[HN Gopher] The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkabl...
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The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx
Boox Note Air
Author : GordonS
Score : 500 points
Date : 2021-06-15 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hanselman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hanselman.com)
| jxdxbx wrote:
| I have a Boox Note Air--but no have no interest in using it for
| notes or "productivity." I just like e-ink for reading, and find
| screens smaller than 10" to be too small (too much page-turning,
| no good for PDFs). It's good as a reading device, and I like
| being able to use Google Play Books and Instapaper (and the way
| that Boox hides animations and increases contrast for Android
| apps is clever).
|
| It could use a dedicated "page turn" button.
| jhvkjhk wrote:
| I'd like to have an E-Ink tablet, but the black flash when you
| zoom in/out is really annoying(8:00 in the video). Is this flash
| inevitable with E-Ink?
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I have been looking at the Remarkable 2 and other devices in this
| category. My use case is taking notes on CS and maths, which both
| often require diagrams and other drawings. Can anyone speak to
| how well these devices work for this use case and how they
| compare to note-taking with a pen and paper?
|
| To date, I have used pen and paper because taking such notes in a
| text editor is too difficult and time consuming. To deal with the
| risk of losing my physical notes, I take photos of the pages and
| back them up to my Google Photos (text search through photos
| works decently well actually), but I would much prefer to have
| the notes in digital form to begin with.
| thrower123 wrote:
| One segment that has disappeared entirely, but which was
| excellent for taking notes, was the 7-9" netbook. In college, I
| bought two of the Asus EeePCs as cheap little beat-around Linux
| laptops - far better to carry around campus than my real 17"
| laptop. Also it would fit comfortably with those horrible little
| rotating/folding desklets that you have in auditorium lecture
| halls. With a little practice, you could type along at a good
| clip in emacs with one hand.
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| There is something about handwriting, that makes it more
| personalized. Show me a typed text, I cant tell you if I wrote it
| 10 days ago, but handwritten things have a bit of "me" built in.
|
| I got my reMarkable2 6 months ago to sketch some infrastructure
| stuff and keep a TODO list. It did help a bit in organizing! U
| lose the papers u take notes on, but this stays longer and can be
| helpful
| mathewsanders wrote:
| I was one of the supporters for the first remarkable and pre-
| ordered with a bundle with case for $350 (I think) which seemed
| pretty expensive but I really wanted to support businesses
| developing these larger scale e-paper tablets.
|
| The battery life was really bad in the first software versions
| but seems to be a lot better now.
|
| I use it for recipes (I like to write my own version out even
| when working from a cookbook so that I can modify), UX sketches,
| and most recently I've joined a bookclub and has been great to
| highlight passages and write notes in the margin for discussion.
|
| Overall it's been useful, but the early bad experiences with
| battery life/power management really turned me away from more
| consistent use (after a couple meetings where it powered down and
| had to go back to my desk to grab a paper pad).
|
| Would be curious to hear from anyone who got RM2 after RM1 and
| what their battery life difference has been!
| vendiddy wrote:
| I bought the RM2 and used to have a RM1. The battery life is
| much better, though I don't have any hard stats.
|
| They also improved a lot of my complaints with RM1 such as
| difficulty erasing.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Has anyone here used a reMarkable 2 and had the chance to compare
| it to a Supernote or a Note Air?
|
| I've had the opportunity to use a reMarkable in person, and it's
| the first and only digital writing device that I could tolerate
| to write notes. The MS Surface, iPad Pro and Samsung tablets have
| never cut it for me. It's difficult to quantify why - a
| combination of pen-to-display distance, latency and screen
| texture perhaps.
|
| Reviewers seem to agree that the Supernote and Note Air have
| higher latency, and higher pen-to-display distance, so I wonder
| if I could work with them or not.
|
| The reMarkable seems to to be the go-to device as a digital
| notepad, but doesn't do anything beyond that, whereas the other
| devices offer a (near) full Android experience, which would be
| more useful to me as a dwevice that costs PS400+.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| I mentioned below, but you.can see my thoughts on RM2 and Max
| Lumi here: https://sammorrowdrums.com/e-writers-
| remarkable-2-v-s
|
| Personally I don't get a lot out of the Android (as I really
| try to avoid DRM e-books), but they are both nice devices.
