20 ms·
I returned my Remarkable2
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoSupernote A5X however has been amazing for me for the last 3 months and a joy to use. The eraser function alone makes it an upgrade (!) to pen and paper workflow
- ozzydave 5y agoI’ve made a few things for my Remarkable which mean it’s now almost indispensable for me: - an iOS share sheet shortcut to save a webpage as PDF to the tablet - a script that bundles my long form RSS feeds into a daily newspaper - a yearly/weekly/daily planner PDF (with clickable links) - a short manual process for de-drm’ing kindle books
- harshalizee 5y agoAny chance you can link to or provide info or the iOS share sheet shortcut? That sounds nifty to have. Thanks!
- ozzydave 5y agoNo problem! https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5b5945a3f1a345f9aebe5c34f0cbebb2 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5b5945a3f1a345f9aebe5c34f0c... I got the idea from someone else but unfortunately forgotten who so can’t credit it.
- omarhaneef 5y agoI notice in the comparison the author has the cost of scanning the digital pages. If you have an issue with organization, OCR, and interface, it seems these issues would be 10x worse if you’re digitizing your hand written notes. Just the process of digitizing them with a camera is cumbersome. The quality of the image isn’t really great. Tearing up your notebook and feeding it into a scanner is worse. So the author compares the cost of the writing on a notebook and phone to the remarkable but not the convenience.
- ascagnel_ 5y agoPhone cameras have gotten good enough to reliably capture notes, and there’s software that’ll give you better results and are tailored to scanning documents. It’s a pain to have to scan everything by hand, but I find pen & paper to be an overall better experience, plus you get a built-in physical backup.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoStrongly agree. I am seriously impressed with the ocr engine in iOS 15, and it’s ability to successfully ocr any images or photos in my photo roll, even my poor handwriting. My only complaint is that the Apple Notes app doesn’t seem to OCR content added to notes; hopefully in the future it might, I submitted a feature request.
- ascagnel_ 5y agoIt works, but probably not in the way you want. It'll OCR the content within the image, but you'd need to copy+paste the text out of the scanned image if you want plaintext. https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-monterey-the-macstories-review/4/#live-text https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-monterey-the-macsto...
- abdullahkhalids 5y agoIs there any state-of-the-art OCR system on linux, which works reliably without too much fiddling?
- selectodude 5y agoI've had pretty good outcomes with Tesseract, but it's command line only and it's not even a small fraction as simple and straightforward and plain useful as the built in tools on Mac OS X. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
- approxim8ion 5y agoOffice Lens (and CamScanner and similar applications) are incredible, the output without much effort is absolutely serviceable for me.
- erolx 5y agoJust update the latest software.
- nnwright 5y agoI had many of the same complaints with my remarkable 2... returned it and got an onyx boox note air 2 instead. Still not perfect, but I find the experience much better for my needs.
- bartvk 5y agoThe writer complains about not being able to find/do the "next page" gesture. That seems hard to believe when it's just a swipe. Did you also experience this?
- lallysingh 5y ago* Says he has horrible handwriting and complains about the OCR * Never looks up how to do the basic gestures * Complains about the size, when it's comically obvious what the size is from the constant advertising. Look, the device isn't for most, but HN really deserves a less half-assed critique than this.
- Spivak 5y agoWhether or not it makes sense for a HN post notwithstanding, these kinds of reviews are good because if you are similar to the author then you’ll likely have the same feelings. It’s the same with movie critics, knowing a movie with 84% on Rotten Tomatoes or something isn’t half as useful as the opinion of your twin flame critic.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoThe parent commenter cherrypicked a few of the weaker arguments and threw out the extensive criticism of other aspects of the device, such as the atrocious UI. The reMarkable was panned pretty hard by every major tech outlet as being useful for only one thing, and worse, not very good at that one thing.
- eitland 5y ago> The reMarkable was panned pretty hard by every major tech outlet as being useful for only one thing, and worse, not very good at that one thing. yet my colleagues who loved the first one love this one to and keep recruiting new users so there is obviously a market for it. Personally I returned mine because I couldn't justify both the iPad and the reMarkable at that time but the writing experience was fantastic.
- throwanem 5y agoYeah, I got recruited that way too, only the trouble is that having had the device a few days now my takeaway is I should really have done more research first and ideally spent that money elsewhere. Presented by an excited aficionado, the thing looks amazing, but when you go to actually use it the way you use a notebook, the software just isn't there to help you do that. Oh, well. I guess if nothing else it's a valuable refresher on the correct weighting to apply when evaluating early adopter opinions.
- ralphb 5y agoI've had my Remarkable 2 for 2-3 months. I agree with some of the critiscims here (missing tags, bad typing experience, little integrability), but overall I am super happy with the tablet. I think it's just down to the usecase. It does what I most need it do to! (replace physical notebooks) It also does some things that I didn't know I needed. It's just so amazing to have an undo for stuff you write on paper. The ability to select and move stuff around is also something I now do constantly. I think it just comes down to what problem you're trying to solve. For me, replacing physical notebooks = solved problem.
- throwanem 5y ago> It's just so amazing to have an undo for stuff you write on paper. Sometimes. When drawing, absolutely. When writing, absolutely not. Nothing else in my entire life has improved my handwriting so much as using a pen to do it, because without an eraser there are no options left but to get better or give up, and it's also amazing how much an eraser slows you down.
