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Comment by laserbeam | Hacker News Reader

I love my remarkable 2. Bought it before "Connect" was a thing, so I don't have a subscription. But I cannot recommend it to anyone. There are better alternatives out there and MyDeepGuide (youtube) has reviewed them all better than I ever could.

The software is moving too slowly and often in a wrong direction. Especially since they released the keyboard folio most updates were around typing (which is supar on any eink device)... and they generally made my experience as a pen user worse.

I don't care if the new hardware is awesome, whenever mine breaks I will switch to a competitor.

EDIT: the reviewer I mention is excited about the device https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkEg8WLeW4Q

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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...

They absolutely know about this, given that the seemingly reworked markers for this tablet have a redesigned nib holder that doesn't look like it breaks as easily as the old ones. This is a common enough issue that there are people on ebay selling caps to replace the broken nib holder, but they seem to expensive for what amounts to a piece of 3D-printed plastic; I might just look into your solution with the lamy pen. It's just a shame that reMarkable is handling those issues so badly. They force you to buy a new pen for $130 because a little piece of broken plastic.

Not sure if country of residence makes any difference (I’m in EU), but at least I got a new pen from warranty when the nib holder broke. And I think it was even little over 2 years after the purchase.

stopped using mine because of the nib holder (mainly because I was furious at the build quality)

> "But the power button gave up 13 months in"

I had the exact same issue on mine... you can just feel it's bad quality.

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.

I just worry about using Android… this sort of e-ink device seems somehow even more personal than a laptop or cellphone (which are already quite personal); like a journal or something. I’d love one that had a community developed OS, like Linux or BSD.

By now it is more than proven that devices with community developed OSes never take off to the amount to keep a sustainable business, and then there is the whole FOSS OS distribution politics on top.

ReMarkable2 is running on Gentoo iirc.

They use their own in-house OS, based on Linux, Codex.

I don't think that's true, but in any case it doesn't have to be "community developed" to not be Android.

> "I just worry about using Android…"

Exactly, I'm avoiding them for the same reason, I don't want to use a personal e-ink device running on an OS created by the biggest advertiser in the world.

I was hoping Pocketbook would release something new this year running some Linux distro / with less tracking, and more privacy.

PS. Also: i want a light sensor to automatically adjust brightness/night mode based on lighting conditions (previous Pocketbook models don't have this.)

AOSP is free and clear of Google beyond the obvious fact that a lot of engineers paid by Google contribute to it.

Can AOSP be installed on the Boox (10.3) though? I thought the bootloader was locked…

In any case, i think going this route might be very finicky, i’m afraid it would become a new hobby just to get it up and running / and keep it updated.

Probably true, although getting it to run seems doable.

No, it is locked and furthermore DOA because devices don't get version updates after release. E.g. my ultra C comes and dies with Android 13... In late 2023.

I have the slightly older Boox Note Air 2, and can second this comment. It’s a really nice device!

As I don't have an Android eink device (I do have an Android phone and a Kobo with KOReader, for the record), I would like to know: have you tried (and what are your opinions on) any apps designed specifically for eink screens?

Thinking about EInkBro [0] as the browser or ReLaunchX [1] as the launcher, even KOReader as document reader.

[0] https://github.com/plateaukao/einkbro

[1] https://github.com/Leszek111/ReLaunchX

EInkBro is terrific. I filed a bug last year, the dev fixed it in less than a week. I use the stock launcher, but on an old Nook I used ReLaunchX, it was fine. On that device I only had two applications that I used anyway.

I have not tried KOReader, but I can test it for you. What features do you use?

I'll second EinkBro as an awesome browser. I absolutely cannot stand anything else on my e-book reader: Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, Firefox/Android, Onyx's NeoBrowser (rebranded Chromium), and DDG Privacy Browser installed, I only use those if EinkBro blows up for some reason, which it very rarely does.

I've had a lot of interactions with the developer and the GitHub repo, and he's been quite responsive. Hasn't addressed everything, but several features added and bugs get smashed fast.

I'm going to check that out. I have had a Max Lumi for years and have been happy with it, but I never do browsing.

Any other apps I you recommend?

I try to minimise the apps I install / use.

Though I'd give nods to:

- Termux, of course. Linux-on-Android userland. There's a suite of related apps which I also install (e.g., Termux:API and Termux:Styling.) There's a black-on-white theme which works quite well (default is white-on-black, not so much).

- F-Droid. FOSS archive repo, independent of Google Play.

- Aurora Store. Alternative interface to Google Play.

- APK Mirror. Direct access to app installs, though not managed (no updates).

- Hacker's Keyboard. Far preferable to Android or Onyx defaults.

- A podcast app. I'm using AntennaPod (FOSS), have also used PodcastRepublic in the past.

- RSS Feed reader, though I'm finding I don't make much use of this. Feeder seems to be the default.

- Internet Radio player. Transistor is one option. Not something used frequently, but handy to have.

