs are very slow to load and sometimes fail. It's also just a tad too heavy for one handed use.

I had one of those. It also had some audio transcription capability, so you could take notes aligned with a lecture and then tap a letter on the page to play the audio that was recorded when you wrote it.

I never used it extensively but I remember it also had a nice integration with EverNote. That was truly a bygone era of productivity tools that are now zombie companies…

I too had a livescribe pen 12 or so years ago! It was so cool for the time

It's funny, I would have thought that OCR on handwriting on a tablet would be great, because they can capture each individual stroke, rather than just the final pixelated product. In other words, because you're witnessing it being written, there's a lot more information. In fact I wouldn't even call it OCR because it's not "optical", but rather "stroke" -- SCR?

Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet tries to do and fails? Or is it only trying to OCR after-the-fact, in which case I'm not surprised it's terrible.

I'm absolutely fine without OCR and searching if they can give us working links. All I want to do is to be able to doodle a star on a page, or a word, and have that work as a link off to another page in another notebook. That's all you need for a zettelkasten-style system to hold your notes in but I've not seen anyone do it.

Seems like they've improved the processor (at least the latency is lower) and that might help to add new features or improve pdf responsiveness, but they're still lacking on the software side, and even simple QOL features like the ones that rmhacks adds aren't available by default.

I feel like it falls short on the reading side (not searching, dictionary, note management...), and short on the notes side (simple drawing tools, no dashed lines, no shapes, and I think you can't even position text on the wherever you like on the page).

I really liked the initial hackability, as you have SSH access to the Linux inside the device, and people was building software to run on it, but seems like due to some changes since v3.4 of the firmware, it's either very difficult (or not possible) to do it, and the ideas I had for using it aren't feasible right now.

The price for the color model is (at least in Europe) already higher than a Boox Note Air3C, that's a full fledged Android tablet. Of course, the battery won't last as long even with all the optimizations, but is a bit lighter, has more resolution, and you can put whatever software you like that runs in Android. I haven't tested the software, though...

TLDR: not sure about this :(

I was hoping rM3 will be about improved OCR, and ideally a GPT chat app with integrated pen - just use GPT4v or something. Their AI integrations are shit.

Yeah... New product looks fantastic, but finding your notes will still be a pain. You have to be diligently organized with folders and notebooks to find anything.

Agreed. I got the RM2 because I thought it’d be “a notebook I can search.” No. I regret every piece of writing that has ended up locked up inside that device vs on paper notebooks.

It’s like an anti-discovery device.

I’ve got a RM2 and a Daylight tablet.

In ambient light the contrast is worse on the Daylight than the RM2 - the screen background is quite significantly darker.

However, the Daylight has a backlight which increases the contrast enormously. And it’s usable in the dark which the RM2 is not. The much faster refresh rate also gives it a more fluid feel.

What I didn’t anticipate is the difference the screen makes in how I use and perceive them:

As the RM2 is so simple and static it feels more like a notebook or book reader that happens to be battery powered, whereas the Daylight is definitely a gadget.

I’m more likely to use the RM2 to take notes or do some thinking and the Daylight as something to tinker with.

I have both. Daylight is _amazing_ for reading and marking up technical PDFs and books. Also good for marking up web pages.

Remarkable screen and pen latency is much better.

I hope they both succeed. Both awesome. I'll probably get this new Remarkable as well.

(That being said, I use my pen and paper bullet journal ($30) more than both of these combined).

I haven't used a Daylight (yet) but here's a side-by-side video of them being used in sunlight: https://x.com/daylightco/status/1808213555579441214

The reMarkable has better contrast, viewing angle, and resolution, the Daylight has a far better refresh rate. There are other tradeoffs between them of course, but display-wise, those are the main ones

DC has even worse contrast than e-ink.

I'm paying $2.99/month. Got mine last year, and used it, then didn't, and started again earlier this year - was using it daily for about 4-5 months. My daily routines changed and I've not used it as much, but will be picking it up again shortly. Was more for daily journaling and planning, but not as much 'in the workday' use. I think $29/year is an annual plan (looks like a new offering) - I may switch to that.

