Hacker News Reader

Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 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 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com