It's Hard Not to Love ReMarkable's New Colorful E Ink Tablet | Hacker News Reader

It's Hard Not to Love ReMarkable's New Colorful E Ink Tablet

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How this compares to Boox is probably the main question, followed by somebody who compares to the TCL NXTpaper, which is not eInk but has a better reflective light model and so can compare, if not being in the same technology space.

Boox has been on my "maybe" list for 2-3 years. Android and so capable of e.g. handling all my current Kindle life, albiet in the Android kindle app not the kindle paperwhite GUI (oh, what a terrible GUI that is, but tightly bound to Amazon and I now have a significant investment, calibre aside)

I mostly like the reMarkable as a note-taking device because if I want to send someone a diagram from my notes I can send a clean image instead of having to scan. I got the Kindle Scribe when it came out and the latency with turning pages and handwriting is a lot better, but I've read that the new reMarkable has improved that so I'm optimistic.

With both the Kindle Scribe and reMarkable I'm kind of disappointed that there isn't an easy way to automatically back up PDFs of notebooks. When I last checked, it looked like the third-party projects for exporting reMarkable files are not too popular currently.

I realized I'd lost some journal entries over the years that I'd put in e.g. Evernote, and currently I'm facing having to digitize a bunch of Video8 Sony camcorder cassettes, so having a system that automatically backs-up to a futureproof format is pretty important to me.

Markdown is futureproof isn't it?

I have a Daylight tablet on order. I find it interesting that products like ReMarkable are adding color e-ink, while companies like Daylight are actively removing color.

This does make me wonder more about the Daylight panel and if they could enable color through a software update to enable things like highlighting. Of course, at some point it would defeat the point of the whole company, becoming just another tablet for mass consumption.

I also have a Daylight on order... but isn't the main thing with the Daylight that it's not a true/typical e-ink display, and that's how it gets such a high framerate? My understanding is that it's a first-of-its-kind thing, so "removing color" is more like "we haven't gotten to color yet." Although I hope they eventually do!

It’s using a reflective LCD panel. I’m curious if that panel is limited to b&w or if it’s a typical color LCD limited to b&w in software. Color reflective LCDs exist (I saw a LTT video where they reviewed a desktop monitor using one[0]), they are used in digital signage and less on the consumer side.

Daylight does say they made modifications, but haven’t gone into a ton of detail around what those are (at least not that I’ve seen).

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TcGjzKbag

How hard is it to print to pdf on a PC/laptop and transfer to the remarkable? I used to do that on my ancient Kindle DX, which I remember being a bit clunky, but not too bad with wireless sync. It was nice avoiding stacks and stacks of paper.

The RM2 has a web interface. You can plug it into your computer, it enumerates as a USB Ethernet device, and you can upload there.

You can also do it through SSH, but it's not that straightforward.

There's also their cloud offering which automatically syncs files.

The price is the only thing stopping me from buying it

I've been on the fence for this product, but this device seems designed for handwriting which I have no use for. Writing by hand is slower than typing, produces text which is harder and slower to read than typing, and typing produces text which is searchable without relying on flawed handwriting recognition. Handwriting is really only for old people, teachers grading papers, and signing documents.

Its too large to be an ereader and it doesn't have enough ram to be anything else. I love that its a real gallery 3 color eink screen instead of the half-measure of spectra screens, but I want this screen in my laptop where I can drive it with powerful hardware and an open operating system.

> Handwriting is really only for old people, teachers grading papers, and signing documents.

ahaha. Is walking only for old people too, as the young ones only drive ?

Not a good comparison because:

1. Cars have existed in approximately the same form factor for the entire lives of the vast majority of people alive today. Convenient, portable machines for typing are a relatively new product. You can easily see the age gap, ask a teenager to type something and then ask a retired person to type something. One of those two people will struggle. I can't remember the last time I wrote something other than a to-do list, but my retired parents regularly send me photos of hand-written notes.

2. Driving and walking do not cover the same use cases. You cannot drive through the grocery store and most people cannot walk 100+ miles away.

they sell a keyboard for it

Thats falls under the "doesn't have enough ram to be anything else" bit. Yes, they have a keyboard, but how am I going to run emacs+rust-analyzer or emacs+latex in what remains of the 2GB of ram after the OS takes its slice?

Your emacs doesn't run on your server!? You can ssh or vnc or even use gtk's web backend.

haha that is a good point. I could set up a development VM on my 1U and use this as a dumb terminal. That actually could be a pretty good set up and could easily fit in the ram constraints. Now I'm back to being on the fence.

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