Using Two ReMarkables
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This is not in any way a commentary on technology or ergonomics. This is 100% an artifact of the show being produced in a time where multiple physical pages on a desk is the only way people knew to operate. It was the only option at the time, so they just used that same concept with a different prop. We didn't have multitasking supercomputers in our pockets when TNG was produced, we had physical books that had to be spread out on a physical surface.
Trek is not a prediction of the future, it's just a TV show.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42093345 As well.
In the 13 year hiatus when there was no TV Star Trek, touch phones and tablets became normal. So PADDs were no longer futuristic, and now they're background objects a viewer doesn't even notice. In the case of specific shows, Discovery and Picard are heavily focused on action, so PADDs generally show up less frequently because there are fewer scenes in which it would be natural for them to show up. Contrast to BNW, which is more traditional Star Trek, and the characters are constantly carrying PADDs around. And LD's earlier seasons have several extended gags revolving around PADDs...
For personal use I use it a lot for annotating philosophy papers and source materials, and the lack of a split screen feature is extremely frustrating.
Writing annotations or commentaries on texts means writing in the margins or switching back and forth between books (often a paper book and the remarkable for writing, or 2 notebooks in the device which is a slow operation).
A split screen mode would have been extremely useful, or lacking that a method for having a page-matched 'fold-out' so I can just associate a full blank page to each source page for my commentary.
I know there's an unofficial hack that adds this, but why ReMarkable doesn't I can't fathom, especially as annotations and such are marketed as primary use cases for the device.
/rant :)
I'm one of those people with "analysis paralysis" towards the E-Ink ecosystem. Remarkable Paper Pro came out while I was researching, and made me aware of the set of dichotomies around the notion of minimalism vs full blow Android, black & white only tablets vs Galery-3 vs Kaliedo, front lights vs having a screen closer to the surface without front lights...
It's difficult to enter the e-paper market.
For me, I'm a science student currently struggling through classes like Integral Calculus, Linear Angebra, etc... So I'm usually writing math equations.
My first question is how does Remarkable handle math writing? I'm guessing there is nothing to read things like a handwritten Sumation, or Integral, and then convert to Tex ?
Is black and White really the best kind of e-ink, or is that the prejudice or bias of those old time e-ink users who have been using the tech a while now? What about screen size, is the 10.3 really that great (smaller that A4 paper)?
Is Remarkable's "minimalism" claims actually legitimate, or more of a coping mechanism to explain away their apparent lack of features?
I have a Remarkable 2 for notes and working on math problem set homework to hand in as PDFs.
It’s fine. It doesn’t do anything other than record your handwriting. You can try and have it convert it to text, this works for language but fails utterly at math. I got the better pen that you can turn around to use as an eraser as using the UI to change the tool from pen to eraser and back is incredibly annoying.
I recently got an iPad to use instead mostly because I wanted one anyway, and because my handwriting is atrocious and iOS 18 pretties it up. I haven’t quite made up my mind on which one I’ll continue using. The iPad and its pen are more responsive, the fact that it improves my handwriting is a boon for the TAs, and solving some of the simpler math automatically is neat. The built in Notes app is garbage for handing in multi-page PDFs, bafflingly this is impossible, but the Goodnotes app is cheap and rather good. There’s other apps to convert handwritten math into Latex.
The Remarkable produces much smaller file sizes (I’m not sure why I care, the web app I upload homework to sure doesn’t) and the battery lasts much longer. I find replacing the pen tips very annoying and have no idea why that is needed.
I’ll probably end up using the iPad more, but I’ll guess I’ll see.
I also use a table for university, instead of a laptop I've got the bigass Samsung s9 ultra (or whatever it's called) because it's near A4 size for reading PDF papers, etc..
This tablet has a special accessory that is a screen overly that is textured glass, so the "Writing feel" seems more like a pencile or whatever paper-like... It's marketed towards artists or whatever creative types. I think the Remarkable has that feature built into the screen without any accessory. You might see if you can find something like that for Apple tablets.
As far as a writing or note taking table goes, for people in the University, we really do need integration with things like Google or Microsoft. The whole idea that a minimal table requires the user to be subject to gatekeeping things like a computer/mobile app to do basic input/output of documents is quite frankly absurd. There is nothing distracting about saving a document into OneDrive or Google Drive.
I really do suspect the whole "focus" of Remarkable, and similar, is a cope. I totally get people with ADHD exist, and those people appreciate the kind of devices that actively prevent them from straying off their path.... but this is ridiculous.
