I am happy to be proven wrong but I’m shocked they believe there is a market for this size at all, let alone at $450! The sample text on the stock images looks useless.
I wanted to love my RM2 so much. The write path is great. Writing notes on it during a meeting is a genuinely good experience. The read path: not so much. EInk UXs are so clunky especially when you’re used to how fluid phones are. Forget scrolling through your notes - It’s maddening.
Pretty good ereader though.
fluidcruft · 6m ago
I'm actually in the market for something this size, but it's too expensive for me given what I know about reMarkable's inconvenience. I'd pick it over a kindle scribe, but not sure I'd pick it over a boox or supernote. I haven't decided if I actually care about color yet. MyDeepGuide's review of reMarkables color tech has me pretty interestes in it... but I don't know I actually need color personally. I have a colleague who has a reMarkable and it seems pretty annoying software wise. Especially at this size I want ebooks easily loaded.
I mostly have a very aged Kindle that needs replaced and I would like a small digital notepad. Boox fits the bill generally. I have a larger boox, it's a little quirky and a bit too heavy to hold comfortably but works fine after some configuration.
al_borland · 15m ago
I was interested until I saw the price. For a lower price I’d probably risk it and see if/how it might integrate into my life. However, I think it has a high chance of failing to integrate, so $450 is too much to risk.
I say this as someone who bought a Daylight tablet for $700 and is now looking to sell it, since I didn’t fit anywhere and it just sits.
branon · 30m ago
I found the lack of backlight and built-in dictionary to mostly cripple the e-reading experience on rM2.
Format support wasn't great either, only PDF and EPUB. Which does cover most bases, to be fair. AZW3 and MOBI aren't dealbreakers, but... really, no TXT?
pkhuong · 24m ago
RM Pro (and this new product) has a backlight. I print everything to pdf when I want to read on the remarkable.
squigz · 26m ago
No dictionary on an e-reader?! What the heck? Can you at least install your own or is there simply no lookup functionality at all?
branon · 25m ago
There is no lookup functionality at all that I could find. You cannot install your own dictionary on the stock firmware.
I wound up down the https://toltec-dev.org/ rabbit hole which was fun and gets me additional features but has its own issues (suspend/resume is dodgy sometimes now)
Again to be fair the rM2 is not sold as an _e-reader_ per se. But regardless I do find the e-reading experience weak.
beoberha · 19m ago
Yeah I’m not suggesting anyone go out of their way to buy it as an ereader but it does the job for me considering it would otherwise be a paperweight.
squigz · 21m ago
> Again to be fair the rM2 is not sold as an _e-reader_ per se. But regardless I do find the e-reading experience weak.
It's just such basic functionality that... why would you not, if even a small function of the device is indeed to read files?
Honestly from what I'm reading in this thread I'm rather turned off by ReMarkable now, which is sort of disappointing. Still, I'm glad to see more and more e-ink options.
Arainach · 16m ago
The reMarkable isn't an e-reader. It can display books, but that's not its primary purpose. If you want an e-reader, there are many significantly cheaper options.
kstrauser · 8m ago
But… don’t you sometimes want a dictionary when you write? That’s not a reading-mode-only tool by a long shot.
Arainach · 43s ago
No. I don't use the dictionary on my Kindle. I've never missed it on my reMarkable. Not while reading and definitely not while writing.
squigz · 14m ago
The fact that they're so expensive is, to me anyway, a pretty good reason to expect basic functionality like that.
CGMthrowaway · 24m ago
>I am happy to be proven wrong but I’m shocked they believe there is a market for this size at all, let alone at $450
I was literally about to order one until I read the comments
alsetmusic · 16m ago
Agreed. This is a product I want to own. I've checked in a couple of times over the last year or so, but I genuinely have no use for it. I don't write by hand. When I do, my handwriting is terrible. Even I have trouble making sense of it.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they think there's a market for the device at this size (though the price is debatable), assuming it worked quite well. Sounds like that's a bit much to hope for, given OP's experience.
Edit: your => OP's
choilive · 40m ago
Its unfortunate that the supply chain for eink/epaper displays all seem to be centering on typical mobile device aspect ratios (like 16:9 for this device) particularly because remarkables are marketed as productivity oriented replacements for notebooks.