| Haven't tried Note Air.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I don't think I'd get a huge amount out of Android itself,
| but just being able to install a browser with a reader mode
| would be really nice. In my mind, I'd install Firefox and use
| that when reading articles.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I installed a script on my laptop to 'Print' to remarkable.
| I can send it articles to read on it later.
| codethief wrote:
| > Has anyone here used a reMarkable 2 and had the chance to
| compare it to a Supernote or a Note Air?
|
| I have! See my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27513499
|
| > Reviewers seem to agree that the Supernote and Note Air have
| higher latency, and higher pen-to-display distance, so I wonder
| if I could work with them or not.
|
| The Supernote does come with slightly higher input latency but
| not by much - I got used to it pretty quickly and honestly
| don't really notice it anymore.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| If the reMarkable could integrate well with other productivity
| tools, I'd probably ask my employer for one.
|
| Being able to read my emails, manage my calendar, read my RSS
| feeds, access my documents from Google Drive and optionally
| annotate them (a copy of it in PDF form) would be what I'd have
| in mind to justify buying one.
| dbingham wrote:
| Personally, I really wish the Remarkable 2 would integrate
| with O'Reilly's new learning platform. I love having access
| to just about every tech book ever written, but I hate
| reading on a screen. The Remarkable is the perfect form
| factor for displaying tech books and if I could get the
| O'Reilly app on the Remarkable and read from their library on
| it... that would be enough to push me over the edge to get
| one. Hell, if that was all I ever did with it that would be
| worth it for me.
| newhouseb wrote:
| You can do this on a Boox android-based e-ink tablet, which
| I've done and generally works well (after initial setup
| fiddling with the color to grayscale conversion)
| Loughla wrote:
| I've used the Note Air, briefly, and now use the RM2 everyday -
| my use case is for reading documents, signing documents, and
| storing notes at work due to the high number of lawsuits and
| FOIA requests. I use it almost exclusively for those three
| things.
|
| The Note Air felt like drawing on plastic. Like using a
| ballpoint pen on a projector screen. It was easy for me to
| drift around the page. And my already terrible handwriting
| suffered. The transcription wasn't clean, and had many errors
| based on my handwriting. The RM2 feels like writing on paper.
| It has fantastic recognition for my handwriting, and the
| transcribing has one or maybe two weird words per page.
|
| The only thing with the RM2 is there is no way to tag and
| search your pages. So you have to be very strategic with how
| you organize your notebooks, otherwise it's easy to just have a
| mess of a million pages you can never get through to find what
| you need. Tagging and searching would make the RM2 just
| AMAZING.
| dheerajrav wrote:
| So, I've been using Remarkable-2 for over 6 months now. And it's
| amazing!
|
| Pros:
|
| 1. A single charge lasts a WEEK!
|
| 2. I used to write a lot of notes on white sheets, add addendum
| here and there. Now, its all on reMarkable.
|
| 3. My table clutter has reduced significantly.
|
| 4. I'm writing a lot more!
|
| 5. It syncs to cloud and I can immediately read the notes on my
| computer, mobile.
|
| 6. It's so thin and lightweight. Definitely doesn't feel cheap.
| It has a nice premium feel to it.
|
| 7. New updates like Pinch and Zoom functionality has made it
| easier to read PDFs.
|
| Cons:
|
| 1. Battery life sucks if you're connected to WiFi.
|
| 2. Expensive - Product + Sleeve + Marker with Eraser sets you
| back $500+.
|
| Strongly recommend to anyone who writes a lot.
| frockington1 wrote:
| Addressing the pricing con: I have the Remarkable 1 and it
| addresses most of the pros but not quite as fancy as the 2. It
| still costs a lot but is 300 vs 500. Seems like prices have
| gone up since I bought it for ~200.
| nicolimo86 wrote:
| I was the owner of an Onyx Boox Max 2. The device was large
| enough to allow the reading of A4 magizines. It's a pity that
| after a year and a half I had to trash it because the battery was
| about to explode. Very disappointed about it. Don't waste your
| money with it...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Onxy service battery replacements AFAIU.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Shameless self-promotion: I am launching a free service to
| consume emails on your RM2. I mostly wanted it so I can read
| email newsletters, but plan to add some organizational features.
| It works by signing up for email lists with your
| @emailnewslettertracker.com address.