A feature I was using some is the 'desktop connect' thing - drawing on it is synced to the desktop app pretty much live (<1s delay, ime). Doing a screen share and letting people watch me draw using it has been useful, but not something I need a lot. But... considering some of the discussions I've been having lately, perhaps I do need it more. Trying to get data relationship concepts across to people seems to do better with pictures for some folks.

EDIT: Works fine without it and paid account. I think you even get a small amount of 'sync' data for free if you create an account (5meg or something?). I seem to remember I still had some stuff synced between desktop and device even before paying. I used it for months just as a standalone device with no issues.

The OCR stuff does send the data out to the cloud, and my experience is it's not that great, but my penmanship stinks, so it's more me than it.

This is pretty much all of my concerns as well. The top like 2/3rds of mine is pretty accurate on the tip of the pencil when writing, but on the bottom 1/3rd it's off by about 2mm and it's freaking obnoxious. It makes me hate writing on it to the point where I've gone back to real paper. I do occasionally use it for reading papers and other page-sized PDFs, but it's really not worth the cost for writing.

The addition of infinite pages made my RM2 unusable. It's far too easy to accidentally scroll, and hugely disruptive. I checked for tuning improvements for a couple of software updates, then set it aside permanently. That such a "simple" change could doom the device made me decide to go back to real paper, in all likelihood forever.

I have a cheap foldable split Bluetooth keyboard that I connect to my e-ink Boox often enough. Why not? The device has a large enough screen to be a laptop and it's very easy on the eyes. I really don't care what the typing latency is, I don't look at the keyboard nor the screen while typing.

> If you are writing a lot or working on a text file to take notes etc. it's a great product.

Even for this intended purpose, I am disappointed. The screen is imprecise up to 1 mm, no search in notes, etc. I went back to paper, which is certainly not what I expected.

Which tip/configuration is appropriate for the RM2? Having trouble finding that information on the Lamy site!

Adding to this, another great option is getting a Wacom One for your laptop. They're available for 30$ and you can use desktop note taking apps like OneNote or Xournal++ if you're more comfortable with them + you have the multitasking features of a laptop OS.

I appear to be in the minority where the RM2 is a perfect fit for my needs - but I can confirm that their support is aggressively anti-customer, and also non-compliant with EU consumer laws.

My device broke in warranty (< 1 year). Customer support refused replacements, finally offering a 2nd-hand / refurbished replacement (illegal according to EU law).

Despite my attempts at polite out-reach to individuals at the company, including C-level, everything was ignored until a lawyer friend sent a formal letter - and suddenly everything was magically resolved the next day.

It's such an expensive device, and each press-release makes it more and more cultish - I couldn't recommend buying this - I'll wait for a competitor to do a better job.

Buy from Amazon. Returns are a breeze.

Did they announce they're locking this new device? I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.

You can easily sync your handwritten notes to your computer and phone for free using the app. Once synced, you can back them up with your preferred method. The cloud service is designed to be a convenient, set-it-and-forget-it option.

Asking for a perpetual cloud synchronization at no cost is bold.

This is my stance. I'm increasingly just not buying anything that isn't have FOSS. Artificial constraints that try to force a subscription are a hard no.

Yeah, the subscription and the fact that it can’t handle simple tasks pushed me away from buying the reMarkable 2. I opted for a more convenient tablet instead. Without those features, it’s just a fancy toy that can easily be replaced by a sheet of paper. Plus, it’s heavier and needs more care. Why spend almost a grand on a device when paper does the same job for free?

you can backup and sync without the subscription. you just don't get unlimited storage.

you're not the target market then and that's fine

> What does the ReMarkable really excel at?

Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.

> It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important

Don't use the cloud sync and instead manually sync things between your own hardware, encrypt at rest if you feel like it.

> e-ink is great in bright environments [...] And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?

Living in a country with lots of sunlight and as a person who sometimes visits the beach, this is exactly what I want.

One of the main variables I look at when I buy laptops is "How well can I read from the display when I'm in sunlight?", I'm sure I cannot be the only one who likes to sit outside with my computer, or have windows that let in sunlight.

I learn best via writing things out by hand in my own words, and almost never read the notes afterwards. I am also profoundly disorganized :) Before I got a reMarkable I had accumulated (and thrown out) dozens of bulky paper notebooks. Now those are all digital.