I would much rather have a A6 or A5 sized display or any other standard size for paper notebooks.
mwcz · 15m ago
Is it the case that these devices are converging on 16:9? I don't know about the supply chain, but there seems to be no lack of e-ink tablets at A5/A6 sizes and/or with better ratios than 16:9.
Remarkable has the roughly A6-sized Paper Pro, Kobo has three e-ink devices with styli and good screen ratios, and Supernote has models named A5 (and A5 x2) and A6 after the paper sizes. I think the options are quite good.
krabizzwainch · 22m ago
I have a Supernote Nomad and love the size of it, which is A6 sized. I struggle to see how making one more narrow than an A6 pad is useful. This Remarkable kind of looks more like a long post it note or grocery list instead of a notebook.
aweiher · 8m ago
I'm considering a new reMarkable, but the lack of an official sdk for the cloud API is a major concern.
The community has built amazing tools for remarkable device, but their work is constantly being broken by software updates. This isn't a sustainable situation. For a company that charges for a cloud service, providing a stable, official API should be a priority. It would not only support the community's innovation but also provide a reliable foundation that developers and users can trust for the long term.
As long as a stable, official API isn't provided, I won't be buying a new device from them.
nathan_compton · 40m ago
I was deeply enthusiastic about epaper devices for awhile and I tried all kinds of things. Eventually, I decided paper is better. I used to like the idea of my notes being capture automatically but you can just take pictures of them if you use a notebook.
codazoda · 32m ago
I also got enthusiastic about them, but I ended up embracing the Kindle Scribe. I just completed my 12th monthly notebook, so I’ve been at it for over a year now.
I was using regular notebooks but I was collecting too many and I was worried about storage and loss.
I wrote about the experience a few months into it.
I do not read on mine, it’s exclusively for writing. Possibly because switching is too slow.
beeflet · 30m ago
I've come to the same conclusion. It's just easier, especially for things that involve diagrams. $10 worth of notebooks and pens is a much better value than something that is more fragile, has to be charged, etc and orders of magnitude more expensive.
Also, I tend to only write things down as a note-taking and memorization exercise, or to think out a certain idea. I usually don't have to read the notes again. So the archiving functionality of having digital paper-like notes is not nessisarially more useful, and it is often more difficult to search through than physical notebooks. Anything I really need to read later, I can write succinctly in a text file or something.
I also don't like getting locked into a certain ecosystem. Xournal++ is the only open-source cross-platform app I can find, and it's not that good.
Even for reading physical books, you can find a lot of used paperbacks for less than $10, which is very little when you consider the value of the time you spend reading them, the ease of flipping through pages and being able to dog-ear them, and the collectible aspect of the book covers covers. An eink tablet be nice for reading textbooks and papers that are more expensive and require pirating, however. But for now I just use a regular screen in portrait.
xattt · 26m ago
OCR has also been getting incrementally better and has been surprisingly good if you have the handwriting for it.
beeflet · 19m ago
Can you easily do keyword searches on your own handwritten notes?
wenc · 47m ago
I’m not sold on e-ink devices being a creation device. The refresh rate is too slow and the resolution is too low.
I realized there was already a device that was perfect for note taking on an infinite canvas.
I use an iPad and Apple Pencil (bought refurb on backmarket.com) with paper like surface [1] I install nothing in it except Apple Freeform. (No distractions)
High refresh rate, Retina display, excellent pen pressure, and fast chip. Cheaper than RM2 if bought refurb.
> I install nothing in it except Apple Freeform. (No distractions)
How do you uninstall Safari? That's the most distracting app of all.
captainkrtek · 33m ago
Nearly the same price as a new iPad mini (costs $50 less). Maybe it takes notes better (though I took notes with my mini just fine), but struggling to see the value at this price point.
Arainach · 21m ago
The value is in the lack of features. This is a hard concept for most people who haven't used one (or a similar device) to grasp.
Running Android or iOS apps is an anti-feature. Having cellular data is an anti-feature. Our world is full of trillion dollar corporations fighting as hard as they can to distract us, drive engagement, and get us staring at their wall for as long as possible.
My reMarkable 2 is the best focus device I have. It's the best writing device by far, the best "draw some woodworking plans" device, the best "work on a crossword puzzle" device, and a very good reading device (page navigation is slower than Kindle, but being able to read PDFs designed for 8.5x11 which are unreadable on Kindle makes it a wash).