|
| www.emailnewslettertracker.com if you're interested in being a
| beta tester.
| jrimbault wrote:
| Musicians, are there any tablet you use, recommend, for
| partitions (sheet music) ?
|
| Someone I know uses a iPad Pro, 13" seems like a good size to get
| the approximate good size. But it's also _very_ expensive for
| just diplaying partitions.
| occamschainsaw wrote:
| There are "specialized" dual screen eink tablets for sheet
| music, but they are extremely expensive(~$2000)!
|
| https://www.padformusician.com/en/products/19-21-padmu-3-lum...
|
| https://www.gvidomusic.com
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I bought both of these last year and although the reMarkable 2
| has a great story, the software significantly lets it down. The
| Boox Note Air isn't quite as good (but it is negligible in my
| experience) of a "on-paper" writing experience but its software
| is significantly better if you want to do anything other than
| take hand-written notes.
| jbrun wrote:
| I have had my remarkable 2 for a month and really love it. It
| replaces paper and annotating paper PDFs. It is simple and easy
| to use. If you currently take notes or write paper PDFs, it is
| for you (this is enough for many people).
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I bought the Onyx Boox Note air after much deliberation. Apart
| from the GPL violations, I don't see any major problems in the
| Note air, and it's a perfect device for my needs. I can recommend
| it to someone who wants a all-round eInk tablet.
|
| * Taking notes is really great, the notes app is highly
| customisable to personal needs. Handwriting to text is quite
| powerful as well.
|
| * Searching for text in your handwritten notes is a quite cool
| and useful.
|
| * You can use the Kindle Android app and it's just perfect.
|
| * The browser is quite powerful and offers a great reading
| experience.
|
| * Keyboard is surprisingly good, I like the write-to-text feature
| very much.
| pjerem wrote:
| I loved my Remarkable but I returned it.
|
| I was pretty ok with the "it's just note taking" paradigm. But
| the problem for me is that it should be "just a note taking"
| device but with advanced note taking features, not just "nothing
| more than a sheet of paper".
|
| The number one issue for me was the poor navigation experience.
| Going from one page to another was a pain if they were not
| contiguous. This could have been solved by allowing to create
| "links" between pages for example. But I the end, I found myself
| writing everything on the current page because getting to a new
| page in the right place was too long.
|
| Let apart my issue, which maybe is really personal, Remarkable is
| a remarkably (!) engineered experience. Particularly , the
| writing experience is impressive.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Could you not set multiple bookmarks and navigate between
| those?
| rchaud wrote:
| Boox Note Air seems like the best fit for me, because it runs
| full Android, instead of a restricted device-only OS. So for
| example, if you want to use it as a glare-free word processor,
| connect a BT keyboard, fire up Word and you're good to go. The
| refresh rate is fine for normal typing.
|
| The problem is that Boox is a Chinese/HK brand with no customer
| support depot overseas. So if you get a lemon, you might be able
| to return it, but it'll be expensive, and your refund might be
| subject to a restock fee depending on the vendor.
|
| The Kobo Elipsa is coming in a few weeks, and looks similar to
| the Note Air, and is cheaper as well. It would be well-supported
| in Canada, but it's running a custom Linux OS that's pretty
| locked down and only integrates with Dropbox, Pocket and Kobo's
| e-store. You can't sideload apps.
| pomatic wrote:
| I have an RM1 and it's pretty good, it's a one trick pony and
| does that trick (paper notebook replacement) well. The only issue
| I have is discovery/searching of old notes. If ReMarkable would
| add wiki or roam style linking, it could readily become a second
| brain. I really think they are missing a trick there...
| Loughla wrote:
| Honestly, if they would just allow any sort of tagging of pages
| and selection by tag, this thing would completely change my
| life. We get so many lawsuits and foia requests that being able
| to quickly find notes related to "person a" or "activity a" is
| vital.
|
| If the current RM2 had tagging, and an 8.5"x11" functional
| screen, I would be obscenely content with the product. It might
| be the perfect daily driver tool for my job at that point.
| ABS wrote:
| I have a Remarkable 2 and the device is great, software is
| improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those
| notes later on is next to impossible.