Despite reMarkable's marketing around high-quality hand-drawn professional notes, I suspect crappy "transient" notes to aid memory and mental organization are the most common use case. For me it's really a thinking device rather than a writing device.

If I actually need to reference or organize my notes I will type something out in emacs.

If your notes are the kind that are written faster with a keyboard, you are not the target audience

I find it very useful when doing CAD (with intent to 3D print something). It lets me quickly sketch rough shapes and note measurements I've taken, visualize ideas to show them to colleagues, do geometry "math" with less chance of messing up. Paper would work just fine, I guess, but RM has editing and undo, so reworking large regions doesn't result in attempts of striking out with more ambiguous lines.

So, to generalize, I'd suggest it for people that do bespoke construction of some sort often.

> What does the ReMarkable really excel at?

I have the RM2, and my answer to that question is: nothing. Even when handwriting - which is their core feature - the screen is very imprecise at times - up to 1 mm. You can't search in notes, not even after converting them to text.

Most reviews I have seen say the battery life is terrible (which is the reason I haven't bought one). Can you share a little more on your experience and the 'long battery'.

Does it OCR handwritten notes? Can you export the PDFs that have been annotated? How do you get documents onto and off of the device?

Great to see Quaderno A4 mentioned. Using it everyday. Highly recommend it. Sad that it's not easy to find in many markets

I only see covers and screen protectors on Amazon. Is this a discontinued tablet?

I haven't looked at the software stack in a while. Has RM gone more open source yet? I didn't like how they were pivoting to toward the SaaS subscription thing. I'd much rather pay a little more up front for a fully open device then cheaper upfront but with an annoying subscription plus closed source.

At last someone echoing my biggest gripe with RM2. I dare say a number of recent sw upgrades have been annoying - but the one that made me use my rm less is the infinite scroll and pressing a button to add a new page. Also the zoom feels very clunky.

Is there a way to revert to the older versions of the software?

Didn’t us people that had it before the switch to subscription got a lifetime one grandfathered in?

For someone with ADHD, “do not disturb” is not a reliable solution to the distraction problem.

Writing this on an iPad - have bought like 5 RM2s for myself, employees and kids. It’s a great device. I just ordered the Pro. It comes very close to replacing a pad of paper, and has a bunch of quality of life benefits over paper. I’m not saying it’s better than a pad of paper, but it’s the first eink device I had used that offered a principled alternative.

I mainly use it for my journal/planner, using like a 1200 page PDF. Could I have that PDF on my iPad? Yep. Do I? No, the experience of the ultra high quality iPad color, pixels, brightness, interface, UI, all that just puts your (my) brain in a different space.

Anyway, it’s not for everyone, but I think most people who give it a try for note writing prefer it to the iPad.

Easier on the eyes. No light emitting hitting your eyes. Can read outside in sunlight.

Read about the advantages of e-ink.

Sony made one a while back but I've never tried it, and it's as expensive as the remarkable if not more.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/design/stories/DPT-RP1/

https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/sony-digital...

That's why I'm waiting for further announcements of the Supernote A4x, it fits that bill as far as I can tell.

Sure we do: https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/readmoo-mooi... . No idea of the quality, but it exists.

You can see the price on this thing. Large e-ink screens are expensive, colour large e-ink screens even more so. How many people do you think would pay 900EUR+ for a device 2cm larger on each side?

I wonder why the folios put the display to sleep.

Afaik, e-ink screens don't use any energy to display, but only to refresh.

How does cloud storage work without the internet?

Probably for visibility. It looks like only 5 star reviews get shown unless you specifically filter for fewer stars.

I concur. For a device of that price, size, and considering the reading and note-taking use case, only 229 ppi is abysmal. Why cut corners in a key part of the product?

One rumour is that Amazon negotiated exclusivity for the higher DPI screens.

E-Inks official specs list the color refresh time as 0.5ms in fast mode, 1 second in standard mode or 1.5 seconds in quality mode. That sounds like it could get annoying when reading full color content (e.g. comics).

At least it's an improvement from Gallery 2 which took 10 seconds to refresh in color mode, no wonder hardly anything ever used that generation...

Is this the first mainstream Gallery 3 display tablet (as opposed to Kaleido)? I know BigMe made one but it never caught on.