- xvector 5y agoI can't remember the last time I wrote something by hand for someone else to read. As long as I can read what I wrote, I don't care how shitty my handwriting is, and I'd wager it's the same for most people.
- throwanem 5y agoI used to say the same, and then found myself surprised by how difficult it is to go back and read even my own old handwriting compared to how it is now, enough so that I feel I've done myself a favor by putting in the effort to improve it. Like good headphones, it seems to be one of those things where you don't know what you're missing until you know what you're missing.
- ralphb 5y agoThat's interesting. Maybe I should work on improving my handwriting. For now I just really love the undo feature, and I specifically use when I look at something I wrote and think "I wont be able to read that in the future" :-)
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago> Remarkable is advertised as an E-Ink reader as well as a writing device. In reality, this only works if you have e-pub books on your hard drive. Where can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere What? I'll give you that the two largest distributors, Amazon and Barnes and Nobles don't sell epub but pretty much everyone else who sells ebooks does including Google Books. Also, you can use Calibre to turn any other ebook format into an epub. https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/
- coldtea 5y ago>Remarkable is advertised as an E-Ink reader as well as a writing device. In reality, this only works if you have e-pub books on your hard drive. Where can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere Has this guy ever heard of zlib?
- Bud 5y agoNot to mention MyAnonymouse...
- michaelmrose 5y agoIs this really worth the hassle given the prevalence of resources that don't require membership? I've only ever joined one private tracker and it wasn't materially better than what could be found for free and it was run by raging assholes. Kind of colored my view of that scene.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoHard Drive? The world has moved to solid state, no wonder he is struggling!
- eslaught 5y agoDoes Remarkable support Adobe DRM? If not, then the vast majority of places you can get ePubs either (a) won't be compatible, or (b) won't have the ebooks you care about (because publishers only sell them with DRM). So no, unless you're going out of your way to use a workflow that's unsupported and of questionable legality (DRM stripping), you probably can't read ebooks you care about on this device.
- bambax 5y ago> Where can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere. Not trying to defend the Remarkable (I have no interest in it) but this isn't true. You can purchase epub files in lots of places (usually on the publisher's website). You can download epubs for public domain books on Gutemberg. And you can remove drm from most Kindle files on Calibre, and then transform them to epubs.
- Causality1 5y agoWhere can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere. Legally. If you're willing to break the law you can essentially get every book ever written in a few minutes via torrent. Truly vast archives are available at surprisingly small file sizes.
- fouc 5y agoAuthor seems to be expecting Big Corp level quality of software & integration. He says something about not being able to read books on the ReMarkable because he can't find e-pub files for them, lol. It does high-light the fact that the best users for RM don't have a need for a Microsoft Onenote level experience and/or are more technically astute and can figure out their own workarounds.
- Aeolun 5y agoYou didn’t check what it could do before buying it? Especially when these are the lacking features you are now returning it over? I dunno, this whole article screams ‘user error’ to me.
- tomc1985 5y ago> In reality, this only works if you have e-pub books There is soooooooooooo much content available in PDF
- jjoonathan 5y agoYeah, there are a few core features that can really make or break a notetaking workflow. I'm on an iPad (I need full color pan/zoom for my core workflow) and I want to love ZoomNotes so badly, but the OCR search is slow. It's a silly problem -- it goes one document at a time every time, so probably OCR caching is janked out or something -- but it's core enough that I am willing to cut out all of its considerable feature library from my workflow and use a much simpler app, GoodNotes, instead. It barely meets the core subset of features that I absolutely need, but none of those features are broken, and that makes it a winner.
- martini333 5y agoI was considering an reMarkable instead of an iPad Pro with a pencil back in 2015. But with the cheap iPad having Pencil support, I would never consider it today.
- mywacaday 5y agoHas anybody used onenote on the boox note air 2?
- anon2020dot00 5y agoCheck-out MyDeepGuide on YouTube; he tried OneNote on the Note Air 2.
- mywacaday 5y agoThanks for that, there was an update only 2 days ago that has pushed me to a hard no for now.
- opheliate 5y ago> I should note that in theory there is a gesture I saw referenced in the onboarding materials to go to the "next" page, but I never could figure out how to make it happen This makes the whole article seem un-serious to me. It seems like there was either a defect with the author's device, or they couldn't take the time to Google "turn page remarkable" and find this help page showing the (very intuitive) gestures listed, with videos: https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009582118-Swipe-gestures https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000958211.... This is absolutely not something I had trouble with on my device.
- taysix 5y agoI stopped reading this review after hitting this point. The next page gesture is so simple and gestures overall are a key thing to nail down if you're trying to use a remarkable. It sounds like it just wasn't for the author but it also seems like they didn't try to learn the device or look up guides for it.