On an iPad, at any moment there could be a toast from Signal, or Discord, or Messenger, or whatever. There's a web browser full of infinite content on Reddit and YouTube. I can go on a plane and have a physical book in front of me but it's no match for the allure of the internet if there's Wi-Fi. The reMarkable is one of the only devices out there that fixes the distraction aspect, and THAT is the single biggest thing between me and achieving things.
captainkrtek · 13m ago
I hear you. I bought an iPad specifically for studying and note taking (reading textbooks, annotating, etc.) and just didn’t have many apps installed. I have ADHD and certainly can struggle with distractions on my phone, but keeping the iPad simple worked fine focus-wise.
hinkley · 30m ago
A lot of people get bitchy if you have a tablet or laptop open in a meeting.
anamexis · 26m ago
This is a tablet. Are people predicating their bitchiness on what kind of screen it has?
fluidcruft · 24m ago
That doesn't seem like a particularly defensible reason to invest in one tool vs another to me. ymmv
bigyabai · 27m ago
If you get both with a stylus the price ends up being more-or-less equal. As someone who isn't in the Apple ecosystem it seems like a bit of a toss-up for me.
grogenaut · 22m ago
My wife's RM can't sync right now due to some time bug. RM's answer was to buy a new one and start paying the cloud subscription.
dmitrygr · 11m ago
RM/RM2 run linux and you can SSH in and copy files to/fro. It is not hard
kami23 · 30m ago
These things not being android based is always a deal breaker for me because I have so many sources of DRMed audiobooks or ebooks that would just be a hassle on a lot of these e-ink devices, which is something I really want out of these note tablets.
I got a boox air note 4c with the original intention of using it for comic books with some basic coloring, but have found it significantly more useful for notetaking over anything else. UX is still abysmal in some ways that make starting notes a chore, but it's increased my note taking and journaling significantly.
ge96 · 55m ago
Funny I almost wish I bought an RM2 (again)
I got a PineNote and it had a $100 import duty
This device for me is odd/too small it's like you'd have 2 phones. Though I've seen those e-ink phones.
The writing feel is great on the RM2 and the battery life wow. Charge it once a month deal.
whatevertrevor · 23m ago
I wish Remarkable had better software compatibility though. Importing books from Kindle is a multi-step process, a bunch of formats aren't supported, and their first party app doesn't even work on linux.
Haven't tried OCR on it, but I've heard other e-Readers have them beat on that end too.
floren · 44m ago
I would really like to get a PineNote but by the time I came to that conclusion, tariffs made it very unappealing :(
kstrauser · 9m ago
I understand that they deliberately make focused devices with no desire to have a million distracting features. That’s nice. I appreciate it.
But for the life of me, this thing screams to have a calendar app. My life involves plenty of meetings now. If I could take this to one meeting and look at it to see what my next meeting will be, I think I’d never want anything else.
Not anything fancy. Not even a way to add or edit appointments. Just show me a list of where I’m supposed to to be today.
(And to anyone who’s about to point out that I could lot that info down at my desk before I get up to walk to the meeting room, lemme stop you right there. That’s not happening.)
cebert · 1h ago
I’ve been considering purchasing a ReMarkable device primarily for note taking. Has anyone tried both the Kindle Scribe and ReMarkable devices? It’s difficult for me to determine which one to go with and they’re quite expensive.
drum55 · 50m ago
I have a RPP and it’s an almost device, it’s so close to good in many ways and falls flat in others.
My biggest gripe with it originally was that the next and previous page gestures worked perhaps one in three attempts, which has been fixed in the most recent software that reduced the perceived latency of everything dramatically. Beyond that it’s a weird experience, it’s sort of usable with open source tools but requires a lot of hacks to not have it sync with their cloud offering if you want privacy. Even if you use their cloud services it often feels a bit clunky and half considered where buttons and controls end up being.
I love the hardware, it’s an amazing looking screen, it feels ultra premium, the folio cases people have made for it fit perfectly in my bag.
beoberha · 27m ago
“Almost device” is a perfect way of putting it. I only have an RM2, but I was never able to get into a flow where I’d easily and happily reference the notes I’d taken. The UX was so clunky it took forever to navigate the folder structure and the cloud sync was frustratingly proprietary.
whatevertrevor · 15m ago
I agree (as another RM2 user). It's great for writing stuff down, but for retrieval it's at best high-friction, sometimes just plain irritating.