1. They are too small. I want an A4/letter sized display for writing notes and for reading PDFs.
2. The pen is laggy. It’s very frustrating to use after using an iPad for a while.
Both of these are subjective though. Since Remarkable has a generous return policy, I recommend buying one and trying it for a couple of months. If you don’t find it useful, you can return it easily.
I’m hoping Remarkable comes out with a 13” display. There are others like the Fujitsu Quaderno, but it runs Android. I prefer a more focused device like the Remarkable.
My general impression is that you'll still have the most-contrasty screen with black-and-white eInk. Color is just getting awesome, while black and white is already there.
The minimalism claims are real. The existence of Boox shows that reMarkable is deliberate in their minimalism. An rM2 is a for-real linux system and it does have a browser under the hood -- they could make that user-facing if they wanted to do so. In practice, the minimalist use-case can be powerful. rM's interface is conducive to entering flow and reviewing electronic documents in a way that is far less distracting than a fully-featured iOS/Android tablet. That said, that choice can also be troublesome. The lack of a real email client and for-real Google Docs integration (or JIRA) is a major impediment to certain forms of collaborative productivity. If you need to spend a long time with a document, or really think things through, though, the rM interface is helpful.
If you're eInk-curious, go demo some. Best Buy usually has displays of more than one eInk device. Doing so helped me to shape my decisions in the arena.
- 60 FPS screen makes a huge difference in reading experience, especially if you want to flip through a PDF quickly
- It's an Android tablet, meaning that I can use my usual programs and don't have an awkward "how do I bring it to Remarkable and back" process
The downsides:
- It's $729 vs $379 for the Remarkable 2
- It's heavier
However, I'm not going back.
I found it:
- oddly heavy, the Daylight is made of all plastic (body & screen) - yet it’s heavier than an iPad Air made from metal & glass.
- handwriting lag, the input lags when I use the pen is so much that it distracts me while writing a sentence. I have to concentrate to ensure it’s keeping up with each letter I write. No such lag exists with my iPad Air.
- no setup instructions or tutorial on its unique gestures. You boot it up and have to figure out how it works and getting it on WiFi
- display resolution is much worse than I was expecting.
- when using chrome, webpages render incredibly small. I’m having to constantly zoom in. There’s a setting in chrome about “desktop mode” but it made no difference.
And I also wasn’t expecting to have to sign up for a Google account to even get software updates, even from Daylight. (Maybe I don’t but that’s what the Google App Store made it seem like).
Wish I had read this review before I had bought it.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/20/24201356/daylight-compute...
* Note: I truly love the idea of Daylight, and hope they succeed. But in my mind, a considerable device improvement needs to be made to realize that vision. Until then, I’ll revert back to using my iPad Air (and now with nano-texture coming more broadly across Apple lines, Daylight is going to have that much more to overcome - because Apple is also cheaper product).
- oddly heavy: it's indeed heavier than remarkable, but not an issue for me.
- handwriting lag: hm, which app did you use? I didn't notice that in both Reader and Notes, the experience was all right for me.
- no setup: valid feedback, I had to figure out things myself. Granted, it's an Android tablet, so I think I discovered most of the shortcuts etc. Not that much different from iPad.
- display resolution: maybe because I used iPad mini (and Remarkable) before, I didn't have very high expectations. The resolution is OK with me.
- chrome rendering too small: I didn't notice that before you mentioned it, but you can also change the default zoom level in Settings -> Accessibility, which I just discovered.
- Google ecosystem: yep, I kinda expected that given that I knew it's an Android tablet, so that was not an issue for me.
Our mileage certainly varies - I would not consider buying an iPad (I already have an iPad mini and don't want more of that), but this device I really like. It's hard to put a finger on it. I read other reviewers claiming that reading e.g. X in greyscale is less addictive, and I didn't really believe it until I tried it myself. Something is certainly different about my workflows on this device.
Reading it late at night is much more enjoyable than reading an iPad, even with the Night Shift on.
That's not a feature. I'm looking for a digital piece of paper that can't access reddit/HN/webpages-on-demand, not something that runs highly distracting apps. If I wanted that I could just buy an ipad. I know it's seems really weird to intentionally pay more and get less - fewer features, but the fact that I can go lock myself in my office with my phone and laptop elsewhere and get some proper reading and writing done on my remarkable is, well, I'd say remarkable, but now I sound like an ad. But I'm not getting paid by them and that's just what they called it.