- michaelbarton 5y agoI have a remarkable 2 and have a similar problem with the page turning experience. Swiping for a new page works very infrequently. It used to work when I first bought it, so I have to use the page navigation UI similar to what the author describes.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoThe author has a few silly points, as pointed out by others - but plenty of valid criticism. The basic problem with the Remarkable is that it's useless without the $8/month "cloud" plan because that's the only plan that enables its primary feature: handwriting recognition. That means that very rapidly it has a TCO approaching or exceeding, say, a used iPad and Pencil. A device that exceeds the capabilities of the reMarkable in every regard (even on the most basic level: an iPad doesn't require a network connection and cloud service to do handwriting recognition and drawing simplification), even before you get to the massive ecosystem of accessories and apps. This device is a one-trick pony that is expensive and requires its own special food. They're also more than a little shady about their refund/return policies. If you don't buy the cloud "trial", you don't get the "free" trial/return policy. The cloud trial is a nonrefundable 3 month $24 fee. They have no defined return/warranty policy if you don't buy the cloud service; it's literally "go look up what your rights are, we'll do that." This is buried several pages into their site away from the product page. I've never seen a consumer electronic device company say that nor make it so hard to tell what the warranty and return policies are. I've never seen a consumer electronic device company tie a return policy to a cloud service purchase. In the last discussion about reMarkable I believe several HNers had return/warranty issues with them, too. That doesn't even begin to get into the privacy concerns with them being what appears to be a principally Hong Kong based company. They may have some offices in the Netherlands, but everything on their homepage points to HK operations for some reason. Where are the cloud servers based?
- renewiltord 5y agoI thought they were Norwegian.
- thisiszilff 5y ago> The basic problem with the Remarkable is that it's useless without the $8/month "cloud" plan because that's the only plan that enables its primary feature: handwriting recognition. Are you saying the key feature for the remarkable is handwriting recognition? I have a remarkable 2 and I love it, but the whole appeal is to replace the endless paper notebooks and loose sheets that I use. It is great for that. Since I've bought it they've added a bunch of new stuff and the subscription stuff as well. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but then again I have no need for those features. It sounds like most people want a general purpose e-ink tablet whereas the remarkable is basically e-ink paper.
- codebook 5y agoI am using Supernote A5x. It has solutions for almost all issues the author addressed. Syncing is exceptionally good. It can sync to its own cloud or dropbox. User can install Kindle app, so I can read all e book. The annotation feature while reading the book is good.
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoYeah, also an A5X user here (I actually have both, A6x and A5x but have not used A6X much yet). I have pretty much zero complaints about my A5X (only "nice to have" ideas I'd appreciate). I never used RM2 (or RM1) but the mandatory subscription alone is enough for me to never touch it. Supposedly RM2 has better writing latency than Supernote, but the current Supernote beta firmware improved that latency significantly (I signed up for beta). It may have been a bit slow on the firmware 1.0 but on the current one (2.0.4) it's pretty much as good as it gets for me. Sure actual pen on paper is faster, but for me the latency is low enough that I sometimes reach to turn the page when reading / annotating some PDF. That's probably the best attestation I can give to a device that tries to simulate the paper
- showerst 5y agoI've been considering one of these for Christmas; how is it for reading PDFs? Do you read any tech ebooks or textbooks? I'm a little concerned about page cropping and rednering latency.
- wellthisisgreat 5y agoThe latency has improved with the beta a great deal. For pure reading you can prob get a regular ebook for 1/3 the price. However if you want to annotate PDFs or even epubs, I can’t really complain about anything. There are small glitches here and there (nothing persistent enough), but overall it’s been one of my personal slam-dunks in terms of consumer device experiences. Also you can sync it via Dropbox, and it’s quite seamless for me. Can also connect BT keyboard or wired keyboard and use it as typewriter. The one issue now is they don’t have some feature like shift+arrows to select but that’s going to come with future updates It has kindle app and can read epubs natively.
- throwthere 5y agoThe new “connect” subscription for $11.99/month is required for dropbox/drive integration. That was enough reason for me to pass on remarkable. I get the subscriptionification of everything but the pricing is out of whack. I mean if you capitalize $144 at 3x you’re paying $432 for a simple integration.
- doktorhladnjak 5y agoI'd been on the fence about buying one for a while too, but once the cloud subscription became required, that was it for me deciding against it.
- kstrauser 5y agoI’ll third that. The idea of subscribing to basic features on a device that expensive makes it a non-starter.
- supermatt 5y agoIm a bit surprised that it is a5. I was thinking to purchase one, expecting it to be closer to a4 from the pictures on the website. Either they are composites, or those models must have tiny hands! (or maybe i dont look at other peoples hands enough to know what is "normal" :))
- shakow 5y agoYeah, I have no idea where the author found that. I have one on my desk right now (but no ruler unfortunately), and it stands somewhere between A4 and A5. Edit: according to A4/5 standards and Remarkable promotional content, it should be very close to A4.5.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoIt has a 10” screen. The long side of an A4 piece of paper is 11+.
- salamandersauce 5y agoA4ish sized eInk is expensive. There is a few 13.3" eInk devices out there like the Boox Max Lumi and Fujitsu Quaderno A4 but they are pretty much all around $700-800. The 10.3" devices are IMO a good compromise in size and price. It's basically normal iPad size.
- morpheuskafka 5y ago> When I turned it on, I had one of my first disappointments. It was really hard to to type my wifi password. Not only that, but there is no supported way at all of getting the MAC address of the device, which makes it incredibly irritating when users want to use one in an enterprise/academic network.