Do you mean hack the box in "go to this page in the settings where it tells you the root password", or something else?

It's not good as an e-book reader regardless of how much storage you need. It renders epubs to pdf on the fly (so changing the font size induces a long delay in a big document, for instance). The documentation even tells you it's not a good ebook reader.

Do you need to have hundreds and thousands of pdfs on a reading device? How fast can you read?

IMHO, it's too small for PDFs. If they offered an 13" / A4 / Letter sized version for a few hundred more, I'd buy it today. Instead I'm using a 13" iPad Pro which has different compromises.

I've mostly used it for reading textbooks or academic papers (and taking notes on them) and it works fine for me. It can be a little small but you can zoom in if you need

I've had a remarkable tablet. I'm very much waiting for the Supernote A4 x2. There's also BOOX Tab X and BOOX Max 3 if you want a 13.3" today.

I read arxiv content on the Remarkable 2 and I am satisfied. The reader auto-removes the white margins, so the smaller screen is not a problem. The zoom functionality is snappy for an e-ink device from 3 years ago (slow by modern standards). The quick-view thumbnails used to scroll through far-away pages is sufficient for my workflow. Generally I am very happy with the device for consuming static academic PDFs.

From my past research 13" is the minimum I'd be comfortable with for a tablet that is tailored for research papers. The only one that seemed just right was the Sony DP-1 or (DPT equivalent) though it was around 1000 USD and Windows only compatible (for file sync and what have you).

That is the only thing I use mine for these days. Screen size is fine for that.

I miss an API to their cloud storage. It is simply a dealbreaker that it aims to help avoiding distractions but leaves no room for building an automated workflow around it.

It's designed as a reading tablet with good pen support, so yes. And E-ink makes reading more comfortable than LCDs. For technical PDFs, size matters a lot. Normal reading tablets often resize the text to be easily readable, but PDFs cannot do that. So having a tablet of good size becomes a dealbreaker for such use-cases, more so than other features.

Remarkable lacks a backlight, and e-ink displays don't have deep blacks, so depending on your reading environment, it may be a bit low-contrast. I got a kobo elipsa myself for this reason. Kobu is notably cheaper and has a backlight which helps the contrast a bit, but the pen support is waaay worse.

From experience,reading the screen size is not a problem at all.

But writing is where you notice how small the screen really is.

It’s down to the size difference between printed text and handwriting.

Just reading, it's okay. For annotating it's close to useless. I'd suggest a Supernote or a real tablet.

Remarkable is very open source friendly and you can ssh into it from the get go.

I'm really looking forward to installing Zed on this thing!

depends on source of books I find, and perhaps also if you have eye strain issues, I need to read mine with my glasses often, which is irritating. But the zooming in can often leave you with text being too big to fit on the display.

So I sort of feel like I should love it more, but this bit makes it annoying for me.

It honestly depends on you. I used a Google Nexus 7 as a textbook and paper display during university back in the day and while in some cases you needed to zoom in overall it was fine. I don't have any experience with this remarkable but purely from a screen size perspective, if your eyes are healthy and you're willing it should be fine.

If weight is a factor (and, of course, if you can afford it) the new iPad Pro is an amazing option. Without a cover is the lightest device I’ve seen.

the reMarkable lets you upload PDFs and then you can write on them, so perhaps it can do what you need.

I was using mine a little while ago for a PDF-based RPG-type thing which involves a lot of writing on the PDF and it worked quite well (the main downside was the PDF took a while to render as it's very image-heavy but that might work better in your case.)

What line of work are you in?

I've had an rM2 for a few years now, and can answer these.

> Will I be able to use it without creating an account with the company?

I _think_ so. I created one, and am not willing to wipe my device to see if it's required. I _have_ used mine for months without connecting it to the network, so it's certainly not required on a regular basis.

> Will I be able to use it if the company fails?

Yes.

The "Connect" service is nice and all, but really the big that that it provides is an easy way to sync files to and from the device. That's not required; you can just use USB to transfer if you want.

> Will I be able to install third party firmware and software?

Yes.

There are active F/OSS projects out there for the rM2, including custom bootloaders, OS forks, and applications.