|
| OCR is very bad and basically makes indexing and full-text
| searching impossible (and off device)
| lallysingh wrote:
| I generally end up taking my Big Notebook on my RM2, putting it
| into page overview, and moving pages to different notebooks
| later.
|
| OCR could never work with my handwriting.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| This is EXACTLY the reason why, after weeks of review, I ended
| up with an iPad pro.
|
| Clearly it's a very different look and feel. However, using
| GoodNotes, it immediately finds whatever I've written (even in
| my sloppy handwriting) on any page I wrote it. It's kind of
| amazing actually.
|
| I'd have preferred eInk, but notes that I can't find are not
| useful to me.
| Jedd wrote:
| I bought a Pocketbook 912 [0] soon after it came out, around
| 2012. It wasn't cheap - I think around PS400. It had a 9.7"
| screen with a resolution of 1200x825. But the CPU & memory were
| what you'd expect a decade ago, so the experience was quite
| laggy. OTOH the display was superb for reading most text books -
| almost native size, PDF rendering & page turning was _fast
| enough_ , and zero eye-strain. It came with a pen for doing
| highlights and basic drawing. I still use it occasionally for
| distraction-free textbook reading.
|
| In 2014 I picked up a Galaxy Note Pro 12.2" - an android(ish)
| device, good pen support. Slightly laggy, but the ability to sync
| my notes and colour drawings (in SVGs, typically) back to my
| computer was valuable. Samsung notoriously ceased supporting this
| flagship product soon after release. (They're now on my list.)
|
| The Remarkable2 looks great, but I'm wary now. I'd want to be
| extremely confident about inter-op of content between my
| computers (Debian, mostly) and the device - in both directions -
| before wanting to make a long-term commitment to yet another
| platform.
|
| [0] http://www.pocketbook-int.com/au/products/pocketbook-pro-912
| abawany wrote:
| I used to have a 912 as well but its bugs were tiresome so I
| stopped using it. I can say that the rM2 is a very different
| beast from that. I didn't expect to like the rM2 and was
| anticipating returning it when I preordered it but now it
| pretty much accompanies me everywhere.
| Jedd wrote:
| Can I ask two questions please? First, what _don 't_ you like
| about it now that you've used it for a while? Second, are you
| sharing data to and fro with a GNU/Linux desktop/laptop (if
| to is the workflow comfortable) or is it primarily a reader
| and note taker that generates notes that are sent one-way
| back to your computer?
| jpichon wrote:
| The default sync app works fine with WINE without any
| tweaking, for what it's worth. Been using it on Fedora for
| a few months.
| abawany wrote:
| My biggest dislike is the storage: my ebook collection is
| closer to 20GB and I'd love to be able to put it all in the
| device but it's not to be.
|
| The sync story is itunes like (transfer+metadata), which I
| somewhat dislike, but the use of rmapi plus other
| mechanisms to transfer data to it (e.g. plug in via usb and
| then post/curl a file vs. using their somewhat silly front
| end directly) has made it work for me.
|
| I use their app as an easy way to look at my notes on my
| work+personal laptop plus also use the send-as-email
| functionality to share notes. I also transfer content from
| my chromebook to it via the chrome plugin.
|
| All in all, the storage limitation is my biggest criticism
| but in general the other improvements it's brought to my
| life have been much appreciated.
|
| PS: I use the Staedtler Noris Digital Jumbo stylus instead
| of the stock due to the built in eraser. The writing
| experience is less realistic with this though but the
| eraser is handier; I wish I had bought the marker plus when
| I preordered.
|
| Edit: I didn't really answer your 2nd question: I don't
| know of good approaches to share data with a Linux desktop
| in this case though I think rmapi would do well for it. It
| would be nice if they had a webapp vs platform dependent
| apps for sharing data. Some of the hacks people have
| developed for it might help in that case. I recommend
| joining their discord or checking out remarkablewiki.com
| Jedd wrote:
| This is great, thank you.
|
| WRT 20GB - I'd just assumed it had a microSD slot. Your
| comment led me down a spiral, to find a guy who pulled
| the v1 device apart and soldered in socket for one.
| That's _extra_ frustrating then that the electronics are
| already there, but the socket + hole is not. [1]
|
| WRT pen - yes, I splashed out for the 'extra good' pen
| for the Samsung, and was glad I did. The bundled pen was
| serviceable, but things like the ersatz eraser, and
| thicker / heftier feel, made it worth while. When ogling
| the remarkable2 shop page I've kind of assumed I'd get
| the better pen at the same time, so it's good to have
| further confirmation on that gut feel.
