It's a very niche device but I've owned mine for nearly two years and am a big advocate. In some ways, the first model was proof of concept. Excellent hardware and writing experience, but the early versions of the software were horrible, and the device itself is very ugly. The software has improved dramatically in the time I've owned it, going from horrible to bad, then to almost acceptable, and now it's decent.
I'm happy to see the company is doing well enough to make a second generation reality. Looks like it will be an overall improved experience, with a magnetic marker, a slick-looking device and overall incremental improvements. I'd like to see some kind of trade up program though, it's expensive (and 50$ more for a marker with one extra sensor is ridiculous) and I can't justify paying that much for an incremental upgrade.
My only concern about the new specs would be the thickness, or rather the sturdiness. The first generation is thick by modern standards, but it's very sturdy. I've dropped the device, I've dropped the bag with it, I've bumped into things with it - not a scratch. Very refreshing in the age of fragile devices. Hopefully the rM2 doesn't sacrifice much sturdiness to be thinner.
I really would like to see TC just gone. It didn't use to be this bad, but they've been going downhill since... forever, really.
This isn't even a review. This is someone writing from the press release.
Occasionally I'd go from regular work (notes on a project file), to a business or client meeting (pull up notes from past meetings, update with new notes), to a volunteer meeting after work (pull up the previous week's training notes). At each point I had all the information I needed without having to juggle binders or loose-leaf papers.
And I love that I can rework my notes as I write them. So, during a meeting, first draft is just scribbling stuff down, then while people are busy listening to themselves talk, I can drag my scribbles around into priorities and tasks, add a diagram, clean a few things up. This is a completely different workflow from either plain paper or laptop/tablet, and it really works for me.
I've tried a few things in the last couple of years to take my note taking electronic, and it turns out that delay is important - if there's too much delay I end up not jotting down the couple of quick notes I need to write. Wunderlist opens very quickly on my Android phone and I ended up unconsciously using it to write down quick things. OneNote (an otherwise great tool) take an age to open and get to the right page, so I end up not using it except at my desk.
The only things I would like are slightly longer battery life and more options for syncing with other services like Dropbox etc
There has been an FCC leak: https://fccid.io/2AMK2-RM110 showing a machined aluminum back, which the motherboard is affixed to. To me this looks good.
Disclaimer, I pre-ordered V2 today and am an owner of V1.
Also, how often do you need to buy new tips, or do they not wear out? I'm asking because the ones for DPT family are designed in such a way that they wear out. I guess I've always been more on the DPT side, because it's made by Sony, which gives me a feeling of confort, you know, a company with long history.
If price wasn't an issue, which would you prefer. rM2 does look much more refined and it is half the price of DPT-RP1 (the Sony website does list the price at ~600$ but sadly the reality is that if you want to buy that in the EU the price is approximately:
EU_price = base_price + (base_price*0.22))
And of course the shipping...
I really hope rM2 turns out to be an amazing product, because the digital paper market feels very stagnant at the moment.
I would love to hear more of your experiences with the device. Thank you,
Lots of Love Mortuus
But as soon as I get the email for RM2 I pre-ordered again. To your point, it is the product the digital paper market has been waiting for.
I am an avid hand-writer. I have been a Levenger Circa user for more than 20 years, and basically had a subscription to the Circa paper for the last several years, as I went through so much of it. It took me a while to adjust my workflow and so forth, but I am now a full convert to the RM and think the device and the ecosystem have enormous potential, especially for developers.
The RM folks are very dev friendly, though their docs and so forth are poor at present. I take this to be a function of focus/resources rather than intent. The architecture of the software on the device is very good and dev oriented, and the code (what they've released) is well written. The device can run a webserver! The APIs- community documented- for the server-side of the RM platform are minimal but well structured. I was fairly quickly able to dig into them and write some utilities, which work reliably. So I am very optimistic about the ecosystem around these devices.