That is frequently enough, but for a lot of folks who are fans of Remarkable, the preference is based on one or more of these three:

(1) e-ink for both paper-like visual texture (the pixels are not square) and eye comfort (impossible with traditional screens)

(2) single-purpose note-taking without distractions (although some hate that)

(3) paperlike haptic feel (the only thing that can be addressed by screen cover on an ipad)

E-ink is not "paper feel". It's a super low-power display, it only consumes power when the content on it changes. Since it works by moving around physical pigment molecules inside little cells, the screen will continue showing the last thing that you put on it literally forever while consuming no power.

I have an e-ink tablet, the Boox Note Air 3 C, when I use it as an ereader or notetaker the battery lasts for weeks. A little less when I use it for web browsing or apps that change the content on the screen a lot.

I have both iPad Air with Paperlike cover and a Boox Note 3C... and the Boox with its color eInk and Wacom pen is SO MUCH nicer to write on and read that it's really not comparable.

Also paperlike film for iPad significantly degrades the screen, making it darker and grainy. It's still a better all-around device, but its really not as good as these eInk tablets for writing.

Paper texture is not the same as e-ink. The latter retains state when power is removed.

Uhm, like this one https://www.amazon.com/ELECOM-Pencil-Feel-Compatible-Scratch... ?

good question. they have a good product, but it seems like their marketing folks haven't figured out selling to engineers/geeks

ha — that's exactly what I've been working on on a separate reMarkable project posted earlier today [1] :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437740

Seems like you can, but not clear how easy it is - https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

There is quite a lot of hacking possible on the RM1 and RM2 at least. This repo has a nice overview over the many projects: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

I haven't tried it but the PineNote is an attempt to be a hackable alternative: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

But from what I have read software support for the device is very unfinished and not moving that quickly. So while you can hack on it, you will also likely need to.

(EDIT: Some other comments here appear to be suggesting that this is unlikely to come back in stock.)

Can you elaborate on some examples please?

Also, if you were in the company's position, what would you do?

According to the video [0], the pen needs to be charged and I thought EMR pens don't.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uyh6KSYVJ4

I'm a Remarkable 2 owner and yeah, this is a "make or break" feature to even start considering a potential upgrading, but found nothing online about if the Pro version has this or not.

I've read quite a bit on Kindle and Nook, iPad, and iPhone, and I think these Remarkable style eink writing devices and kindle style reading devices are each firmly in a small niche. The tech is really sexy, but for most people I think these kinds of devices and kindle kind of devices are impractical.

For instance, with Kindle and nook, the best use I got out of it was reading on the train and bus where having a paperback-book sized device was really convenient. Outside of that, I have rarely reached for my Kindle.

As for eink writing devices, Even without the high price, I am very skeptical that they would be more useful than a stack of printer paper and a decent pen. Especially with modern phone camera features that can transcribe your handwritten text and save the image as a PDF. I suspect the target market for Remarkable is quite small, and I also suspect that many people who buy them rarely use them, just like I rarely use my kindle.

Here's an experiment: navigate your browser to the Remarkable page, look at it, and pay attention to how you feel when thinking about using the device. Next, navigate to the PineNote page[1], a device that has technological capabilities that are quite similar to the remarkable 2, and do the same thing. I suspect that the Remarkable marketing is doing a lot of work here. (One caveat here is that the Remarkable Pro is color, so the comparison is more different than if they still had a marketing page for Remarkable 2)

1. https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/

To me, eink is definitely better for reading books, which is what most of those readers (Kindle, Kobo etc) are used for.

The other big advantage is battery life. I have an old Kobo Aura I got second hand on eBay. I keep the WiFi turned off, have installed KOReader and load books over USB (with the held of Calibre). With semi-regular usage the battery lasts weeks if not months. Way longer than any phone or tablet I ever had. Granted of course those devices do a lot more, but it's nice to at least very rarely have to worry about whether you have enough charge to read a book.

Like you I'm not sure of the advantages of eink for more general computing. I wonder what the (actual) battery life is like on the ReMarkable.

i have a kindle. I use it for reading books. Its only function (to me) is reading books.

I have an ipad pro (2018). It's functions are 1) watching youtube 2) drawing/painting on procreate and 3) using some music apps like AUM and various synths 4) acting a kitchen display for recipes and 5) general note taking if I need to take notes that involve drawing or diagrams.

