Not sure why this pops up now, nothing new afaik, but I'll take this as a chance to leave a quick review ;)
I bought one during the kickstarter, mostly for note taking; but also as a ereader & perhaps drawing tool.
- For note taking: I prefer a simple paper notebook, as my notes are more procedural. I don't really look back often. It's fine. Just not better then paper for note taking imo.
- As a e-reader, it is absolute dog shit. period.
- If you are not artistic, this will not change that
- The subscription model is terrible, I've cancelled my 'grandfathered' account and tried to sell my rm2 over it.
- Currently using it as exceedingly expensive notepad, no cloud crap etc.
- Battery life is kinda meh, either you have it go to standby and have to wait a few second to use it. Or it is constantly empty when you want to use it. Not the eInk experience I had expected.
You can install custom software, as it is not locked down, that might solve some of these issues. I haven't tried. For me, this is just a notepad. And not a great one at that. I use it mainly because I paid for it tbh.
I have several friend that have one too and enjoy it much more, but this how I experienced it, ymmv obviously.
My review is complete opposite of yours. I also prefer the notepad style of note taking but the remarkable means that my notes are available on my phone or computer whenever I need it. It is the first note taking tablet I've used that actually feels like I'm writing on paper. It's writing and drawing latency is fantastic and the matte surface with the pen replicates the feel better than anything else I've tried.
As an e-reader for general reading it may not shine but when I'm reading a PDF for research and need to underline/mark it up as a part of my study it's fantastic. I find the battery life to be excellent and I don't mind occasionally starting it back up.
It sounds like the remarkable doesn't really fit your way of working but it absolutely fits mine.
No, I do such reviews, but I also take notes, interact with a terminal, read books, hack etc.
The boox and the previous gen of Sony are easy to root: there're even guides available. I may write such a guide for the new gen eventually.
Also, they are cheaper, with better customer support, there's no need for special software or subscription.
So I insist: the remarkable has only one small feature where it's ahead. I got one and promptly returned it, as it would have been a downgrade for just everything else.
I've got a collection of eink devices (Moaan/Xiomi inkpalm and inkpalm plus, Sony, Fujitsu, Boox...), and I have very low standards: anything that I can somehow use makes the cut.
The remarkable didn't, which is telling.
It's just bad, sorry. It's marketed to the linux/free software community so it's good if you want some geek cred, but personally I don't care: I root as needed, and write my own tools if required.
Maybe that's why I didn't like the remarkable: I don't need their inferior offering as I can just take something better and make it dance the way I want lol
We've both got a collection of these types of devices :)
I don't dislike the overall reading experience of the RM2; it's the file workflow and the highlighting workflow of the RM2 that in my experience let it down for document review.
My ideal device would be something with the industrial design of the RM2 and most of the software of the Quaderno Gen 2, except the file/folder interface (which I prefer from the RM2) and the tagging workflow from recent RM2 software versions.
Since you have experience rooting these devices, would you happen to know if there's a hack to turn off font hinting on the DPT-RP1/CP1 and Quadernos?
I haven't looked at font hinting, but if you're root, you should be able to replace the ttf files by files you've edited to behave just the way you want.
Have you tried to do just that? If you can't, if you can at least give me fonts, I can try to take a screenshot for you after I've replaced the default fonts by your fonts.
I share your review 1000x. I pretty much exclusively read PDFs, mostly OCRd but sometimes not. reMarkable is the only ereader I’ve ever found usable. I do agree that the subscription model feels tacked on, but there’s good tooling otherwise (I don’t use the cloud service myself). I highly recommend it as an ereader if you want one predominantly for research, actively taking notes on your documents at home and on-the-go while wanting to sync that with your PC note apparatus.
Subscription? No way I'm buying that.
Why can't it just connect to an existing cloud storage (dropbox, Drive, iCloud). It's so ridiculous that every company wants to offer their own, highly targeted sync option.
I don't do my all of my notes in a single document. I create new documents that are specific to whatever I'm taking notes on. That plus the new tagging capabilities make it pretty easy to find whatever I'm looking for.
Generally speaking, I only use notes for at most a week after I wrote them. Anything beyond that and I type up a document. So while I do wish it had search capabilities, it doesn’t really bother me.
The e-reader is alright, they have been adding features to it on a regular basis and now it's decent. But it has one big advantage in that you can drop PDFs onto it with no changes and then you can scribble all over them with the pen. (I am not a big fan of MOBI/EPUB and most of my content is in PDF.) My amazon ereader couldn't do that.
I love mine! It's a fantastic device and I am glad I got on the bleeding edge of this tech.
I do wish it would sync with Calibre, I don't like having to maintain two ebook libraries
I also wish it had a touchscreen calibrator, as the pen is slightly off around some of the corners
It still doesn’t have bookmarks. Still. This isn’t even just missing reader functionality but would be really helpful in notes as well. Yes, you can get around this with hacks… that are wiped out along with your custom templates as soon as you update.
The web interface fails to upload for me about 80% of the time.
The hardware works brilliantly. Aesthetically, it is an objectively beautifully designed device.
Connect subscription is useless to me, and I’ve never used it.
I’m still torn on the purchase, about a year later. It’s… ok, and I like having it around as it scratches the “want to write but I don’t like having 40 notebooks” itch. It would be nice to have a backlight as well, but most of the time I’m alright without.