To your questions- I write on the order of 20-30 "pages"/day on the RM, and go through 1 tip maybe every 2 weeks. The writing experience is very comfortable. Adding an "eraser" to the premium RM2 pen addresses the main ergonomic inconvenience. I also use the device for reading PDFs. There are some ergonomic nits there but on the whole it works well.
Yes, RM is a new, small biz, but to my eyes they have a great product, a great approach, solid operations, and are developer friendly. I have not used the Sony device, and can't compare it, but I see nothing but good things ahead for RM.
To be fair, Sony are a company with a long history of absolutely amazing hardware crippled by comically bad software. The DPT series doesn't even show you the PDF table of contents, last I looked.
One marker nib lasts me about 10 weeks, but it seems to be very individual. Some people can write hundreds of pages on a single nib, others need a new one weekly. In any case, I wouldn't say nibs wearing out is a major concern. It would be nice if they didn't wear out, of course, but the design of the nibs seem to be crucial for giving that excellent writing feeling.
And yes, these devices are expensive. I'm in the EU myself, and some 400€ is rather steep for upgrading the rM to rM2.
Everything just felt better on the Sony- not just the hardware or the software, but the whole product. With some minor fixes (ex: moving the icon from the dropdown menu to the empty space on top of the screen) it could move from outstanding to just perfect.
The rM is best thought of as a pen and paper notebook, except of effectively infinite size. There are no apps. The UI (the only user-facing program) has minimal features, most of which are there just to mimic what you can do with an actual paper notebook. There are only a few exceptions, like being able to drag your notes/scribbles on the page. The device won't integrate with any 3rd party services, it doesn't have search, etc. If a physical notebook doesn't have it, then the rM probably also doesn't.
That definitely makes the rM a very niche device, but I'm getting great use out of mine, while I never managed to get much good use of an iPad.
Both physically and mentally this device has changed how I use tablets/devices. It feels like real paper to me, and without all of the glorified app icons and notifications screaming at me I feel more focused on the task at hand. Purpose-driven devices reduces distractions and has helped me grow professionally and I'll even go as far as saying reduced some stress and anxiety.
I am seriously considering buying a dumb phone (minimalist interface) thanks to the impact the rM1 has had on my productivity.
https://youtu.be/SWY_bwFMxro?t=73
Made out of aluminium, so I don't think there should be worries about give. I think bendgate is still fresh in people's minds.
Does it support ePub format ebooks or just PDFs?
One could imagine hacking something like this tablet to have a true interactive Squeak like environment on it. Or, better yet, a Squeak-like environment designed from the ground up specifically for epaper displays...
People have made some neat stuff, and there's a Rust library for making apps: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
I just got a polar/readwise/orgmode/Anki setup together and I'd love to use this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/e8p22h/re...
Links/lynx should work great on such a device.
I was also pretty shocked that there was no way to get a list of all annotations you've added to a given PDF; I really wanted a way to read through a book making notes as I went, then get an overview of where I'd made notes. Even a way to bookmark a given page would have been useful.
Fix those two issues and it would have been a great device for me; the page size was juuuust big enough to display pretty much any book at a readable size.
> reMarkable’s virtually instant response and texturized surface make for an unprecedented writing experience.
There is indeed a precedent for having literally instant response with a texturized surface: pencil and paper.
Also, I wish they were able to use an e-paper with a faster refresh rate, like ClearInk claims to be (see e.g. https://youtu.be/kE_byDwLjxk?t=34).
That said, it seems to look quite attractive as is already.
The lightest of touches are registered by device. I suppose if you choose the wrong pen mode for the immediate task you might have to push hard?
Dunno if the privacy is any better, but you can at least view it with adblockers on.
One concern, the ability to access material off the Web, has been addressed.
Another has not: the Gen 2 tablet still has only 8 GB storage.
On my current, much-despised, Android tablet, I have a 128GB microSD card with over 32 GB of documents, in a range of formats -- the overwhelming majority are PDF and ePub, but also djvu, docx, txt, htmk, chm, ppt, pptx, and other formats.