A few others though most are very occasionally used and/or disappointments (e.g., Mozilla's Pocket App, which has been an absolute shitshow, despite potentially filling a critical niche). For the most part I avoid anything that has an account associated with it, largely to avoid distractions. Though also because tablets are shitty generative tools. Adding a Bluetooth keyboard helps slightly, but Android still throws in far too many limitations.

Oh, it was just out of curiosity, as an eInk device with a more accessible platform (compared to my old Kobo with it's old Linux system) is something I love to daydream of. Thank you for your reviews!

As for KOReader, I mostly use the epub reading capabilities, and the FTP client for getting files onto it. I've tried it as an app on my Android phone but it felt a bit cumbersome in a smaller screen, and I think the faster refresh rate of LCD panels doesn't suit it well. I do really love it on my Kobo, though.

Koreader handles the reading part perfectly on my Boox device. For ftp I use the default Boox functionality which works well for me. Einkbro is good but I ultimately stick to Firefox for the sync between devices. No experience with other launchers as I don't use any other apps and the default one doesn't bother me

+1 for Kobo on Boox. +20 for EInkBro (which I use with Bazqux reader for awesome RSS experience).

Some other apps that work (not amazingly but they do work well enough ) are Todoist, readwise reader (hard to use but good to have locally to check excerpts and notes), Syncthing and obsidian (but only to read notes in case to want to check something)

Blinklist (?) audio reader worked too. Outlook too. But most of these apps I just use them to look things up and avoid switching to phone when reading (I leave the phone in my room while at home)

Every time I look at it I get turned off by Android 11 being so old. I don’t know the Google ecosystem as well, how much longer will that API version be supported? Does it get security updates? Can I unlock it and install something less Googled?

I don't believe that there are third-party Android builds for the Boox devices, simply because they've modified it to better fit E-Ink screens.

Yeah, for me a Boox would have been way more tempting if there were third-party builds available.

No, there aren't any because they don't follow the GPL and haven't released their sources at all

I really do love mine too, and support has been rather good. I do worry about it reaching end of life, but only mildly. I do wish that boox would open source their android changes, they are arguably the best in class features for eink, and beat the pants off systems like the Kindle

I actually did love the E-Ink display algorithms, but maybe two months ago an update changed them and it is far worse. Lots of dithering, and I have a hard time configuring the "Enhance dark colours" and "Enhance light colours" settings to display apps as good as they were prior. Don't upgrade the OS!

Last I heard, book is violating open source licenses.

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.

I imagine a lot of people bought reMarkables, enjoyed the stylus handwriting for a few weeks, and then remembered that they actually prefer typing to writing by hand. So the product shifted to become a keyboard-driven device with an e-ink screen that incidentally offers handwriting as a novelty, rather than a primarily handwriting-driven device.

I think they just realized they could get Freewrite’s market too if it did both.

Maybe? Anicdata, but nobody I know who has a reMarkable tablet uses that interaction mode. If I want a keyboard, I'll use a laptop.

I've been using a reMarkable since the first release and have never experienced what you describe. Yes, the updated focus on typing more recently - but what else can they really do for the writing experience without new hardware? Lots of updates I don't care about, but none that make it "worse".

I really hate accidentally hitting the text input button when reaching out to change my pen/tool. All other tools I can easily just spam and click through, but the text one is slow and messes up the display with the virtual keyboard. I get the physical keyboard, but the virtual one has so far only annoyed me.

The Remarkable “community” is full of people like this — especially on Reddit.

99% of the time they have some comically unique workflow that Remarkable “needs” to support or they want to read ebooks on the thing and have it be better than a Kindle (which they also hate) or something else that if they did any research before buying would have (hopefully) dissuaded them.

An eink device not being great at reading books is silly. These devices are especially compelling for academics, but Remarkable has no links to reference managers like Zotero. It also is radically dependent on your computer or phone for getting material on/off, when an integration with Readwise for instance would fit naturally into people’s flow and not require cluttering up the filesysten with temporary material like news articles. Search over handwriting is bad to impossible, and there’s no mechanism to link to another note or another page, a now standard feature on all competitors except the Kindle Scribe that helps solve the “I can’t flip back and forth in my notebook” problem common to all electronic notebooks.

People’s frustration is that it could do radically more that way would really enhance functionality and utility for a lot of people, without hurting its distraction free nature, but they refuse to do so. The thing doesn’t even support comic book archives, and the new one has a great color screen!

> An eink device not being great at reading books is silly.

No it isn’t.

Remarkable is primarily marketed as a replacement for a paper notebook.

If that’s not far and away your #1 use case you’re going to be disappointed in it.

> The thing doesn’t even support comic book archives

And my bicycle doesn’t ride well on ice. I don’t blame the bike.

It's a processor and a screen. There's nothing about the physical device that prevents it from doing well at reading ebooks or comics. It's purely software. Forcing me to carry both a tablet for reading and a tablet for writing is ridiculous, especially at an ~$800 price point.

I can't mark up documents in a paper notebook, but it's marketed as one of the chief uses for Remarkable. Why? Because it's not "a paper notebook" it's electronic paper -- ie it's meant to do everything paper does. If I can print it out, I should be able to read it without much trouble, and would expect a good experience doing so for such an expensive device.