- renewiltord 5y agoGuys, I really like the iPad Pros with the pencil but the thing is I want just a simple notebook app. I want to draw on a page and then add a new page easily and draw on that one and so on. If I could screen share that would be great but if I can’t, so be it. Who knows what app I should get? Procreate and Fresco are what I’ve tried. I was thinking about the Remarkable 2 but now I don’t know. Seems like a bad idea if all I want is a sketching tool that I can quickly take notes on. This sync issue is just a nightmare. I don’t want to pay big bucks just to post to my own Google Drive. It isn’t the money, it’s that I won’t get it because I know it costs money and then I won’t use it and then I’ll use the device less as a result. At least on an iPad I can just airdrop it.
- selectodude 5y agoOh gosh, the notebook apps on iPad are best in class. Goodnotes is insanely great. I loved Notability but they started doing some nonsense and moving to a subscription plan so I hesitate to recommend that anymore (though it is like $12/yr).
- renewiltord 5y agoJust tried Goodnotes and it’s pretty good but the iCloud sync just fails with a 503. I like the recommendation, though. It’s got exactly the flow I want so I am grateful. It’s just a pity that the sync is rubbish. It’s unfortunate that this happens so frequently. Like between Miro, Procreate, and Goodnotes I have the functionality but no one does everything neatly.
- selectodude 5y agoIt's a known problem that apparently just resolves on its own. iCloud sucks. https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNotes/comments/qpo3kf/icloud_sync503_error/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNotes/comments/qpo3kf/icloud_sy...
- mattkevan 5y agoNebo is great if you want absolutely first-class handwriting recognition. It also does equation and shape recognition and is basically black magic as far as I’m concerned. Paper by WeTransfer is probably the best pure notebook app - really refined and easy to use. I have years of work notes in this. Vectornator is good for vector work along with the Affinity apps. My favourite vector app is still Graphic, but it was sadly bought by Autodesk and basically abandoned.
- mushufasa 5y agoI bought a first gen remarkable used at the beginning of the year, with the expectations that - I would read more - I could use it for organizing work notes For reading, almost none of my reading actually happens on remarkable. It's usually easier to just use my ultralight laptop (macbook air) instead of setting up a buggy sync to the remarkable, and having backlit screens is better than e-ink unless you have the perfect reading chair/nightstand light setup, which I don't. For writing, I do get a lot of use out of it. I used to write a lot of paper notes and draw on scrap / computer paper, and then would gradually lose them and not be able to find things when I need them. Part of this is my own disorganization, but I also travel a lot so it sucks to have the notes in another place, and scanning requires intentional effort that seems like overkill for notes, that is until you remember them and want to look them up later. The most useful remarkable feature, by far, though, is where you can stream your screen to a computer. Then i can write drawings and diagrams like on a whiteboard, but over Zoom for a remote team. The problem is this feature is super duper buggy. It's currently broken for me. They "improved it" in the software but it's broken without a subscription, except I seem to have the subscription??? If anyone from remarkable is reading this, please fix that one feature, (used to be called LiveView), and then I will keep your product and write a good review. Yes, a laptop with a pen or tablet would also serve the same purpose, I know. If I had an iPad, I would probably use it instead.
- approxim8ion 5y ago> having backlit screens is better than e-ink I enjoy "frontlit" e-ink screens like the Paperwhite and Kobo Glo/Aura quite a lot to be honest.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYeah it's a big miss they left that out on the remarkable IMO
- approxim8ion 5y agowould probably increase the cost for an already expensive product. But yes, I was surprised to hear the Remarkable lineup has no lights at all.
- throwanem 5y agoHaving recently picked up a Remarkable, I can empathize with some of these frustrations, but only some. Good things first: The writing and drawing experience is excellent. It's enough like paper and pencil that I've occasionally found myself trying to shade with my fingertip, as I would when drawing with graphite. The medium fineliner tool is perfect for notetaking, and the calligraphy pen tool does a solid enough job of feeling like a flex-nibbed pen that it's taught me some things about how to use one of those which I previously hadn't grasped. Battery life is ample, and palm rejection is if imperfect then at least tolerably okay. The OCR is surprisingly good, if your handwriting doesn't suck. Mine doesn't, by dint of having spent a few years using fountain pens - we missed a trick dropping those in childhood instruction here in the US; they're a tool you just can't use long-term and not improve your hand. For fun yesterday I hand-wrote a trivial shell script, without really trying to write more neatly than usual, and fed it to the reMarkable's OCR to find it fell only two characters short of perfect accuracy. Especially given that, I can't really accept the claim that the OCR is bad - if you can't write clearly enough for humans to read, is it fair to expect a machine to do better? Now the bad, of which there is regrettably quite a lot: The first-party software ecosystem is basically nonexistent, and the on-device capabilities are weirdly rudimentary. In paper notes I index by topic and page number, which is probably the simplest possible system of organization to maintain over such a corpus, and I expected thoughtfully built software on the reMarkable to do at least as well. But there isn't anything, so I'm faced with the need not only to come up with a new system that withstands freely rearrangeable pages whose numbers no longer can be relied upon, but also in so doing to work around the slowness and lack of tactility of the reMarkable as compared to paper. The page turning gestures are indeed not that reliable, and slow when they do work. Worse, the absence of even a basic bookmarking system forecloses any kind of rapid access to a specific page anywhere. Even the few features that exist tend not to be completely implemented. For example, layers exist but aren't opaque; if you draw in white on a layer below lines in gray or black, the white appears on top. It's hard to even come up with a mental model for how this is implemented, and it violates the expectation created by every other graphical program that provides layers. They're still useful for protecting some content on a page from accidental erasure, but they're only useful for that. The lack of a "save as template" feature means that, to use eg the custom layout I've drawn up for a sleep diary, I have to either keep it as a blank page which I laboriously duplicate and move for each new page I need, or go through a convoluted flow of exporting, saving as PNG, and reuploading via the onboard SSH server. Too, if I want straight lines for that layout, I need a physical ruler to create them - which is fun for a little while, but would be preferably replaced by a straight line tool in the actual UI. The hackability of the device is clearly excellent, and the community ecosystem quite rich. I can see where the folks at reMarkable could imagine this was enough, but it isn't. The device sells as being "like paper but better" right out of the box, but that's only true for people who have no idea how to get the most out of paper. But I do know how, and the device has at every turn frustrated my efforts to apply that knowledge to its use. I have to say that I've found the reMarkable on balance mostly disappointing. I don't know whether they got so excited about the tech for itself that they forgot to put thought into making it pleasant to use, or if the tech cost so much to productize that they can't afford to build the software it deserves, but either way it comes to the same in my view. I haven't yet decided to return it, but I also haven't decided not to. Maybe I can hack it into being the tool it really should have been out of the box, or turn it into a "newspaper" annotable RSS reader, or something. In any case I expect before long I'll be back to taking regular notes with pen and paper, because the reMarkable has a very long way to go before it can provide a comparable level of utility.