With the paltry cost of storage, cripling the Remarkable with anything less than 128-256 GB staggers the mind.
I'd also very much like to have an eccessible, full-featured Linux userland, even if only console mode, as this is invaluable to me (the file extension-based counts and storage utilisation come via Termux utilities on the Android tablet). A keyboard (external, Bluetooth), and terminal driver, would be sufficient for this.
My handwriting is terrible, and while I'd love to unplug for reading/writing, I haven't found an acceptable solution for doing so beyond a Chromebook with wifi turned off and/or a "self control" web extension.
EDIT: from elsewhere in this thread, I see https://github.com/dps/remarkable-keywriter which looks interesting. Curious to hear how it plays with the remarkable 2, esp around lag
Utility afforded is immense. Termux on Android, crippled as it is, is the one thing on the platform that does not completely and abjectly suck.
As a better paper, without any distractions, works well!! I have one at work, on my desk, I have one for each kid doing maths with them on it, it's awesome. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32922602355.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
The huge downside is being unable to erase any part of the screen without erasing the entire screen - so by the end of a long brainstorming session I have lots of scribbled out parts and lines directing the eye to follow my flow.
I desperately want something like the remarkable2, but I just can't bring myself to spending $800CDN (for the package) as a replacement for paper or the "Boogie Board"!
EDIT: Ok, 719CAD if you want the marker with an eraser and the book-style cover instead of the pouch.
It's a great tool, especially considering there is almost no lag between the "pen" and the display.
However, the contrast is a bit low and makes it difficult to view in moderate to low light.
Great for outdoors though. I have one with four magnets on the back and keep it on my fridge.
As for the previous one (single page scribble) then I found in the past that I usually have a new single page each day on my desk for tasks minor notes of that page and it's now replacing it - this is its main usage.
Also pumped to see them officially releasing a Chrome extension to send to reMarkable. Long overdue. It doesn't look like it's out yet, so here's a link to the unofficial version I made last year (used by over 700 other reMarkable owners):
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/send-to-remarkable...
Open source at https://github.com/michaelschade/remarklater
https://remarkable.engineering/
Isn't easy to find from the official site (remarkable.com), and I've yet to find a simple "Hello, world"-example from ReMarkable...
Ed: i see there already are some comments on this topic. I think I just might pre-order an rm2.
I made the mistake of buying an equilpen2 at an apple store years ago. I say mistake not because I didn't like the product (I used it for hundreds of pages of notes over the year or two after I bought it and loved that it let me write on regular paper) but because the company gave up on the product and eventually released destructive app updates that deleted all my notes from my local machines.
I was only able to recover my content because I had it synced to dropbox and now I'm paranoid about content creation devices like this potentially losing my content in the future if the company goes belly-up.
Can I just... connect a USB cable and transfer files? Why do I want an app at all?
The apparent requirement to transfer files through an app was the reason I didn't get a remarkable 1.
Well this sucks if it is not leftie friendly as the price and features had me sold.
Does the reMarkable adapt to left-handed people? If you're left-handed, don't worry. A few of our colleagues are also left-handed. They want to make sure all lefties have an excellent experience with their reMarkable device. You'll be able to set up your reMarkable to left-handed mode when you first set up your device. We've also made it easy to switch between right-handed and left-handed modes in the main settings.
But I'll be honest--I don't purchase "left-handed" notebooks or use them backwards or left-handed books or anything so maybe it doesn't actually matter as much as right-handed people think it does when righties writing articles imagine what lefties think.
At that thickness, I'd be worried about sturdiness and, in particular, bending, à la the problems with the iPhone 6.
I can stick an iPad Mini or similar tablet into a jacket pocket or backpack and jog a couple of miles to a bus stop daily without concern. Will we be able to do the same with this, I wonder?
When I take my tablet (in a case) out and about, it goes into a laptop sleeve before it goes into a bag. For me, it's not bending I'm worried about, but scratches.
It could be jostling around with corners of large books, laptops, cables, random containers, etc. It can also have more space to accelerate when you swing your bag around, whereas a phone is held firmly your leg when you run/jump/etc.
