6 ms·

I've had mine for 4-6 weeks now. I'm not returning it, but I can't particularly recommend it - both the annotation and eReading experiences are significantly i

I've had mine for 4-6 weeks now. I'm not returning it, but I can't particularly recommend it - both the annotation and eReading experiences are significantly inferior to what you'd get with Onenote, Notability, or Drawboard on iPad/Surface. The reMarkable hardware is nice, but its stock software is frankly disappointing. The hackability is a "plus", but I don't want to have to resort to unsupported firmware tweaks to fix a $500 device. Specific feedback: * Zooming is incredibly coarse. There is no pinch zoom, only a button in the UI that jumps in intervals of 100% or more. On many of my documents it goes from slightly too small to WAY too big with no level in between * Speaking of zooming, the pen controls overlay the document, often blocking parts of the text. There is no way to scale the document to fit in the remaining space. There's not even a way to have the button backgrounds be transparent so you could still read most of the text. * It doesn't support in-document hyperlinks in PDF or ePub, so your table of contents and index are worthless. * If you somehow know what page you want to jump to, that's buried two menus deep and frustrating to get to * Search is very slow in large (100+ page) documents, and results trickle in gradually so you can never be quite sure when you're looking at the whole list. Given that one of my desired uses for the device is to carry around some PDF textbook-style references, this hurts. * You can't change the default writing utensil, so if you don't like the grainy mid-width pencil you have to change it every single time you open a new document * There's no pressure sensitivity in the pen * The eraser works like a pencil eraser, not a digital one. There is no way to erase a stroke, so you'll inevitably erase more than you want to and have to redraw some of it

sanderjd 6y ago
I share some of these criticisms, but the hardware is so good and, I think, the harder thing to get right, that I'm optimistic to see the software improve over time, perhaps through community contributions.
e12e 6y ago
I've had my rm2 for a few weeks, and I think the software is remarkably bad - but I've yet to truly experiment with the various foss/hacks for it. The actual drawing and doodling is nice, but there are a number of issues. First the cloud/sync software will happily let you add lots of ebooks/comics to transfer (I have a couple of comic bundles from humble bundle I've yet to read). The end result is that the disk fills up, and the on-device file manager is anemic and slow. Not only is there no discernable way to clear the sync queue (so as you free up space it gets filled again..) - even if you can sort by file size, you can't actually list file size. I had hoped to use it, beyond comics, for technical books - but both zoom and reflow of text, and font selection is poor for both Pdf and epub. Then finally, I had hope it would work for viewing Pdf rpg rulebook - but it chokes pretty badly (on the admittedly quite horrible) white wolf mage 20th book for example. And to add insult to injury the built in Pdf reader can't be used with the interactive (Pdf form) character sheets. It can read a "printed" version and allows doodling on top - so it's not all lost. But the end result isn't machine readable, so you're almost better off with a paper sheet anyway. Finally, reading a standard epub (like "The Star's my Destination") is painful because the limited font/margin/reflow, and the sluggish response for turning pages (a hw button would've helped here). In the end, my aging huawei phone [1] with oled display set to night mode is a better book reading experience both in Kindle and FBreader. But again, the doodling is pretty good, and the screen is crisp - so I hope something can be done via software. Maybe even just adding a djvu-reader and do the conversion off device if the cpu is truly as underpowered for Pdf as it appears. [1] p20 pro (wow, it really is a 2018 phone - thought it was older..) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20
michaelmior 6y ago
I don't have the reMarkable 2, but I preordered v1 and have been using it pretty regularly since then. I've really enjoyed it and greatly prefer it for my primary use case of reading and reviewing academic papers. I find it far superior to an iPad in this respect. Mostly because of the display. The specific points of feedback you have are common with the v1 device. With the exception of pressure sensitivity. The pen for the v1 device was pressure sensitive. Has that been removed? Of the other points, the only one that I've found really bothers me is being unable to change the default writing implement.
- Arainach 6y ago
  If it has pressure sensitivity, it seems to be a random number generator. It does some stroke thickness tweaks depending on speed and maybe the angle the pen touches the screen with, but my experiments of drawing a straight line at constant speed with variable pressure have yielded a line of constant thickness every time.
  - striking 6y ago
    This is true for drawing tools with fixed or capped widths. Have you tried the Paintbrush? It should be at least a little more obvious.
paultopia 6y ago
I agree with all of this and would add two more: * PDF annotations are automatically flattened, so you can't browse them separately or easily extract them on a computer * sync is terribly, agonizingly, slow and unreliable

sanderjd 6y ago

I share some of these criticisms, but the hardware is so good and, I think, the harder thing to get right, that I'm optimistic to see the software improve over time, perhaps through community contributions.

e12e 6y ago

I've had my rm2 for a few weeks, and I think the software is remarkably bad - but I've yet to truly experiment with the various foss/hacks for it. The actual drawing and doodling is nice, but there are a number of issues. First the cloud/sync software will happily let you add lots of ebooks/comics to transfer (I have a couple of comic bundles from humble bundle I've yet to read). The end result is that the disk fills up, and the on-device file manager is anemic and slow. Not only is there no discernable way to clear the sync queue (so as you free up space it gets filled again..) - even if you can sort by file size, you can't actually list file size. I had hoped to use it, beyond comics, for technical books - but both zoom and reflow of text, and font selection is poor for both Pdf and epub. Then finally, I had hope it would work for viewing Pdf rpg rulebook - but it chokes pretty badly (on the admittedly quite horrible) white wolf mage 20th book for example. And to add insult to injury the built in Pdf reader can't be used with the interactive (Pdf form) character sheets. It can read a "printed" version and allows doodling on top - so it's not all lost. But the end result isn't machine readable, so you're almost better off with a paper sheet anyway. Finally, reading a standard epub (like "The Star's my Destination") is painful because the limited font/margin/reflow, and the sluggish response for turning pages (a hw button would've helped here). In the end, my aging huawei phone [1] with oled display set to night mode is a better book reading experience both in Kindle and FBreader. But again, the doodling is pretty good, and the screen is crisp - so I hope something can be done via software. Maybe even just adding a djvu-reader and do the conversion off device if the cpu is truly as underpowered for Pdf as it appears. [1] p20 pro (wow, it really is a 2018 phone - thought it was older..) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei_P20

michaelmior 6y ago

I don't have the reMarkable 2, but I preordered v1 and have been using it pretty regularly since then. I've really enjoyed it and greatly prefer it for my primary use case of reading and reviewing academic papers. I find it far superior to an iPad in this respect. Mostly because of the display. The specific points of feedback you have are common with the v1 device. With the exception of pressure sensitivity. The pen for the v1 device was pressure sensitive. Has that been removed? Of the other points, the only one that I've found really bothers me is being unable to change the default writing implement.

Arainach 6y ago
If it has pressure sensitivity, it seems to be a random number generator. It does some stroke thickness tweaks depending on speed and maybe the angle the pen touches the screen with, but my experiments of drawing a straight line at constant speed with variable pressure have yielded a line of constant thickness every time.
- striking 6y ago
  This is true for drawing tools with fixed or capped widths. Have you tried the Paintbrush? It should be at least a little more obvious.

paultopia 6y ago

I agree with all of this and would add two more: * PDF annotations are automatically flattened, so you can't browse them separately or easily extract them on a computer * sync is terribly, agonizingly, slow and unreliable