Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

I had an iPad Air, which I changed for a reMarkable 2 and I couldn't be happier! I see a lot of people here commenting about the limitations of it, and I get it. For me personally those limitations are features.

My needs are mostly note taking and reading technical PDFs, and for that the reMarkable is fantastic. I used it extensively while taking Calculus, which, it was great to use as many pages as I needed and to write as big as I wanted without worrying about "wasting" paper.

I miss background light from time to time, which I think is a great addition.

I'm not super familiar with alternatives so I can't say that is better than X or Y, but I personally have been moving as much as I can to single purpose electronic devices. That allows me to be more focus and not fight my device wanting to distract me. That takes out every eInk table that has android for me, I don't want a yet another multipurpose device that I need to develop discipline to use it!

On that line, I love my kindle, but that spends about 90% of the time in airplane mode, because, again, the kindle is for readin, the reMarkable for taking notes and reading Datasheets and such...

But, that's just me :-)

> 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.

Makes sense… my note taking is more like highlighting and such, since I later get those out into my project documentation

Try checking for software updates? My RM2 got infinite canvas in an update some time ago.

That said, I don't really use that feature and find it annoying when I accidentally move the canvas instead of turning to the next page.

This whole paper tablet space looks like a place full of tradeoffs where it's hard to please everyone... IMHO overall remarkable is doing that balancing act quite well.

Yes, in notes themselves there's an infinite canvas towards the bottom. I meant a canvas around a PDF to take notes alongside the paper - which is 50% of my use case.

I don't feel it balances the features well, just today they released another update for their keyboard support. For me, that's setting false priorities for a device that's designed for handwriting.

I don't know, maybe using the layer function for the PDF's. So it may overwrite the text in the PDF, but you can hide the note-taking layer temporally, when reading.

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