Why is it then that this concept only appears in Trek from before 2005 or so? The modern series barely show PADDs at all. No one uses them like this, and most things are holographic.

This is not in any way a commentary on technology or ergonomics. This is 100% an artifact of the show being produced in a time where multiple physical pages on a desk is the only way people knew to operate. It was the only option at the time, so they just used that same concept with a different prop. We didn't have multitasking supercomputers in our pockets when TNG was produced, we had physical books that had to be spread out on a physical surface.

Trek is not a prediction of the future, it's just a TV show.

I find mine close to useless. The pen is sometimes really inconsistent, to the point where the ink gets applied 1mm from the pen tip. Also, no canvas for pdf annotation, no split screen, no search in pdfs and notes, only tags, etc. It's strictly worse than paper for me.

Hi Locutus_

I'm one of those people with "analysis paralysis" towards the E-Ink ecosystem. Remarkable Paper Pro came out while I was researching, and made me aware of the set of dichotomies around the notion of minimalism vs full blow Android, black & white only tablets vs Galery-3 vs Kaliedo, front lights vs having a screen closer to the surface without front lights...

It's difficult to enter the e-paper market.

For me, I'm a science student currently struggling through classes like Integral Calculus, Linear Angebra, etc... So I'm usually writing math equations.

My first question is how does Remarkable handle math writing? I'm guessing there is nothing to read things like a handwritten Sumation, or Integral, and then convert to Tex ?

Is black and White really the best kind of e-ink, or is that the prejudice or bias of those old time e-ink users who have been using the tech a while now? What about screen size, is the 10.3 really that great (smaller that A4 paper)?

Is Remarkable's "minimalism" claims actually legitimate, or more of a coping mechanism to explain away their apparent lack of features?

Since a few updates ago, margins and pages are "limitless", so you can scroll a page (including PDFs) to the side to reveal a parallel page / much larger margin.

I just returned my Daylight.

I found it:

- oddly heavy, the Daylight is made of all plastic (body & screen) - yet it’s heavier than an iPad Air made from metal & glass.

- handwriting lag, the input lags when I use the pen is so much that it distracts me while writing a sentence. I have to concentrate to ensure it’s keeping up with each letter I write. No such lag exists with my iPad Air.

- no setup instructions or tutorial on its unique gestures. You boot it up and have to figure out how it works and getting it on WiFi

- display resolution is much worse than I was expecting.

- when using chrome, webpages render incredibly small. I’m having to constantly zoom in. There’s a setting in chrome about “desktop mode” but it made no difference.

And I also wasn’t expecting to have to sign up for a Google account to even get software updates, even from Daylight. (Maybe I don’t but that’s what the Google App Store made it seem like).

Wish I had read this review before I had bought it.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/20/24201356/daylight-compute...

* Note: I truly love the idea of Daylight, and hope they succeed. But in my mind, a considerable device improvement needs to be made to realize that vision. Until then, I’ll revert back to using my iPad Air (and now with nano-texture coming more broadly across Apple lines, Daylight is going to have that much more to overcome - because Apple is also cheaper product).

How's the quality of the stylus? Have you found good software for handwriting, both in general and atop existing documents?

Just looked into this and - this isn't e-ink just a grayscale LCD - at that point just get an iPad instead of an overpriced low end Android tablet.

> It's an Android tablet

That's not a feature. I'm looking for a digital piece of paper that can't access reddit/HN/webpages-on-demand, not something that runs highly distracting apps. If I wanted that I could just buy an ipad. I know it's seems really weird to intentionally pay more and get less - fewer features, but the fact that I can go lock myself in my office with my phone and laptop elsewhere and get some proper reading and writing done on my remarkable is, well, I'd say remarkable, but now I sound like an ad. But I'm not getting paid by them and that's just what they called it.

Did you consider any of the boox tablets? On first sight they seem quite similar, epaper with android, but maybe there are important differences I am overlooking?

> the closed nature of the platform (despite it being a linux OS) makes it less appealing.

Seriously, I really hope some management and/or devs from Remarkable are seeing this. I want to shout it from the roof tops. I bought a Remarkable 2, and I would definitely be buying a Paper Pro, if it were a little more open. I'm appreciative that the device itself isn't locked down (that was enough to sell me a RM2!), but for the kind of money Paper Pro costs I need more out of it. If it was a very open system (like in my wildest dream, all software for it would be fully open source) I would take the plunge. As it stands, I'm leaning more toward the Daylight as it seems more hackable to me. I don't need much, not even a big ecosystem, just the ability to hack on it and/or install homebrew stuff from others. The ability to automate and/or easily run scripts on it would be killer.

Please Remarkable, embrace the spirit of openness that I know burns within you. It's a little hidden by conflicting business needs, but I know it's still there! Let those feelings be free, and create the masterpiece that you and I both really want.

You should check out Supernote. While still a bit closed, it's interop is far superior to Remarkable.

Agreed. I'm still letting the Lenovo Yoga 9i bake another generation or so and then I'm jumping in. Booklet PC! Finally!! There is an Acer product but it does not fold down flat like the lenovo model does.