Durability in a bag is what separates great electronics manufacturers from decent ones. If I buy something and it doesn't survive bag life for several months, which is quite common, then I write off the manufacturer as a creator of fragile throw-away devices. But I've never had a phone have any sort of problem from pocket stresses.
I happen to have Sony's competing 13" e-paper tablet already and I'd be nervous about putting it into a backpack without something non-bendable next to it to prevent flexing.
The writing experience, battery life and hackability are very appealing to me, but it also looks like it's not as good a reading device as high end readers, where really good lighting and water resistance are common. It's also slightly big for me. The size would be great for academic pdfs, or reference works but for normal books, or even for normal note taking (rather than sketching) it's a little on the large side. Maybe if it had less bezel, the size could be closer to best of both.
I don't mind it having a high price point, but I hoped that it would compete with high-price point e-readers (kobo forma / kindle oasis) too.
Note to ereader makers: Please, PLEASE make the screen saver show the last page read! I'd throw away my Kindle and buy a new one just to get that. I'd pay extra for it. I will stop complaining about my ereader if you do this.
It took my brain about 13 months after first trying the RM1, failing to transition my workflow to it, setting it aside- then all of a sudden, the crystallization moment, a flash of how it would work. I switched over and haven't looked back.
Re: screen saver- the RM has 4 different power modes- active, then 2 levels of sleep, then off. The last page is visible both in active mode and also in the first level of sleep. The screen goes blank on the second level of sleep, then dark when off. Given the openness of the software I suspect the duration of first level of sleep could be tweaked.
Would this be... not having a screensaver? Or are you thinking of something more specific?
Having typed it out, it's sorta odd that there's a screensaver at all, rather than just always acting like it's up and running. I'd probably love it if ereaders would just show a "booting..." indicator when necessary, and otherwise never have an "off" screen except when serving some critical need (e.g. low battery warning).
It's like in a modern car when you stop for a stop light - the engine turns off. Step on the gas, and the engine turns back on.
- Search was fixed in 1.5
- USB is still not a drive, but there's the web UI and also third-party apps.
- Zoom: Not sure what you mean, but rasterization was fixed/removed in 1.6.
After reading an in-depth review from GoodEReader [1], I concluded that an iPad, although not with an ePaper display, could also function as a regular tablet with access to a ton of apps. This was something that the ReMarkable was not able to do. The ReMarkable tablet does allow you to have SSH access though, as noted by other comments here.
Just my 2c, if you are also looking at this for a paper replacement.
[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/hands-on-rev...
- It's sometimes unstable, and crashes while I draw. Not super often but maybe 4 or 5 times a week. I don't lose any data other than the last ~5-10 strokes.
- There is a notebook called Quick Sheets that is permanently there, even if I try to remove it's metadata over SSH. It gets generated on boot. No idea why this is here.
- You can SSH in, and there's a good hacker community around the tablet. A lot of cool open source software is written for it.
- Putting a file on the device for the first time, after doing the same on a kindle for years, is an adventure to say the least. There is no calibre plugin for it that I've found.
- I have never been able to use EPUBs properly on this tablet, a lot of my books just crash it. I have to convert them to PDF first on calibre. So highlighting is just markup on the PDF and not really selecting any text, but you can write directly on the book with notes.
- The first time I opened an EPUB, it took a while (10s) to load. When I tried to change the font of the EPUB on the reMarkable, it just stayed on the loading icon for hours, and I gave up on EPUBs then, and resorted to PDFs.
- There is no dictionary on the EPUB reader. I miss this feature a lot. And even if there were, I wouldn't be able to use it because I have to convert my EPUBs to PDF.
- Metadata for EPUBs or PDFs isn't visible, only the raw filenames. So no sorting by author, genre, etc.
- drawing and marking up is phenomenal, as is reading on such a huge screen. I absolutely love reading and journaling on this tablet.