If a workflow for exporting my remarkable notes as SVG to obsidian but then also running OCR over them so I can search through them (without converting them to editable text because that's usually a formatting nightmare) existed, I'd be so happy as it would solve the retrieval problem.
sbrother · 41m ago
I have it too and feel the same way.
If I could easily just use it as a text terminal -- with emacs and ssh support -- I would use it every day. But when I looked up the hacking side of things it looked like a lot of work and kind of sketchy.
Figs · 36m ago
> requires a lot of hacks to not have it sync with their cloud offering if you want privacy
That killed my interest in their previous devices.
jonprobably · 24m ago
Partner had remarkable. I bought a scribe. Tried both side by side for a month.
Scribe lets you read your kindle books, draw on them, and write notes. Hard to get the notes off the device.
RM lets you sync automatically. The rest of their software is total junk (see App Store ratings). It was more glitchy. Marginally better writing. Monthly fee.
Both make exporting notes more difficult than it should be.
My current go to - paper and pen with chatgpt app on phone - snap a photo to extract my writing.
I kept the scribe for reading books - rarely use it over the kindle app on my phone.
Hope it works for you though- love the idea.
whatevertrevor · 19m ago
I'm trading classes with my partner on my remarkable (she's teaching me Social Choice Theory, me her Physics), I agree with almost everything you said but there are a few reasons why I'm going the Remarkable route here:
- I don't need to take pictures manually, all lectures are automatically stored, and much easier to flip through instead of a library of photos (which I'd have to later organize).
- I use the screenshare feature which turns my Remarkable into a whiteboard. I could get an actual whiteboard but then we're back to taking manual pictures in the middle of lessons, which will definitely be an impedance.
ordinaryradical · 39m ago
I have the Remarkable 2 and my only gripe is being unable to use a mechanical keyboard with it. In every other regard it is truly a delight, perhaps even a perfection of certain modes of thinking.
baby_souffle · 49m ago
Kindle scribe has been a disappointment.
Unless you're going to go through all the work needed to jailbreak, your subject to whatever software changes Amazon wants to push on you with next to no notice.
I haven't looked much since shortly after a launch of the original scribe but I was infuriated to find out that they didn't have a straightforward or simple API for extracting notes and that wasn't something they had on the road map for immediately after release either.
To the best of my knowledge, there is still no convenient way to extract handwritten scribbles and store them as an SVG alongside OCR inside of an obsidian vault. I would love to be proven wrong on this though.
If you don't plan to do a ton of handwriting, the scribe is a gorgeous and large screen. Reading long form documents on it would be a treat if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to side load and synchronize PDFs.
Now I just do everything through my iPad with a pencil and it's almost as good...
codazoda · 27m ago
These days you can email a searchable PDF of your notebooks. I would guess you can extract these with simple tools, though I keep mine as PDF.
whoisburbansky · 46m ago
OTOH, koreader on the Scribe post jailbreak is easily the best large format PDF reading experience I've ever had.
It is a Linux variant. Has been rootable in the past.
mandeepj · 53m ago
I find the name is a bit unrelated! Move as in move your data?
rapfaria · 50m ago
Move like mobile phones
Now the "Pro"...
whatevertrevor · 13m ago
The Pro is because it's a colored display. Though I do agree I can't wait until we're done with the whole "Pro" branding non-sense everywhere in hardware.
debugging · 36m ago
$700+, that's a little steep folks for replacing paper :)
mrcsharp · 33m ago
I have the ReMarkable 2 so I am biased here but these devices do more than replace paper.
My fav feature so far has been screensharing from the ReMarkable 2 while on online meetings.
So while their whole thing is about replacing paper, it actually does a lot more than just that.
fuzzythinker · 38m ago
Really can't see how it can sell well priced this high.
mrcsharp · 35m ago
Sorry, but A$799 for this one makes no sense when the ReMarkable 2 is A$699.
hinkley · 30m ago
Huh. The smaller one is cheaper. Look at that.
vzaliva · 53m ago
May I use to read books (epubs?). I am not carrying another device, but it could replace my Kindle.