I'm looking forward to a non-Windows device that has two screens. Gave up on Windows a while ago, and as much as I love their Surface tablets, I don't think I'll go back.

1.3M views 15 years ago

You can enable developer mode and remote into the device. There are several API frameworks for building extensions. This has been one of the better experiences with hardware (RMP) I’ve ever had. What else are you looking for in a “jailbreak?”

What was your intended use for the split screen? It sounds like you wanted a tablet with an e-ink screen, which the Remarkable is ostensibly not.

I bought my R2 originally with the same mindset, of jailbreaking it to run custom apps, but ended up loving it for what it is: the best and most expensive reading and note-taking device in our era :)

My Boox e-ink tablet has a split screen mode that I use regularly, but I wouldn’t use it on full page (A4/US letter) sized pdfs like journal articles as the text would be too small.

I had the same experience, when not using their cloud (for privacy reasons), syncing your docs / getting them off the device is very cumbersome.

This totally breaks my workflow. I also tried jailbreaking, but it's all too finicky. It's yet another project to manage, instead of a solution / improvement.

Check out daylight: https://daylightcomputer.com/

they've only launched recently (mine arrives monday) but it uses a novel display tech which purports to be e-ink-like with 60fps. i'm very excited because the main usecase for ereaders that i've found totally unworkable for the last 15 years of trying is marking up the margins of a pdf while i read it; early readers were too small to read pdf's, current gen ones can be large and high-dpi enough but are still agonizingly slow to refresh. finally, finally i can just take notes in my docs. plus it runs android and you can hack it https://www.daylighthacker.wiki/

Yeah, running Linux and having SSH are a massive plus for me too. I can use them as substitute Wacom tablets for basic drawing (design diagrams, sketches on calls etc) and check https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable every so often to see what cool new things I can do with them. :)

It's nice, but doesn't have the advantages of e-ink.

I work similarly to the person in the parent article, but use a mix of devices:

- Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- running Windows 11 this is used for development and web browsing and art/drawing and 3D modeling and so forth

- Kindle Scribe --- ebook reader and notepad --- sometimes will use the web browser for referencing documentation

- Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ --- on-the-go usages

- Wacom One (gen 1 13 inch stylus display) attached to an Apple MacBook --- affords the ability to draw/annotate

The big thing is all 3 devices use the same Wacom EMR stylus technology, so it's seamless switching from one to the other when using a stylus.

100+

The notes organization is awkward, imports/exports are not durable (as another poster mentioned), had several exports fail, and then the only method of export is email.

Definitely felt like a device meant for reading ebooks and writing comes a distant second.

But the screen and the backlight are far better than the RM2 as is the battery life. For me writing notes daily, I had to stick with the RM2 though.

Even worse: if you send the PDF back to the Scribe, all previously-written notes are uneditable.

It seems note taking is treated more like an afterthought. Of course, this means I only use my Scribe as a scratchpad for disposable notes.

It's definitely a different feel, but not bad. It feels like using a particularly smooth ballpoint on some nice heavyweight stationery. I don't find it particularly noticeable or distracting, but I also don't do much handwriting anymore. It has a pleasant amount of drag and has a very slight squishy feel, like if you're writing on a stack of two or three sheets.

My problem is that I apparently apply quite a lot of pressure when writing and the nib in the stylus wears out after a few dozen hours. Some people talk about using titanium nibs, but I'd rather burn through nibs than tear up the irreplaceable screen.

The handfeel is fantastic. It really is a wonderfully designed object.

However, the writing experience is not great. The digitizer is quite simply bad. RM knows about it and seemingly don't care. The digitizer develops random calibration problems and it becomes impossible to accurately put your pen on any specific spot. You absolutely cannot ever continue a stroke after you've lifted the pen. There is no way to recalibrate. The working theory is stray magnetization inside the digitizer, some people claim that dragging a magnet over the screen helps. It also has some nasty quantization issues. Pen strokes are not vectorised and come out inexplicably jagged and aliased.

If you are the type of person who can write quickly with very few mistakes, and without constantly looking at the page, you'd probably get good use out of the RM2. For me, I am abysmal at writing like this and the RM just gets in my way.

I do use my RM a fair bit, but for my use case, it's far less convenient than a paper notebook. I'm mostly taking research notes and diagramming things. I don't markup PDFs or take longhand meeting notes or anything.

Also, having been involved in the RM modding community, I feel pretty gross about ReMarkable the company. The originally billed this as an open, hackable linux device you can run custom software on. They almost immediately backtracked on this and removed the SDK from their website. Someone in the community has to go and individually email RM developers for a new copy of the SDK after each update. Plus the files that store your notes are in a proprietary format. The only way to get them out is to convert to a PDF on the tablet.

Generally I recommend you pass on the RM unless you know what you're in for. It's a beautiful device with horrible software and support.

It's different but gives a similarly nice feel. The surface is a little rough which makes it give a feeling not too dissimilar to that of a chalk board albeit without the chalk. Not sure if that makes sense, but is definitely worth trying if you're curious.

The pen is octnrtimes really imprecise. Sometimes up to 1-2 mm.