If you don't trust yourself, let someone else setup that password.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...
It would be nice to have a paper tablet that is, indeed, focused on what it does best, but also seemlessly interoperates with linux laptops and desktops. Users having to juggle multiple closed platforms adds to the cognitive burden.
Seriously, I really hope some management and/or devs from Remarkable are seeing this. I want to shout it from the roof tops. I bought a Remarkable 2, and I would definitely be buying a Paper Pro, if it were a little more open. I'm appreciative that the device itself isn't locked down (that was enough to sell me a RM2!), but for the kind of money Paper Pro costs I need more out of it. If it was a very open system (like in my wildest dream, all software for it would be fully open source) I would take the plunge. As it stands, I'm leaning more toward the Daylight as it seems more hackable to me. I don't need much, not even a big ecosystem, just the ability to hack on it and/or install homebrew stuff from others. The ability to automate and/or easily run scripts on it would be killer.
Please Remarkable, embrace the spirit of openness that I know burns within you. It's a little hidden by conflicting business needs, but I know it's still there! Let those feelings be free, and create the masterpiece that you and I both really want.
It'd be awesome to be able to have a reading/note-taking experience that spanned more than a single system.
Most of my Internet usage is skimfeed/Hacker News and the occasional jaunt on Reddit. I've also gotten back into books given how parasitic the Internet has become writ large.
The iPad Pro is overkill for this use case, and its screen is harsh on the eyes (unless you use it in what I call "red mode", i.e. dark mode with a 100% red filter overlay).
Given this, I wanted an eReader that I could read articles on the Internet with.
The Kindle nails the first part, but its web browser sucks all sorts of shit.
Enter the BOOX Go Color 7. This thing is exactly what I wanted: a super-capable eReader that's easy on the eyes and small enough to fit in my bum bag. It sucks at videos and is kind of slow, which makes it a slam dunk for my narrow use case.
This inspired me to get a reMarkable 2 for keeping track of customer notes (I'm a sales engineer at the moment) and journal my work when I'm hacking on stuff. Loads of people have gushed over how much better this is than an iPad for writing; they are 100% correct. Having a paper feel is everything. No good solutions exist for this on an iPad, but it's totally possible with eInk displays.
The rM2 inspired me even further to ditch my iOS weightlifting journal app (Strong) for a Go Color 10.3.
I've used all sorts of apps for this purpose over the years (Google Sheets, then JEFIT, then Hevy, then Strong). Since there isn't an open standard for weightlifting logs (lol; can you imagine), all of these have different data schemas that you need to normalize yourself. Gigantic pain in the ass. For this reason, logging reps and sets is so much easier on paper, but I hated keeping track of paper notebooks.
This is the perfect replacement. No futzing around on an app, and I can leave my phone at home. It spends nearly 0% battery when its off and barely anything when its on. I can put this in a soft case and leave it in my gym bag for weeks at a time. I even have Kindle and Firefox on this too so I can read books during rest periods. It's incredible.
These days, my iPad Pro is only good for being a HDMI and macOS Sidecar monitor.
Yes, Onyx refuses to comply with the GPL and has super duper shady stuff pre-installed in their BOOX devices. ONYX is also the only manufacturer that's putting serious money into this niche. Root them, install AFWall+, install AdAway, don't connect your Google account; problem solved.
(One last positive I'll mention for the reMarkable: the RM1 and RM2 come with SSH and are rooted out of the box. It even uses systemd to run Xochitl, its frontend. You can hack the living daylights out of these things if you're into that.)
they've only launched recently (mine arrives monday) but it uses a novel display tech which purports to be e-ink-like with 60fps. i'm very excited because the main usecase for ereaders that i've found totally unworkable for the last 15 years of trying is marking up the margins of a pdf while i read it; early readers were too small to read pdf's, current gen ones can be large and high-dpi enough but are still agonizingly slow to refresh. finally, finally i can just take notes in my docs. plus it runs android and you can hack it https://www.daylighthacker.wiki/
The big nail in the coffin for me was difficulty integrating into my workflow / application stack. I had to use a couple scripts I hacked together to get the data from ReMarkable into the tools I use regularly. For the cost Invested I decided it was just too much.
The tech wasn't bad, I was impressed with the build quality, and I think there is a market, without a Jailbreak / easy integration it's just not for me at this time. Bummer.