- shakow 5y ago> I should note that in theory there is a gesture I saw referenced in the onboarding materials to go to the "next" page, but I never could figure out how to make it happen Either the author or their device has a big problem, because it's the ubiquitous “swipe to the side” gesture. Now I understand that the R2 is not necessarily the best thing since sliced bread and that it does not fit well in all workflows, but the author criticism is rather low quality.
- schmorptron 5y agoThe PineNote ( https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote/ https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote/ ) looks like it could really be a good competitor to the remarkable, if software support is as excellent as it has been for the PineTime watch. Really looking forward to things heating up in this space!
- trevyn 5y agoThat looks very cool. It says preorders are open to “developers”, but the preorder button goes to an empty preorder store. Has anyone been able to preorder? https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/ https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/
- paulhart 5y agoI registered for the pre-order and was accepted into the developer batch. AFAIK we're all waiting on the devices. Kernel development is actively occurring on the Quartz64 board (same CPU), and some people with pre-release devices are working on the display driver.
- shbooms 5y agoPer the author in the link you posted, the PineNote appears to still be a prototype in development and does not sound like it's really anywhere close to be competing against the consumer-ready remarkable: "If you’re looking to buy a PineNote in the first batch, you must expect to write software for it, not to write notes on it. The software shipping from the factory for the first batch will not be suitable for taking notes, reading e-books, or writing your dissertation. It may not even boot to a graphical environment."
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThis is how the pinewatch started too though and it did eventually get to a production version.
- endymi0n 5y agoInteresting. I was on the verge of returning my Onyx Boox Max Lumi (v1) myself, which, as far as I know is the only other contender in that space. The whole experience is sluggish, the UX terribly bad, the hardware feels cheap and subpar and the software is really not well adapted to e-ink. It's a cool A4 sized PDF e-ink reader without many equivalents and okay to decent digital notebook with digital syncing. Everything else still sucks badly. I was hoping we'd get more competition in this space.
- epmaybe 5y agoI went through a few weeks of debating with myself the benefits of getting an e-ink tablet for note taking, reading, etc. I need color for the majority of stuff that I read/study/work on, which was certainly one point against remarkable. Additionally, I couldn't really justify getting a tablet to replace paper. Paper is ubiquitous. It is thin. It goes everywhere. I can fold it. And there's something fun about writing with a good pen (I mainly use fountain pens nowadays). Eventually, my workplace just gave us all iPads, so I use that for annotating PDFs, otherwise I'm still just using trusty pen and paper for jotting things down. Can always scan them if needed.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Where can you get e-pub books? Most tech publishers that sell directly, IME, sell multi format bundles, and one of the formats is usually ePub (and usually DRM-free).
- aranchelk 5y ago> Pen, paper & scanner Yeah, tough to beat. I keep on looking at iPad/Remarkable/etc. and keep coming back to fountain pens and paper. More often than not I’m just working through a problem and the distilled version ends up in code; for documentation I dictate with text-to-speech. When I need to, I’ve got a scanner with ADF. The real estate is as big as whatever surface I’m working on. No lag. No distractions. Minimal cost. I can color code with different inks. Slightly annoying to travel with but as long as I fill up my pens (100% with no air bubbles before flying), it works fine.
- someonewhocar3s 5y agoIt's kind of funny how the man opens the narrative with "I can't write" Like okay you tried something for note taking but you can't write. He mentions the OS being skimpy or something. It views e-pub and takes notes. Should be a remote for the desktop, probably isn't. Should have like a per-observation history for drawing apps to work with, and probably doesn't. It's okay. It's how it is.