No comments yet
dmitrygr · 53m ago
I used to be a huge fan of these guys, going as far as buying their extremely expensive $800 device as gifts for a few friends, but now I advise anybody and everybody against ever giving them money
Two separate reasons.
One: they design hardware very poorly, and when advised and shown, do not fix it. I am convinced this is on purpose, and this saddens me. I can share my email exchange where i advised them on this. Did not go anywhere. This has been the cause of a lot of broken USB C ports on remarkable2. I have documented this extensively with photos on multiple devices. No sane person places a USB-C port that will interact with the a real user in the real world, handling insertion/removal forces on the very very edge (less than 1mm from edge) of a very very thin (0.4m thick IIRC) PCB, without affixing it to something else as well -- to take the load. They did. Predictably, it breaks.
Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/eu4P8fnaNtV9vhMo7 . The video in there, via microscope, you can see how the contacts peeled off. Larger photos show the PCB and how the connector is "affixed". Final photo is after it was fixed, but before the epoxy was added by me
Two: they took features that were part of the original very expensive product, bought under the understanding that "I pay you much $$, you do not nickel and dime me ever again", and locked them behind paywalls of monthly service years after original purchase. They did sort-of grandfather-in all existing users, but not if you reset the device or gift/transfer it. Devaluing/crippling products post facto is something that should never be rewarded. Companies that do that should fail.
Please help reMerkable fail for the above anti-user behaviour. They deserve it.
benji_is_me · 23m ago
Another hardware issue they have is the tip of the Marker Plus. It has a thin collar around the nib that (in my experience) is brittle and breaks off, at which point the marker becomes useless because the nib flexes. There are lots of posts on Reddit complaining about the same issue.
They replaced mine the first time this happened. Now my replacement broke and they aren't replacing it :(.
With that being said, I'm still very happy with my RM2. I purchased a "V-Pen" as a replacement and it's working okay. I'm lucky enough to have a free connect subscription for life because I purchased it early enough.
choilive · 33m ago
I have a friend that went through 3 remarkables due to failures, I didnt dig into the root cause but I suspect you might be right on the USB-C port since they all "stopped charging".
whatevertrevor · 7m ago
They also have the USB C charging quirk/cheap-out that if they're completely drained they will only charge with a low powered trickle charger until the device gets to some minimal level of charge, and then you can use a higher power source.
the video in there, via microscope, you can see how the contacts peeled off. Larger photos show the PCB and how the connector is "affixed". Final photo is after it was fixed, but before the epoxy
sowbug · 28m ago
When I bought mine, I appreciated that they seemed to be pricing it to make a profit as a product, not as a loss-leading foothold for future subscription revenue. How naive I was to think they wouldn't do both.
mmastrac · 43m ago
I use a magnetic charger adapter for mine. I can see how these could break over time but the magnet has never failed me.
I wanted to love my RM2 so much. The write path is great. Writing notes on it during a meeting is a genuinely good experience. The read path: not so much. EInk UXs are so clunky especially when you’re used to how fluid phones are. Forget scrolling through your notes - It’s maddening.
Pretty good ereader though.
I mostly have a very aged Kindle that needs replaced and I would like a small digital notepad. Boox fits the bill generally. I have a larger boox, it's a little quirky and a bit too heavy to hold comfortably but works fine after some configuration.
I say this as someone who bought a Daylight tablet for $700 and is now looking to sell it, since I didn’t fit anywhere and it just sits.
Format support wasn't great either, only PDF and EPUB. Which does cover most bases, to be fair. AZW3 and MOBI aren't dealbreakers, but... really, no TXT?
I wound up down the https://toltec-dev.org/ rabbit hole which was fun and gets me additional features but has its own issues (suspend/resume is dodgy sometimes now)
Again to be fair the rM2 is not sold as an _e-reader_ per se. But regardless I do find the e-reading experience weak.
It's just such basic functionality that... why would you not, if even a small function of the device is indeed to read files?
Honestly from what I'm reading in this thread I'm rather turned off by ReMarkable now, which is sort of disappointing. Still, I'm glad to see more and more e-ink options.