- I have never succeeded in exporting my notebooks or marked up PDFs using the built in software after marking up or writing in 100+ pages, I have to use some community written software instead.
- It's $500 total after pen and cover.
- There is no backlight.
- OCR is done in the cloud, and not on the device.
- The iOS companion app is goofy, a lot of the navigation within the app seems to be done in a hacky way, instead of using the usual iOS SDK components. (They segment screen portions for scrolling on pages and for navigating the app, and it leads to just the most bizarre behavior).
I want to love this tablet. And all we need is a software update. The hardware was almost perfect, and now with USB-C, a magnet on the pen, and an eraser, the hardware is even closer to being perfect (I think the only thing left is a backlight).
>No idea why this is here
I agree it would be nice to turn off quick sheets for those who don't use it. For me, I love quicksheets. I often want to just grab the device, jot something down immediately, and put it away. Sure I could create a 'notes' file and put it somewhere obvious, but quicksheets reduces the time and effort for these quick notes.
I'd also love an open Kindle alternative. This is too much for my budget, but hope prices will come down in 1 year.
Heck, even the interface on the remarkable itself is written using Qt!
Lack of backlight not a big deal for me; rather use a room light if necessary.
Some examples of the open source stuff can be found on github [1] and their wiki[2].
[1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable [2] https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/start
I tried to use iPad Pro as a full-time note-taking device and found that after writing on it for up 3-4 hours during the day, my eyes get very tired by the evening. I tried various things to mitigate it, such as using dark background, changing brightness etc, and nothing seems to help enough to make iPad a notebook replacement.
I absolutely love the functionality offered by iPad-like device such as reading Kindle, browse web, notes taking, PDF annotation, scanner apps etc. I absolutely want to be able to use it as single device to hold all my hand-notes and downloaded or scanned documents. But can't avoid the eye strain.
Devices like reMarkable etc can be used at length if your ask is just to carry around all your notes. I have misplaced all my notes from grad school days. I would love an easy way to be able to write and archive for posterity all my notes.
I personally settled for Onyx Boox Max 3. It is at way higher price point, but is more functional - has Kindle, OReilly apps etc and quite functional note taking app.
I tried the earlier version of reMarkable ran into a limitation that limited its usability for me. It did not allow copying a section of text and pasting it into a new document. I might be mis-remembering, but I think it did not even allow pasting a copied section of a note into a new page in the same notebook. All this severely limited what I could use it for. It was just a paper replacement, and not much more.
Boox Max 3 did not have these limitations. Whats great about iPad-like devices is that you don't even expect that you will run into these corner cases.
I hope this update to reMarkable add such small features that increase the usability. I absolutely hope that these kind of devices succeed. They are a solution to the problem of keeping and carrying with you a separate set of notes on varied topics where no single paper notebook would do justice, and they are usable for very long stretches of time with no more eye strain than with using paper.
Can you tell me if the Onyx Boox Max 3 works with USB-C to USB-C cables? I had a Onyx Boox Nova and it was noncompliant somehow, I had to only use the USB-C to A cable that came with it. I ended up selling it for that reason -- I didn't want to carry around a single cable just for this device when all my other devices are USB-C.
Software aside, this is expensive ($479 when you select the pen with the eraser and the book cover), and the screen is not back-lit, so this won't be usable without other source of light.
Why is it so hard to find an e-ink device that's good for reading books, PDFs, and web content (e.g. Pocket)? So far, everything I've tried has fallen short.
Colors, please!
- the display is not very sharp, has poor contrast, and no active illumination
- also, despite there being no display illumination, reading in the sun was not possible, as it immediately resulted in the display bulging notably from the absorbed sun/heat.
- seriously buggy software
Let me know, if you have information that the new revision has improved on those aspects.
I was a little leery, after my experience buying a similar e-ink tablet years ago through indiegogo, which took forever to get delivered, shipped with a painfully obsolete version of Android, and bricked itself in short order, but this seems like a very solid product.
Being able to do work-related stuff other than taking notes would be easier to justify the premium price.