- ksec 5y agoI mean most of these are software problems. It is built on a Cortex A7, released in 2011, the same SoC being used in "original" Raspberry Pi 2. Even if the remarkable team had the time to develop or adopt open source solution they will still need their hardware to keep up. And they had to lower the price to $299 already because of the volume they were selling at $399 simply wont make it. This just shows the bar of today's consumers. If they had sold at least a million unit a year they could easily have further lower the price by another $100 while working on a much improved R3 with better processor ( not that I am aware of there is one... all the NXP SoC Solution are quite under powered ). Last time I checked they were at least profitable. So I hope they keep working on it. Consumer Electronics are hard. Very Hard.
- scottndecker 5y agoThis person likely spent more time writing the review than using the product. I have a remarkable2 and saying you have to give "the sidebar menu a colonoscopy to find the UI to list all pages, then create a new one, then navigate to it" is patently false and just stupid to say. Also, in the comparison between remarkable and pen/paper/scanner, the reviewer leaves out several important features. - How about an infinite number of pages? - Or the ability to undo/redo? - Or the ability to resize? - Or the ability to quickly send a document to a coworker? - Or the ability to just be drastically more organized? - Or the ability to not have to carry around 5 different notebooks everywhere you go? - Or the ability password protect your documents? There are lots of reasons a reMarkable is drastically better than pen/paper.
- unknown2374 5y agoReading the review, i cant help but feel that the author was always planning to return the unit. They did not seem to spend much time actually using the tablet and invest in learning how to use it, they just took advantage of the return window, and from tge sounds of it, was always planning to.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoInteresting rant. I'm wondering if I'm weird because I didn't hit any of this. In defense of the RemarkAble2 Page flipping by swiping my thumb left or right seemed both intuitive and pretty flawless. Granted, my handwriting is okay, I print rather than use cursive, but perhaps that makes it easier to recognize what I write? As for e-pub's, everything from O'Reilly and NoStarch (a couple of places where I get reference books) work fine, I also had a number of text books scanned and their PDFs work well as do the 1000+ page PDFs that count as reference manuals for microprocessors these days. Things I hope improve; I do wish the PDF navigation was a bit better. In the ideal world an upswipe would bring up the 'bookmarks' for the PDF and allow one to select one, but using the menu to go to page view then picking the page you want hasn't proven to be too much of an issue. Drawing notes is the best for me. Feels very good and works well. The one thing I would improve would be a zoom in/zoom out feature for adding detail. And I'd love a screen that is both larger and higher resolution.
- fouc 5y agoMy biggest question about the Remarkable 2 is whether it is big enough to read computer programming or other large books comfortably. The writing aspect of it would be more of a bonus to me. I do like the idea of potentially writing/doodling in the margins, highlighting with a pen, etc - but it sounds like it just ends up saving that out as as a modified PDF, which isn't as convenient perhaps.
- jcun4128 5y agoHere it is on top of a piece of printer paper 8.5x11" https://i.imgur.com/Hg5nl3O.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Hg5nl3O.jpg
- halayli 5y agoNot sure what the author is talking about. I've been purchasing epub books exclusively since 2014. It's the format that unlocked me to start reading books on devices. Prior to using epub format, I've tried on numerous occasions to read on devices but I couldn't make the jump. I use my 2018 ipad exclusively for reading. The only apps installed are apple books and safari.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI've never once had a problem turning the page (it's just swipe left from the right edge, feels extremely natural). You can write a lot smaller than you think you can when you first start. My first few pages were comically full of huge writing. Now I use the "small lined" template and fit my writing to that, and it's fine. Roughly equivalent to A4 (rather than the OP's A5). I read technical books on it, and it works. It's not the same experience as my e-reader that I read novels at night on, but I find the Remarkable experience better for technical and workshop books (and recipes). The pen eraser is a little rough, but the eraser option from the menu is more precise. Depends on what I'm erasing as to what I use. Advantages over paper: - I can move whole chunks of text around the page (or copy-paste between documents). I use this a lot - I have ~500 pages of notes on my Remarkable. I cannot carry that much paper easily. - I create lots of notebooks, with meaningful titles (a lot of those notebooks are 1-2 pages long, which is fine), so finding stuff is a breeze. I don't use the OCR because I don't need it. I can't find stuff in paper notebooks nearly as easily. I have a (homemade) paper journal that I enjoy writing in for journaling - there's something about making marks on paper, and about making journals, that I enjoy. For everything else, I use my Remarkable, and it's been great.
- filmgirlcw 5y agoI got a Remarkable2 last year and an Onyx Boox Air. The Boox Air (and there is now an Air 2) is on the whole, a lot better. The Android support makes it usable as an e-reader and the writing experience isn’t different enough, in my mind, to justify the other limitations of the Remarkable. Having spent $1000 on e-Ink tablets, I have a lot of opinions on them, but the primary one is to not mistake what you are buying. I think 95% of the time, people would be better off with an iPad and Apple Pencil. That isn’t to dissuade people from getting a Remarkable, but it definitely isn’t what the marketing/zealous fans make it out to be. It’s primarily about capturing hand-written text. If you want something with more capabilities, Onyx is where it’s at.