I bought my R2 originally with the same mindset, of jailbreaking it to run custom apps, but ended up loving it for what it is: the best and most expensive reading and note-taking device in our era :)
It's probably doable with some process changes, I just didn't have the time for them. Post Christmas I may give it another shot.
I think you’re vastly overstating how hackable it is. Yes you have root, and yes that’s notable and praiseworthy.
However, it’s not “dead simple,” practically speaking. The parts you actually care about (the display/touch logic, library management, annotations, etc.) are all inside a single, proprietary binary. A group of dedicated and extremely impressive hackers has done excellent work reverse engineering and packaging their work for others to readily use. But they’re always swimming upstream, having to work around the myriad issues surrounding this vital, proprietary blob.
Case in point: the hacker community’s work on RM2 v3.4+ has been stalled for 6+ months now because of changes that Remarkable made to their proprietary system.
Another example of how not-open the core functionality is: you can’t hack in your own two-way ebook sync logic because the remarkable’s blob one-way-converts all books to a custom binary format before the user can read and annotate them. Sure, you can hook into some of the sync logic by mocking their API (iirc) and doing some custom one-way-sync stuff (using tools from the truly impressive hacker community). But two-way sync? I’m not aware of anything. And it’s definitely not as easy as mounting some fuse filesystem that does two-way sync with some service that you can load with books.
So yeah, the RM2 is just a simple Linux system only if you ignore the actual reading and writing functionality. It’s good to have root (I _never_ would have bought mine otherwise), but that’s not enough.
This totally breaks my workflow. I also tried jailbreaking, but it's all too finicky. It's yet another project to manage, instead of a solution / improvement.
I work similarly to the person in the parent article, but use a mix of devices:
- Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- running Windows 11 this is used for development and web browsing and art/drawing and 3D modeling and so forth
- Kindle Scribe --- ebook reader and notepad --- sometimes will use the web browser for referencing documentation
- Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ --- on-the-go usages
- Wacom One (gen 1 13 inch stylus display) attached to an Apple MacBook --- affords the ability to draw/annotate
The big thing is all 3 devices use the same Wacom EMR stylus technology, so it's seamless switching from one to the other when using a stylus.
Large size screen is nice for reading though.
It seems note taking is treated more like an afterthought. Of course, this means I only use my Scribe as a scratchpad for disposable notes.
The notes organization is awkward, imports/exports are not durable (as another poster mentioned), had several exports fail, and then the only method of export is email.
Definitely felt like a device meant for reading ebooks and writing comes a distant second.
But the screen and the backlight are far better than the RM2 as is the battery life. For me writing notes daily, I had to stick with the RM2 though.
My problem is that I apparently apply quite a lot of pressure when writing and the nib in the stylus wears out after a few dozen hours. Some people talk about using titanium nibs, but I'd rather burn through nibs than tear up the irreplaceable screen.
The handfeel is fantastic. It really is a wonderfully designed object.
However, the writing experience is not great. The digitizer is quite simply bad. RM knows about it and seemingly don't care. The digitizer develops random calibration problems and it becomes impossible to accurately put your pen on any specific spot. You absolutely cannot ever continue a stroke after you've lifted the pen. There is no way to recalibrate. The working theory is stray magnetization inside the digitizer, some people claim that dragging a magnet over the screen helps. It also has some nasty quantization issues. Pen strokes are not vectorised and come out inexplicably jagged and aliased.
If you are the type of person who can write quickly with very few mistakes, and without constantly looking at the page, you'd probably get good use out of the RM2. For me, I am abysmal at writing like this and the RM just gets in my way.
I do use my RM a fair bit, but for my use case, it's far less convenient than a paper notebook. I'm mostly taking research notes and diagramming things. I don't markup PDFs or take longhand meeting notes or anything.
Also, having been involved in the RM modding community, I feel pretty gross about ReMarkable the company. The originally billed this as an open, hackable linux device you can run custom software on. They almost immediately backtracked on this and removed the SDK from their website. Someone in the community has to go and individually email RM developers for a new copy of the SDK after each update. Plus the files that store your notes are in a proprietary format. The only way to get them out is to convert to a PDF on the tablet.
Generally I recommend you pass on the RM unless you know what you're in for. It's a beautiful device with horrible software and support.
That’s something I’ve been experiencing with the Kindle Scribe as well. You can’t zoom in on notebooks in the device, but all PDFs exports contain jagged lines everywhere, no matter how straight I write or draw. I can’t explain why these writing-focused devices get this so wrong… a general-purpose iPad does this so much better.
Study notes on one. Exercise notepad on the other.