|
| Sync - sounds like that SyncThing project I found
| earlier, if it's still viable, might be a better option
| for us Linux users. If the data is coming across as SVG's
| or similar then I guess any native apps (Krita, etc)
| _should_ work, but how good the interoperability on that
| actually is ... is not well blogged about. (A doubly
| niche market, I fear.)
|
| [1] http://www.davisr.me/projects/remarkable-microsd/
| abawany wrote:
| The rM1 I think has the capability to solder in a socket
| but it is not clear to me that the rM2 is similarly
| modifiable. The low storage and the lack of support for
| external storage via the usb-c port really make things
| unnecessarily complicated. There is a rm2-pogo project
| that hopes to use the built-in pogo pins to add support
| for external accessories such as keyboard and storage but
| it is still in progress
|
| I haven't checked out the remarkable-syncthing solution
| you mentioned in a different comment but it seems like a
| good idea.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| TFA mentions word processing - has anyone tried eink text editing
| (say, vim, via termux on Boox android), for developing? Long
| dreamt of this.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've got an Onxy BOOX with the optional (and cheap!) Bluetooth
| keyboard.
|
| As this is an Android device, Termux (a Linux userland for
| Android) is available (through F-Droid). So yes, both vim and
| emacs (as well as a slew of other editors).
|
| I've done some light editing on the device, and the display is
| generally suitable. My main gripe is that there's no way to
| position the device and keyboard in my lap in a stable format
| (a kickout selfsupporting folio case, as I have for an earlier
| Android tablet, would be better).
|
| And: as with all Android devices, the OS chooses to kill what
| the OS chooses to kill, when it wants, for memory GC purposes.
| So that shell session may suddenly cease to be at any point
| (usually when backgrounded and you're tending to other
| affairs). This is ultimately a dealbreaker. Android is simply
| not suitable to Real Work.
|
| (You could use Termux + keyboard + ssh + screen/tmux to work on
| another remote system, of course, but that's not nearly as
| portable, unless you're carrying that remote system with you at
| all times as well.)
| danidiaz wrote:
| This is one such setup:
| https://twitter.com/fresheyeball/status/1403192219092144130
| LeanderK wrote:
| My girlfriend got a remarkable 2 and is really, really happy with
| it. We are both computer-science master students and beside the
| remarkable she uses an older laptop. Of course it's expensive,
| but if you are doing a lot of handwriting or annotating pdfs it's
| might be worth it. She spends most of her day using the
| remarkable, not her laptop. She also started using it to organise
| her day, it just works as good as any physical planner. There's
| something pleasant about writing per hand and they really nailed
| writing.
|
| It probably is important that we both don't really code that
| much, it's only a smaller part of our studies.
| master_yoda_1 wrote:
| I am very price conscious and want an e-book just to read
| research paper pdf. I don't care if it does ssh or it has memory
| or i can write on it. I just want it to read pdfs. What do you
| guys suggest.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| A little bit too expensive but so cool (because not just eInk but
| also hackable!) I'm definitely going to buy it. At the same time
| I would never buy function-limited proprietary thing like Kindle
| even if it was extremely cheap (I actually bought a PocketBook
| instead).
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I want to switch fully to digital magazines (as PDFs or via the
| publishers apps), but I can't find the right hardware to do this.
|
| I've worked out that for almost 100% scaling of a magazine PDF, I
| need about a 13" screen, in 4:3 ratio (or thereabouts). 16:9
| ratio is just too tall and thin.
|
| e-ink devices seem too expensive for this single use-case, as
| does the iPad Pro, which although ideal is massive overkill.
|
| I've even started going down the crazy route of trying to design
| something with a Raspberry Pi zero, and a HDMI LCD panel, but the
| power draw seems too prohibitive to make it viable.
|
| Does anyone have any other suggestions here?