I have a phone. I read on my phone because its the device I have with me most.

I look at this Remarkable and

1) It's much more money than either my kindle or even my phone cost.

2) I can't install the kindle app on it, for it to replace my kindle

3) It's not small or convenient enough to replace the kindle or phone

4) It's not good enough for drawing to replace the ipad

5) I don't understand why it doesn't interoperate with a lot of existing stuff. If I want to use my wifi to backup the remarkable to my onedrive, it doesn't sound like that's possible, which is possible on my phone and ipad, and isn't necessary on kindle since everything is already dealt with by amazon whispersync.

Not for me either.

I guess it's a bit like putting lemon on fish, in the beginning we did so for a purpose but after a while people just got used to it and now it's a established thing.

Similarly, we're so used to feeling at least a tiny bit of resistance when writing that when it isn't there, things feels "greasy" or unnatural.

I personally agree with that it feels nicer with a bit of contrast compared to sliding around. Drawing on a Wacom tablet gives me a lot better results than drawing on an iPad, even when I get to see the lines where I draw it with an iPad and with the Wacom that drawing appears on the monitor instead at on the tablet.

Higher quality, fountain pen-friendly paper tends to be smoother than regular paper (e.g, clairefontaine, tomoe river, japanese paper in general) yet still much less slippery than a glass surface.

How slippery/grippy you want things to be depends on the type of pen you use (gel, ink, pencil, brush,etc.) and to some extent also preference, but people generally agree that there are cases which work just badly: very slippery (e.g. glass) and much too rough (e.g. sand paper).

I got annoyed with how quickly I was going through Remarkable nibs, so I bought myself a third party titanium replacement. It is very slick in comparison.

With the replacement I get wrist strain. With the originals I don't.

This can be adjusted for based on different nibs (and/or screen protector) --- a number of different ones are available and they are easily changed.

Looks like 20% VAT

I can access my RM2 with SSH via WiFi or USB-C, if that's what you mean. But the official reMarkable client is not available for Linux, which I find a bit odd, since it is a Qt-app and the founder of the company apparently is an avid linux user.

I have got it working via Wine, but it keeps breaking after updates. I do not use it often though, as I mostly just upload new files via the website.

The remarkable2 works well with Linux in the respect that the remarkable itself runs Linux and you can just ssh into it.

> I'm still surprised I can't really share my screen and start drawing on a whiteboard in a Slack meeting which was my primary desire for having one

Are slack meetings really that far behind? I was doing that with my iPad in zoom 5 years ago, and regularly do it in Google meet now…

It's much more pleasant especially in very bright light like when outdoors. And this depends on the device but you usually have a much much lower minimum illumination level too. A phone or tablet on the lowest brightness still pretty much lights up a dark room while e-ink does not. Big difference if you read in bed with someone who is asleep.

I can use my E-Ink devices all day with zero eyestrain, which are Barnes & Noble Nook devices and now a Boox device.

LCD screens project light on your face (and in your eyes). E-ink does not. And there's the whole sun thing (altough I rarely use my Kobo outside). I don't know about sleep and focus (I sleep easily and like a rock) but I can use my kobo without glasses, which I can only do for a short time with LCD.

>From what I know most color E-Ink displays on the market today have b/w particles and a color LCD on top.

It's not an LCD on top, it's just a static stained-glass checkerboard pattern.

USD prices usually don't include sales tax. Not sure how it is with JPY, but EUR prices usually do include VAT.

Wonder how much of that is due to local taxes or perhaps tariffs. Pricing cross currency is more than just an exchange rate calculation.

10% VAT covers half of it. Possibly tariffs are responsible for some of it, or the difference could be due to strength differences of JPY, USD, and NOK since it's a Norwegian company.

Not color, but I got an Elipsa 2E to augment my Libra 2 (different sizes, different use cases). It works really, really well. The notebook software is nearly as advertised.

Not presently, but I may possibly have impulse-bought the Pro (nearly got Rm2 but held back for the tech to improve - on paper this seems to be the case for the Pro), and I'm already reconsidering it so I probably will have some experience with that program soon.(n. b. They are not a functional company and cannot cancel orders that have been placed, FYI)

Horses for courses.