I was literally about to order one until I read the comments
It doesn't surprise me at all that they think there's a market for the device at this size (though the price is debatable), assuming it worked quite well. Sounds like that's a bit much to hope for, given OP's experience.
Edit: your => OP's
I would much rather have a A6 or A5 sized display or any other standard size for paper notebooks.
Remarkable has the roughly A6-sized Paper Pro, Kobo has three e-ink devices with styli and good screen ratios, and Supernote has models named A5 (and A5 x2) and A6 after the paper sizes. I think the options are quite good.
The community has built amazing tools for remarkable device, but their work is constantly being broken by software updates. This isn't a sustainable situation. For a company that charges for a cloud service, providing a stable, official API should be a priority. It would not only support the community's innovation but also provide a reliable foundation that developers and users can trust for the long term.
As long as a stable, official API isn't provided, I won't be buying a new device from them.
I was using regular notebooks but I was collecting too many and I was worried about storage and loss.
I wrote about the experience a few months into it.
https://notes.joeldare.com/handwritten-notes-on-the-kindle-s...
I do not read on mine, it’s exclusively for writing. Possibly because switching is too slow.
Also, I tend to only write things down as a note-taking and memorization exercise, or to think out a certain idea. I usually don't have to read the notes again. So the archiving functionality of having digital paper-like notes is not nessisarially more useful, and it is often more difficult to search through than physical notebooks. Anything I really need to read later, I can write succinctly in a text file or something.
I also don't like getting locked into a certain ecosystem. Xournal++ is the only open-source cross-platform app I can find, and it's not that good.
Even for reading physical books, you can find a lot of used paperbacks for less than $10, which is very little when you consider the value of the time you spend reading them, the ease of flipping through pages and being able to dog-ear them, and the collectible aspect of the book covers covers. An eink tablet be nice for reading textbooks and papers that are more expensive and require pirating, however. But for now I just use a regular screen in portrait.
I realized there was already a device that was perfect for note taking on an infinite canvas.
I use an iPad and Apple Pencil (bought refurb on backmarket.com) with paper like surface [1] I install nothing in it except Apple Freeform. (No distractions)
High refresh rate, Retina display, excellent pen pressure, and fast chip. Cheaper than RM2 if bought refurb.
[1] https://a.co/d/dHLwPp1
How do you uninstall Safari? That's the most distracting app of all.
Running Android or iOS apps is an anti-feature. Having cellular data is an anti-feature. Our world is full of trillion dollar corporations fighting as hard as they can to distract us, drive engagement, and get us staring at their wall for as long as possible.
My reMarkable 2 is the best focus device I have. It's the best writing device by far, the best "draw some woodworking plans" device, the best "work on a crossword puzzle" device, and a very good reading device (page navigation is slower than Kindle, but being able to read PDFs designed for 8.5x11 which are unreadable on Kindle makes it a wash).
On an iPad, at any moment there could be a toast from Signal, or Discord, or Messenger, or whatever. There's a web browser full of infinite content on Reddit and YouTube. I can go on a plane and have a physical book in front of me but it's no match for the allure of the internet if there's Wi-Fi. The reMarkable is one of the only devices out there that fixes the distraction aspect, and THAT is the single biggest thing between me and achieving things.
I got a boox air note 4c with the original intention of using it for comic books with some basic coloring, but have found it significantly more useful for notetaking over anything else. UX is still abysmal in some ways that make starting notes a chore, but it's increased my note taking and journaling significantly.
I got a PineNote and it had a $100 import duty
This device for me is odd/too small it's like you'd have 2 phones. Though I've seen those e-ink phones.
The writing feel is great on the RM2 and the battery life wow. Charge it once a month deal.
Haven't tried OCR on it, but I've heard other e-Readers have them beat on that end too.
But for the life of me, this thing screams to have a calendar app. My life involves plenty of meetings now. If I could take this to one meeting and look at it to see what my next meeting will be, I think I’d never want anything else.
Not anything fancy. Not even a way to add or edit appointments. Just show me a list of where I’m supposed to to be today.
(And to anyone who’s about to point out that I could lot that info down at my desk before I get up to walk to the meeting room, lemme stop you right there. That’s not happening.)