- syshum 5y agoThat is the thing though most remarkable fans say it is for replacing paper notebooks. I dont know of many that talk widely about "other features" I got the remarkable specifically because it did not have "other features", I have enough distractions and alerts from my phone, I do not need a tablet that get my email, twitter, etc etc. I specifically did not want an iPAD or a full featured Andriod Tablet with Slack, Teams, Email, etc etc etc I needed something to replace the paper notebooks I carried with me everywhere, it does that job exactly as I wanted
- 2-718-281-828 5y agoWhy would you prefer an e-ink over a regular tablet with colored screen as a replacement for paper notebooks? Isn't having colors available an advantage? My primary incentive for buying an Air 2 (I'm still on the fence) would be to use it as an e-book reader that I can use in the evening without having to worry about blue light interfering with my bio rythm. And from what I read - most e book readers are crap. (Kindle is out of the question for me as I hate Amazon and avoid it where I can - except for AWS which is 50% of my job).
- syshum 5y ago>>Isn't having colors available an advantage? I only ever used black pen. I am not talking about art or drawing. I used my paper notebooks to organize my thoughts, meetings, todo lists, etc. Some people use apps, and laptops, I used paper note books Remarkable is good for this >>My primary incentive for buying an Air 2 (I'm still on the fence) would be to use it as an e-book reader I have no problems with the Remarkable 2 as a ebook reader either, but I do not buy or use DRM ebooks, I am mainly using it for Technical books I get off Humble Bundle, or stripped the drm from, or offical documentation. PDF works just fine for me, but I can see how some people hate it For me the Subscription, and the inablity of the company to communicate with the community has soured me on the device, I likely would not buy one today for those reasons, but for the function I bought it for (note taking, and lite ebook reading) is works great for me If I had to buy a device today to replace it I would look at the Supernote A5X
- garren 5y agoI’ve got a reMarkable2 and have been using it on and off for a few months now. I was looking for a larger e-reader to replace my broken kindle DX. I use mine exclusively for reading, mostly technical, and not for note taking. I don’t use the pen and I don’t annotate PDFs. Reading e-pubs tends to be more miss than hit. Often e-pubs will fail to render things like code snippets, diagrams, occasionally whole pages, on the reMarkable. The same epubs work fine everywhere else. The device works great for PDFs though. Fortunately the publishers I usually buy books from offer multiple formats, and a PDF is always an option. I gave up on wrestling with e-pubs on the device. I agree that the page turning can be janky. The UI is mediocre, and navigation could be improved quite a bit. Syncing is also not great, but eventually works. The battery life is excellent though, and the physical design is better than anything else I’ve encountered. It’s the software that sucks. Overall, I wouldn’t consider purchasing it again. There are alternatives that offer similar capabilities, larger screen sizes, and more. I’d look at those first.
- gamache 5y agoI used a reMarkable 2 regularly for a little over six months. It replaced pencil and graph paper for me. The eInk display and writing feel is top notch. Everything else has plenty of room for improvement. In particular, organizing and reorganizing notes is a real chore. This could be solved by either a brilliant UI on the tablet, or (much more achievably) by a good desktop app that complements the device. Instead the desktop app was just as useless as the native UI, and did not improve during the time I used it. Eventually, my toddler ran off with the $100 stylus, and I never found it. I went back to pencil and paper, and that is when it hit me: the reMarkable offered me basically nothing. I do not intend to use it again.
- alexellisuk 5y agoI have been quite tempted by the reMarkable2, but reviews like this are the ones that make me think twice. When I got an iPad Pro in early 2018, I was of course taking all of my notes with it - from meetings, to ideas, to task lists. At some point I went back to paper and the iPad was relegated to ideation. Exporting is not great, in an ideal world there'd be a fast export of PDFs, but I found myself emailing them or Slacking them to myself to share ideas. The iPad's screen is glossy and gets finger grease onto it, the 1st gen pencil isn't the most natural in the hand. I know you can get matt screen protectors, but I like to use the iPad as a tablet. There's no substitute for paper, but I do find indexing and going back to ideas more challenging.
- a-dub 5y agoi've wanted an e-ink tablet for reading (full size for stem docs as well as casual reading) for quite some time. as the remarkable doesn't support kindle, it was sort of out for me... moreover, i have similar handwriting issues as the op and can only write legibly under very specific conditions that the tablet is likely not to work out for. (lots of space, no lines, no distractions, large desk. it's complicated) i've been eyeing the onyx boox series, but they weren't gpl compliant at the time i was looking into them and perhaps more seriously, i didn't want to introduce any android devices into my life that didn't clearly have a rigorous security update program behind them.
- p2t2p 5y agoI use iPad with Notability and it seems to be perfect. I keep my notes in Apple Notes and hand writing in Notability. Endless scrolling makes it so it doesn’t feel size limiting and features like circle a piece of text to move/zoom it makes usual paper feel outdated. I’m trying to migrate to Apple Notes for hand writing as well but they are way less than perfect for it for now.
- WalterBright 5y ago> The OCR quality is comically bad Why is handwriting recognition so bad? One would think that if we can build a machine to recognize cat pictures, recognizing a handwritten "A" ought to be trivial.