There’s a script to upload files from Instapaper on, not sure how well it works.
I'm really sad that nobody has adequately addressed interoperability in the digital inking space; I'd gladly switch to an iPad or reMarkable, but so far I'm still the neckbeard inking in Xournal on an old Thinkpad.
That said, it runs linux so you could conceivably backup the files yourself. You can ssh into your tablet, run sftp, w/e. But they are in some proprietary .lines format.
There's a wiki with more details (the file format stuff is further down): https://remarkablewiki.com/tech/filesystem
It may be possilbe you could hack it to run xournal, but I've no idea.
I have an IPad Pro, but I'm not in love with the writing experience or reading an eBook.
Came close to buying one last year, but went for an iPad Air instead as they are cheaper and more versatile.
While I’d still love an e-ink display, I found a screen protector for the iPad that has a paper-like texture and makes it significantly nicer to draw on.
Onyx also has one, it's a bit cheaper than the remarkable.
All of these devices have major flaws and upsides.
It's one of those cases where the hardware is amazing but the software is just too painful to use (and I really wanted to like it)
Does anyone know on whether it is possible to read kindle purchased books or converted ebooks? What about custom software?
Answer: Yes!
This made ReMarkable a non-starter for many companies that have policies around where internal data may be stored.
>Our cloud service is a service we provide to our customers. You are more than welcome to use your reMarkable offline and store your documents in local storage if you prefer.
Aside: I have setup (via SSH) rclone to sync files to my own cloud storage, but that's not something that is officially supported.
[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264829...
But I already have Onyx Boox for my note-scribbling-on-e-ink needs, and if push comes to shove, I can run termux from there :D
I own a Kindle DX but the screen is not big enough and the software is showing its age.
The fact that you can even use a pencil I this device is a big plus.
Very similar reading experience. The RM1 is faster than the DX, but the software is slightly less reader friendly (harder to get to table of contents, go to specific pages, etc). I didn't use zoom on the DX, don't know if RM1 has it or how usable it is.
The ability to notate on PDFs on the RM1 is very valuable.
Also, is it too much to expect colour?
I reached out to the manufacturer to find out.
I would very much like to order it, but it doesn't support linux :( Please, please add linux support!
https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000266133...
That said, there are whole lot of sync tools that users have created which work very well with Linux (for example, I personally use remarkablefs, which is a Fuse based filesystem to mount your remarkable)
https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable/blob/master...
Also, any integration with the Android app store?
You write or draw with real pens and still can scan and digitize the things you write.
And in price the Rocketbook wins hands down.
How can I import pdf files & export them to a cloud solution?
Unfortunate attitude that perpetuates (browser) lock-in.
Works well, I'm guessing for other platforms, similar things exist using remarkable's api.
Obviously the company making it has its reasons for pricing but a product like this needs to be priced as an accessible consumer electronics product (ie $50-$100).
it’s terrible. the response time makes it very awful.
Only caveats - I like aftermarket cases more than Remarkable's. I bought one one from Amazon for about 30$.
Also I've been using staedtler's digital pencils, works great!
I've long thought about getting one of these, but don't want to shell out $500 if I can't comfortably write on it.
That is the goal of this device. The original Remarkable was superior to the surface and the iPad, and according to their marketing the next one will be twice as fast.
Much more explanation for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
In this case, a new product was launched today, it's normal for companies to coordinate that with press, and it's normal for multiple submissions on a story to show up on HN. It's also normal for humans to overinterpret streaks as something other than the randomness they usually are; we all do it, but it's not good to do it in ways that insinuate dishonesty in fellow community members.
Are you accusing the people who posted these links of being employees of Remarkable? If so, you could just look at their comment histories to see if it seems likely before posting a general accusation.
I am fascinated by this product. It is far more interesting to me than much of what Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or Amazon have done in a tablet form factor in many years. I'm not surprised that others may have a similar level of interest.
Ianal but this website is probably violating GDPR:
That being said I’ve always admired the Remarkable tablets.