My biggest gripe with it originally was that the next and previous page gestures worked perhaps one in three attempts, which has been fixed in the most recent software that reduced the perceived latency of everything dramatically. Beyond that it’s a weird experience, it’s sort of usable with open source tools but requires a lot of hacks to not have it sync with their cloud offering if you want privacy. Even if you use their cloud services it often feels a bit clunky and half considered where buttons and controls end up being.
I love the hardware, it’s an amazing looking screen, it feels ultra premium, the folio cases people have made for it fit perfectly in my bag.
If a workflow for exporting my remarkable notes as SVG to obsidian but then also running OCR over them so I can search through them (without converting them to editable text because that's usually a formatting nightmare) existed, I'd be so happy as it would solve the retrieval problem.
If I could easily just use it as a text terminal -- with emacs and ssh support -- I would use it every day. But when I looked up the hacking side of things it looked like a lot of work and kind of sketchy.
That killed my interest in their previous devices.
Scribe lets you read your kindle books, draw on them, and write notes. Hard to get the notes off the device.
RM lets you sync automatically. The rest of their software is total junk (see App Store ratings). It was more glitchy. Marginally better writing. Monthly fee.
Both make exporting notes more difficult than it should be.
My current go to - paper and pen with chatgpt app on phone - snap a photo to extract my writing.
I kept the scribe for reading books - rarely use it over the kindle app on my phone.
Hope it works for you though- love the idea.
- I don't need to take pictures manually, all lectures are automatically stored, and much easier to flip through instead of a library of photos (which I'd have to later organize).
- I use the screenshare feature which turns my Remarkable into a whiteboard. I could get an actual whiteboard but then we're back to taking manual pictures in the middle of lessons, which will definitely be an impedance.
I haven't looked much since shortly after a launch of the original scribe but I was infuriated to find out that they didn't have a straightforward or simple API for extracting notes and that wasn't something they had on the road map for immediately after release either.
To the best of my knowledge, there is still no convenient way to extract handwritten scribbles and store them as an SVG alongside OCR inside of an obsidian vault. I would love to be proven wrong on this though.
If you don't plan to do a ton of handwriting, the scribe is a gorgeous and large screen. Reading long form documents on it would be a treat if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to side load and synchronize PDFs.
Now I just do everything through my iPad with a pencil and it's almost as good...
If you want a really nice A5 notebook it can run you an entire twenty five bucks. https://www.dickblick.com/products/leuchtturm1917-sketchbook... Wanna share what's on it? Your phone has a camera, right?
all the information is pretty public: https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/software-stac...
Now the "Pro"...
My fav feature so far has been screensharing from the ReMarkable 2 while on online meetings.
So while their whole thing is about replacing paper, it actually does a lot more than just that.
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Two separate reasons.
One: they design hardware very poorly, and when advised and shown, do not fix it. I am convinced this is on purpose, and this saddens me. I can share my email exchange where i advised them on this. Did not go anywhere. This has been the cause of a lot of broken USB C ports on remarkable2. I have documented this extensively with photos on multiple devices. No sane person places a USB-C port that will interact with the a real user in the real world, handling insertion/removal forces on the very very edge (less than 1mm from edge) of a very very thin (0.4m thick IIRC) PCB, without affixing it to something else as well -- to take the load. They did. Predictably, it breaks.
Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/eu4P8fnaNtV9vhMo7 . The video in there, via microscope, you can see how the contacts peeled off. Larger photos show the PCB and how the connector is "affixed". Final photo is after it was fixed, but before the epoxy was added by me
Two: they took features that were part of the original very expensive product, bought under the understanding that "I pay you much $$, you do not nickel and dime me ever again", and locked them behind paywalls of monthly service years after original purchase. They did sort-of grandfather-in all existing users, but not if you reset the device or gift/transfer it. Devaluing/crippling products post facto is something that should never be rewarded. Companies that do that should fail.
Please help reMerkable fail for the above anti-user behaviour. They deserve it.
They replaced mine the first time this happened. Now my replacement broke and they aren't replacing it :(.
With that being said, I'm still very happy with my RM2. I purchased a "V-Pen" as a replacement and it's working okay. I'm lucky enough to have a free connect subscription for life because I purchased it early enough.
the video in there, via microscope, you can see how the contacts peeled off. Larger photos show the PCB and how the connector is "affixed". Final photo is after it was fixed, but before the epoxy