| squarefoot wrote:
| The RPi boards aren't the best choice for low current
| consumption, even other competing but similar ARM boards are
| better suited for that use. However, the main processor is just
| one of the power hungry devices: a LED screen needs its
| backlight on to be read, while an e-paper screens don't, and
| their power consumption falls to zero when the user is reading
| a still image, which also allows the processors to enter in
| extremely low power sleep modes. Making a reader with LCD/LED
| displays in my opinion is doable, but tuning the power
| consumption to save as much power as possible will require a
| lot of effort, and would never compare to e-readers anyway.
| However, if one accepts a heavier and more thick device, then
| yes, it's definitely doable, and could also become a better
| platform for other uses too.
| abawany wrote:
| How about a Chromebook with a detachable screen (e.g. Lenovo
| Duet, Acer, or the HP X2)? These can run Android apps and thus
| support most digital magazine apps such as Zinio plus they
| often cost much less than a comparable ipad.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For any current publications, you can probably get by with
| slightly reduced page-size, so a 10" device should still
| present most _current and well-typeset_ content at full-page
| width.
|
| Most e-book readers have an option to specify in-page
| navigation of a document, generally into four quadrants, read
| either in "" or "Z" flow (first is "article", second is "comic
| book" navigation"). This effectively quadruples screen
| resolution, at the cost of a slight decrease in fidelity to the
| original experience. Given the cost trade-offs in devices
| (~$340 for 7.8", $800 for 13.3") this may be acceptable.
|
| That said, I splurged on the 13.3" Max Lumi. The first time I
| was faced with a less-than-perfect scan of a three-column
| article first published in the 1970s that I could comfortably
| read at full size (with just a smidge of margin trim), it was
| worthwhile. If your budget constraint is stronger, you still
| have options.
|
| Most book texts read fine at 8", so the compromise is not
| something you'll be seeing all the time.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Check out the Youtube channel My Deep Guide for an in-depth
| comparison of e-ink writing devices:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH1pWqY0lPs
| squarefoot wrote:
| Ah, e-readers. I'm looking for a good one since forever, but they
| are either too small, too slow or too costly. Hopefully
| technology developments will bring soon a good 10" before my eyes
| will need a 15" one:) Reading old books and magazines is also a
| problem: they're often 100% graphics with no OCRed text,
| therefore they're really slow, also zooming a page with diagrams
| on a technical book can be painful on low end hardware.
|
| Does anyone have a model to suggest with 10" screen size? I don't
| have many other requirements, other than:
|
| Decent speed, storage space and battery life. Support for beefy
| pdfs and other e-book formats. (this is important, one of my old
| readers took like forever to load a big book, then 15 seconds to
| turn each page). I would connect it only to my network, so it
| must not rely on cloud services et al. Color not needed,
| grayscale will do if well implemented. Taking notes not needed,
| although being able to fill pdf forms might be handy, but it's
| not a requirement.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I splurged on the 13.3" Onyx BOOX Max Lumi for largely similar
| reasoning: I do a lot of reads of older materials with poor-
| quality scans, and wanted to be able to read as many of those
| at full-screen rather than zoomed resolution. I also had
| concerns with the size of the device.
|
| I'm happy with my purchase, though with experience, I'm happy
| to suggest trade-offs.
|
| Onyx's product line is based around 7.8", 10.3", and 13.3"
| e-ink screens. Those are what their vendor offers, so it's what
| Onyx bases its builds around.
|
| My previous experience was with a 9" emissive (OLED) Android
| tablet, which saw principle use as an e-book reader (the only
| application to which it's well-suited), with portrait-mode
| presentation of books and articles working fairly well. It was
| hard to read in bright light, with overhead lighting (screen
| glare), or, of course, outdoors.
|
| The jump to 13.3" e-ink at 220 ppi makes even low-quality scans
| of small-print materials readable at full size (without
| zooming). There are a few specific cases that really impressed
| this on me. Many books can be read _landscape_ mode, 2-up,
| which is also good.
|
| The device is large, about the size of an A4 or Letter-sized
| paper tablet. This is _just about_ at the maximum size for
| comfortable in-hand viewing, and you might prefer a smaller
| device. It packs easily into my courier pouch.
|
| If you don't wanto to spend the $800 (over $900 when you
| include stylus and cover), you can shave a a few hundred on a
| smaller device with some compromises in reading convenience.