You don't have to go full Boox with the entire Android ecosystem to do that if you don't want to. But as an example of what a great reading experience on epaper can be, I'd refer you to Neoreader from Boox, the default reading app on their platform, which has excellent support for epub, comic books/manga, and PDFs.

> but what else can they really do for the writing experience without new hardware?

Great handwriting conversion, search in notes and converted text (not just relying tags to find stuff), great pdf annotation (not just highlighting and keywords here and there, but rather space all around the page for note taking), digests with commands, creating and extracting parts of text using parsed annotations, etc. I have a RM2 and I barely use it because it is simply too barebones and lacks precisely these features that I would expect from such a device.

Instead they're focusing on making it into a poor mans laptop.

> I have absolutely no idea why they went all in on keyboard input

Yeah it sucked how they bricked every Remarkable without a keyboard attached and made everybody mail their markers back in.

The update which added all the keyboard features made the writing experience much worse. In particular the hand contact detection was changed in a bad way, so if became very easy to accidentally resize/zoom the display when writing.

It got so annoying that I switched to an iPad.

I haven’t noticed any of that

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

Other people in this thread are saying that you can run your own software on it. If that is the case, it should be easy to integrate whatever you want, or am I mistaken?

I believe adding extra components (i.e. custom software) would classify as the "mangling" GP wanted to avoid.

It’s 2024, like 6 people read blog posts lol. Not surprising they don’t support this. Sending a PDF from phone to Remarkable is dead simple.

Friend, like 50% of the content on this website is blog posts. Are there only six of us? Are all these accounts just bots? Are you even real? Am I even real????

The guys my dad goes to the diner with still have cassette players in their trucks. When they look around they see other cassette listeners.

I read blog posts

Neat! I never said you didn’t.

My point was that overall, “blog post readers” are now in the minority — even if they tend to hang out with each other.

And it’s not surprising that supporting the needs of “blog post readers” is no longer a priority for many companies — including Remarkable.

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!

I believe he has said the Supernote A5X is his favourite. There's a newer A5X2 coming out later this year to update it (though it has repeatedly been delayed)

I like my A5X

I like my A6x

Looking at the video there is a significant lag in the rendering. Is it noticeable when you're writing? Also looks like there is no pressure sensitivity so all the notes are come out in that ugly fat style. Maybe I'm just spoiled with my Wacom though!

> Looking at the video there is a significant lag in the rendering. Is it noticeable when you're writing?

Speaking from my experience with a remarkable, not on that device.

I think two factors contribute to this. One is that there are different rendering modes, and it uses a very fast one for updating pen strokes so there is less delay than you would guess by looking at larger updates. The other is that the stylus obscures the very end of the line anyways.

The A6X2 is great as well, and fits a surprisingly small niche for smaller writing devices.

I would also love a device that is the size of a pocket notepad someday

I have a Supernote A5X! It's great! I got it to replace my old rm and never looked back. I also recently bought the Supernote A6X2. Not sure which I prefer size-wise. Sometimes the smaller A6X2 is great, especially for reading. Other times drawing on the A5X is more comfortable.

One thing I don't like about the A6X2 is that there is a noticeable gap between the screen and the pen. This gap isn't there (or maybe is just way smaller) on the A5X. The screen on the A6X2 is also textured, I guess to try to mimic paper, but I grew to like the gel pen feel of the A5X screen.

Also a very happy user of the A5X. Using it for about 3 years now, with a Lamy pen. I could not imagine reviewing papers sent to me as pdf without it.

He does have best-of videos. There's at least one at the end of each year, but there was also one a few days/weeks ago.

I went through all of these devices a couple years ago, and chose Supernote A5X which seems to be the winner on that channel too.

I think they are about to release Sueprnote A5X2 in a few weeks also

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)

A4 surely. A1 paper is massive.

The kind of ebook reader you open to the crossword puzzle and say "harrumph" an awful lot whilst sitting in your high back wing chair in front of the fireplace where discrete employees refill your brandy snifter. You may occasionally bend down one corner of the ebook reader as you peer askance at the likes of who they are letting in these days. There is a member of staff whose sole job it is to stand nearby with a real news paper and snap the pages to show your displeasure as you return to crossword. Five down, "someone who adds nothing to the conversation beyond pointing out the minor flaws in another's statements." Begins with P... With P... Hmmm...

;-)

I kind of like this A1 ebook idea. Time to get out the wallet.

Get a touchscreen TV?

To difficult to swat flies with and the hired help cannot spread them on the kitchen floor after mopping so that the floor dries faster.

A4 paper has a diagonal of about 364mm (≈14.3 inches). I've not seen an e-paper e-book reader that big. Several companies lie and claim to have A4 screens when they're considerably smaller.

the DPT-S1 is 13.3-inch. It's close enough I haven't even noticed it's not the size of A4. It's huge.

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!

I bought one. No regrets yet. I use it for both reading and note taking.

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

From my searches, Supernote A5x or Samsung Tab 9 series.

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 !?

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