Comment by parasense | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parasense | Hacker News Reader

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Hi Locutus_

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?

There is nothing I'm aware of that converts from handwriting to LaTeX

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.

I have two main problems with Remarkable products:

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.

I’m currently doing a Masters in Computer Engineering, struggling through a lot of calculus and linear algebra.

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.

Hi bc569a80a344f9c,

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.

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