+1 to koreader. I didn't want to install it on my Kobo because I don't really want to mess with the firmware of some devices like my phones and ebooks, but it's really a game changer when you get over the initial readjustment to the new controls.
The page turning feels snappier, the ui is better (subjective), and for me the killer feature is better dictionaries in different languages (which are present on the Kobo but not all languages). Not sure how it compares to the reMarkable2 ereader, but judging by the thread reMarkable's might not be even as good as Kobo's
IMO, the whole point of the Remarkable is that it's simple to take notes and annotate PDFs. It doesn't try to do everything, and it's a great single purpose device. The EPUB/e-book reader functionality is very basic, but it's great for reading PDFs.
I've had a different experience with the reMarkable. I love this thing. It's a notepad of course, but I read a lot of books on it. Battery life has worked fine for me.
My experience is almost the opposite but I understand what you say. I use it for note-taking only and it's almost like paper in the feeling. But it hasn't got the downsides of paper as compared to digital media: weight, the difficulty to copy it, the fact that it deteriorates easily, that you cannot erase pen marks easily, etc...
This is what basically removed my need for paper in note-taking. And since in 2022 that was the last thing that I still used paper for, this changed my life and that's an understatement.
Paper went for me from a routine need to something like snail mail (contracts, the few things I really care about and want a hard copy of and very few other uses). I haven't bought a notebook since and I used to do that almost monthly before I had this device.
I feel it's just designed to be a notebook replacer and nothing more. I agree that as an e-reader it's horrible but we have Kindles and tablets for that. Not everything has to be in the same device.
What I am really missing from paper, however, is some color. Even having a way to draw in, say, red and black only, would be amazing. No need for the whole RGB spectrum, just that the feeling of drawing with different pens is something I had unfortunately to give up on.
Re: reading: try KOReader. It was a straight upgrade from the reader app on my Boox device and I wouldn't switch back if you paid me. I only dip into the stock apps for note-taking now, all of my reading happens in KOReader; It took reading from "pretty good but often annoying" to excellent.
Agreed on the other points though. Personally I think we're a good two generations of color display tech away from general availability of really good e-ink hybrid devices that have color displays, high PPI and low enough display latency to feel responsive during markup. If you're okay with slower refresh the kaleido 3 stuff hitting the market this year might satisfy your desire for highlighting and color markup. Personally I'm waiting a bit, 150PPI just doesn't do it for me.
I'm not the OP but also have a reMarkable 2: the reMarkable 2 doesn't appear to mount as a standard USB external disc on MacOS (Kindles do, however). This makes it hard to manage a library via Calibre or a similar system. The reMarkalbe 2 really, really wants users to sign up for subscription services that manage the device through reMarkable's servers, which adds a bunch of unpleasant and difficult-to-manage steps, relative to the simple strategy of "plug in, send to device" that Calibre enables.
In addition, I often download articles from https://www.instapaper.com/u; the reMarkable 2 often malforms them, in ways other e-readers, including Kindles and iPads, don't.
I infer that reMarkable's scheme and hope is to sell monthly sync software, but this plan works poorly with my e-reader workflow and, I'd guess, others'.
Probably there are ways to get around these limitations (and, reading the thread, I see some people listing rsync and such), but they're so annoying out of the box that I wish I'd not bought mine.
I actually use my reMarkable 2 mainly for reading. I'm not big on note taking (I did use it to draw graphs for presentations occasionally, though). I picked it over other e-ink readers mainly because:
1. It's big enough for PDFs.
2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.
I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.
Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).
It works well as an e-reader if you're loading it with PDFs. If you're loading it with ePubs, it converts these to PDF behind the scenes, but the internal converter is terrible (although it has improved). It also has a very peculiar/frustrating way of highlighting text; if you're trying to highlight a paragraph, usually at least one of the lines won't "snap" to the text and you'll have to hit undo and try again.
You can install koreader or plato on it, which turns it into more of a traditional ereader, with good ePub support. But occasionally you'll have to reinstall the launcher you use, because there is no officially supported launcher and the option to disable updates doesn't always work.
I wouldn't personally recommend an RM2 as an ereader; there are better options.
Awkward to hold, slow page turns, bad battery life. A kindle is a million times better for epub reading. For PDF e-reading it's no good either because it's slow, and you can't read charts on a low resolution grayscale display.
I bought one during the kickstarter, mostly for note taking; but also as a ereader & perhaps drawing tool. - For note taking: I prefer a simple paper notebook, as my notes are more procedural. I don't really look back often. It's fine. Just not better then paper for note taking imo. - As a e-reader, it is absolute dog shit. period. - If you are not artistic, this will not change that - The subscription model is terrible, I've cancelled my 'grandfathered' account and tried to sell my rm2 over it. - Currently using it as exceedingly expensive notepad, no cloud crap etc. - Battery life is kinda meh, either you have it go to standby and have to wait a few second to use it. Or it is constantly empty when you want to use it. Not the eInk experience I had expected.
You can install custom software, as it is not locked down, that might solve some of these issues. I haven't tried. For me, this is just a notepad. And not a great one at that. I use it mainly because I paid for it tbh.
I have several friend that have one too and enjoy it much more, but this how I experienced it, ymmv obviously.