- activitypea 5y ago> Recognizing a handwritten "A" ought to be trivial You clearly haven't seen my handwriting :)
- WalterBright 5y agoPerhaps I have. I've seen the prescriptions you write!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoMy handwriting was described by a professor at college as "dog's dribble" and has only degraded as I spent most of my writing time typing (or painting script!) for the last many years. I've been super surprised to find that doing a search in OneNote will find some of my marginal notes, in part because I knew it was OCR-ing but just imagined it would only address formal fonts/body text, and in part because that writing is really poor. OneNote is the best software I've used from MS I think, VS Code made me wonder if I needed to reassess MS, but OneNote is super-effective. I moved 2 years ago to a paper-free work process (by choice when I started a new job) and OneNote has been central to that. It has flaws a-plenty (not too many bugs that affect me), but it just really fits for me. Short version, MS's OCR is getting there. However, it's not 'recognise "A"' that's the issue, I'm a word-based handwriter, it's the general shape of the word I record in my writing when it's at its worst; that A might be more like a capital lambda with a floating platform in the general vicinity.
- intrasight 5y agoI had investigated a couple weeks ago getting a Remarkable2, but concluded that what I really seek doesn't yet exists - a "smart pen" that will just record what I write on regular paper. I understand the challenges, but I figured that with sensitive gyros and ML and the support of the supercomputer in my pocket that this would by now be a thing.
- Croftengea 5y agoNever used them myself but Livescribe pens do exactly this.
- sidr 5y agoThey need special livescribe dot pattern paper - any ol' paper won't work.
- KallDrexx 5y agoI think the Wacom Bamboo folio does that with any paper? https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/smartpads/bamboo-slate-and-bamboo-folio https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/smartpads/bamboo-slate-...
- edward_elhauge 5y agoReading all the reviews I remembered researching reMarkable about a year ago. Seems like the new model still has the same problems for my use case. Hope a manufacturer out there will eventually upgrade to the level I need. I want two things: (1) take notes (including sketches), never lose them, and be able to search for them (2) read downloaded scientific paper PDFs, read them and highlight them, and make marginal notes. At 10.3 in diagonal screen size, the reMarkable wont let me page flip through scientific articles in their natural size, you need 13.9 in for that. Scientific articles have graphs and diagrams in color, and the color is key to making sense of them. None of the 13.9 in paper substitutes had color. So still waiting for the basic specs to be available.
- bar_de 5y agoWait until you _have_ to return a RMB2 via a RMA. I had to write 23 mails to them until they sent the replacement device - to another address...
- tobinfekkes 5y agoIt takes a lot for me to comment on HN, but this review is frustrating. I couldn't be happier with my Remarkable 2, but I also researched what it could and couldn't do beforehand, then learned how to use it after it arrived. Something the reviewer didn't seem to do. It works like a charm, navigation/gestures are absolutely simple. It's a note-taking device, it never claimed to make crappy handwriting legible; that's not a fault of the device. After a handful of "I thought" and "I figured" the Remarkable should to this or that, with the comical part about "next page" being too hard......seriously? Please. It couldn't be easier. I find it a joy to use for the things it was designed to do. Quit expecting it to solve all your edge cases you can think of, or fringe scenarios you developed and inherited from a different system.
- projectileboy 5y agoJust to second your comments, I love my Remarkable 2 _because_ it doesn’t try to do everything. It’s a great note taking and sketch device, and a pretty good e-reader. That’s it. If you want an iPad, buy an iPad.
- antoniuschan99 5y agoBasically only good feedback from this review is to improve the eraser. For books get a Kindle. Everything else get a Tablet.
- psanford 5y agoI love my Remarkable2, but don't buy one without a clear idea of how you'd use it. I use mine primarily as a reading device. I enjoy writing on it, but don't find myself taking notes or doing other hand written or drawn things on it very often. But I love reading on it. I have a few daily articles and newsletters set to forward to my remarkable. I have some scripts that convert those docs to epub (epub is just a subset of html), and then use the remarkable sync API to push them to my device. Everyday I get a little bit of joy from turning on my remarkable and having the new daily articles pop up ready to read. I imagine its similar to the (lost) pleasure of reading the morning paper with a cup of coffee. A big plus for me is the lack of distractions when using the device compared to a general purpose computing device. I also have an email address setup where I can forward emails or urls to and it auto converts the email/page to epub and pushes it to my remarkable. For long form articles it really hard to beat the remarkable reading experience. I thought I would use it quite a bit for reading academic papers (pdfs). In practice, I find reading pdfs to be a bit annoying on the device. For papers in standard latex 2 column format, I find I have to zoom to get to a comfortable reading size, and then scrolling on a single page is quite annoying. I would much rather read epub files on the remarkable rather than pdfs. On the plus side, when I do read papers having the ability to annotate the doc with my own notes is really nice.
- laurex 5y agoI bought a reMarkable 2 and used it for about a week and then stopped using it. It's not really because it was bad in any way, it's more that it's not sufficiently better than actual paper notebooks. I suppose I had grandiose thoughts of how great it would be to have my written notes turned into digital text files, but in fact, I mostly write notes for my own thinking, not because they will be of any use to me to refer to in the future. I initially blamed myself for not adapting to the new better method and kept it, thinking I'd eventually see the light. Now, I wish I had returned it while I had the chance.
- who_me_qmark 5y agoWait a minute — a hardware note taking device requires a subscription for basic things like OCR and getting your notes off the device? How is that not the highlight reason never to buy one?
- 9935c101ab17a66 5y agoApparently, unless you subscribe to their completely unnecessary 'connect' service, you don't get a hardware warranty AT ALL?! That's insane...