Use an e-ink tablet if you want:

- long battery life

- paper-like writing experience

- high resolution (for b/w)

- an alternative to paper for books and notes

That said, there are devices which are essentially Android tablets w/ e-ink screens, which aside from refresh rates work much as one would expect.

I suspect they'll honor their 100 days return policy if you ask them.

There are two options for that:

* Onyx Boox Mira and Mira Pro: https://shop.boox.com/products/mira

* Dasung Paperlike Monitors: https://shop.dasung.com/

Between them you can pick between multiple sizes and specs. I haven't tried either, but I have a number of Onyx Boox devices (a Palma phone sized one, and Nova Air small tablet sized one) and I'm very happy with their quality.

I've been happy with my 13.3" Dasung Paperlike HD-FT. I can imagine eventually getting a larger color e-ink monitor for office work, and a smaller one for travel.

Paper is nice, but can be cumbersome to organize. While I love physical books, my e-reader is so much convenient as it's lighter than the majority of book and I only have the one thing to bring. So if you like to take notes (and refer to them later) something like this could be great. But I agree that it is too much expensive for what it offers and too locked down. At least with the iPad, you can install third-party apps to sync files and what not.

P.S. I was seriously considering it, but I went back to paper after trying to use my iPad for digital notetaking (too much distraction and the main apps, goodnotes and notability, have become awful). I have a clipboard and a ram of paper as a thinking tool. Then I copy the final result in a text file.

> a problem that is solved pretty simply and cheaply by a good spiral bound notebook and a nice pen.

You're right, but only mostly :)

The paper and pen that it replaced for me certainly wasn't cheap. I bought the rM2, keyboard folio, and the pen, so I'm all-in for around $1k USD. My EDC pens are all around the $150-$400 mark.

There are use cases that it does much better, though. I regularly use mine in Zoom meetings, and the desktop app allows me to screencast my rM2 to the call. It's super nice to be able to draw a diagram "on paper" and have everyone on the call see what I'm doing.

> I can just carry this new device around with me and never lose deep focus!

This is a net zero, at least for me. Before, I had two notebooks (one for work, one for personal stuff) and a pen. Now I have a single device that's the same height and width, but is about 1/3 as thick. The weight is a bit less. It's not distracting because all I can do with it is take notes and read PDFs/ebooks.

Actually, I take it back. It's a net win. I no longer have a separate Kindle that I carry with me.

Too-dark...the Remarkable 2 is e-ink at least, so did you mean low contrast? Or is there some other problem with it?

I posted some other comments in this thread - unless they've significantly improved the software in the past year I would 100% recommend against it.

(Also, a lot of manga gets distributed through proprietary apps now so an iPad is probably your best bet anyways, at least if you read the serialized version and not the tankoubon releases...)

I have the RM2 and it took them one and a half years of me owning it until I could draw straight lines. I still can't search in notes, even after converting them to text. If I don't annotate everything I write with tags, then I'll have a hard time finding it again.

The screen is imprecise, sometimes the line appears 1mm away from the tip of the pen.

Their synchronisation service costs monthly, I think 3€?

I'm simply underwhelmed, especially for this price. The Supernote would have been a much better choice for me - now I'm looking at the Samsung Tab S9 series for real note taking.

I had the same experience with the reMarkable 2.

I agree with the comment. Owner of the reMarkable 2. I also think that in this case making an open source ecosystem gives more business benefit for reMarkable because very soon they will disappear with the growing number of competitors (and new tech) arising.

Two big buttons to choose one of the folios and a small radio button below for no folio. And the Type Folio is + 249 € but also Save up to 49 € with bundle, so it actually "only" costs 200 €. Why would you even do this, make it appear more expensive then it is and on top of that confuse me, is selecting a folio already the bundle or can I somewhere buy a bundle that saves 49 € instead?

A big issue is that it requires a new pen. The earlier pens are not compatible.

I use a 3rd party pen with the RM2, much better ergonomics, but not clear what now will work.

The rM2 at least allows you to screenshare wirelessly, which of course can be done while charging. I expect this one will be the same in that respect.

The rM2 also "just runs linux" under the hood. I bet you could write a utility to screenshare over USB if you really wanted to.