| There's an in-page navigation that will scroll either in
| "reverse-N" or "Z" mode, for articles or comics, respectively,
| dividing the page into four regions (a 2x zoom). This makes
| virtually any material readable, at a cost of not being able to
| see the full page in a single glance. Even with a 10" or 8"
| device, you'd likely only have to engage this for a portion of
| your reading. Most books are readable at 100%, and even many
| articles. You can also trim margins to increase the size of the
| actual text on the page.
|
| Battery life is quit good (I get a couple of days per charge,
| but use the device for much of the day, what I'm spared is any
| battery anxiety), performance is quite good, the display is
| delicious.
|
| The notetaking feature wasn't something that attracted me to
| the device _but it has turned out to be surprisingly useful and
| appealing_.
| dont__panic wrote:
| No offense, but the article discusses 10" ereaders heavily
| (that's the screen size of both the reMarkable 2 and the Note
| Air). There's also the Kobo Elipsa if you'd like something
| that's totally focused on reading.
|
| I've been using a 7.8" Nova 3 myself for a few months now, and
| it's a dramatic improvement over the 6" Kindle I was using
| before. I love having a screen that's closer to the size of
| your average hardcover page, and it's just large enough to make
| PDFs readable at 100% zoom. It's also very fast, though there's
| always a bit of perceivable e-ink related lag unless you put an
| app on the fastest refresh rate. The warm frontlight is also
| the best I've experienced on an ereader, even better than what
| I've seen on Kindles.
|
| IMO, 10" might be a smidge too large for comfortably reading in
| bed -- the Note Air might feel a bit too large physically and
| heavy to hold up if you're reading for long periods of time
| with one arm holding it up. If that's a common use case for
| you, you should really consider the Onyx Boox Nova 3, like I
| have, or maybe the Kobo Forma, which is a bit cheaper and
| reading-focused.
|
| I'm using my Nova 3 completely disconnected from the internet
| most of the time, though I do occasionally find it useful to
| fire up Firefox for random browsing (and to sometimes transfer
| files with https://snapdrop.net/, which is like Apple's Airdrop
| on your local network). I don't think using the Nova 3, Forma,
| Elipsa, reMarkable 2, or Note Air offline most or all of the
| time would be a problem, though from what I can tell reMarkable
| has invested a lot in sync functionality that you might not
| necessarily want to turn off. Though the reMarkable probably
| wouldn't be for you, since it's focused on note-taking, rather
| than reading.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Thanks. They seem really nice devices, especially the
| Remarkable2.
|
| The problem with working online is that most of these devices
| phone home regularly, and while I wouldn't mind if they read
| with me an electronics magazine or book, that would be
| different since I'd also use a reader for displaying medical
| prescriptions and/or other personal documents.
|
| Broadly speaking, device manufacturers (TVs, home appliances,
| etc.) became obsessed with making users sign in to their own
| cloud and downloading their own app; no thanks, I'd rather
| buy a device that lets me browse shares on the local network
| I'm connected to, and/or save documents into their storage
| using a USB cable. If the reader and the media are both
| within my house walls, I don't see reasons to connect
| outside.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I picked up a kindle fire 10 for the express purpose of reading
| PDFs (RPGs, mostly, so lots of graphics), and I'm very happy
| with it. It is far from perfect, but it is really cheap and you
| get a lot for the money. You can easily install the google app
| store and get a solid pdf reader (I like Xodo). I got it on a
| Black Friday sale for $90, but they are normally $150. So worth
| the price!
|
| I just wish they would put out a 12 or 13" one, and wish the
| aspect ratio was a bit more square to fit more PDFs perfectly.
| remisharrock wrote:
| And the Notea ! Looks like it's full android under the hood. And
| it's french https://bookeen.com/pages/notea-bloc-notes-numerique
| dash2 wrote:
| Has anyone had any experience with e-ink monitors? I work long
| hours at a screen and have two problems:
|
| 1. I get eyestrain and find it hard to concentrate.
|
| 2. The bright screen seems to be very "addictive" and I find
| myself browsing hacker news, reddit etc. instead of working.
|
| I wonder if an e-ink or RLCD screen might solve these problems.
| There are some new 25" screens coming out this year.
| tyler109 wrote:
| I am using 80% of my time working with Dasung eink monitor. The
| advantages are: -Zero eyestrain -Focussed work/Less Distraction
| -Less temptation to do anything else (e.g. videos) because its
| not inviting to do so -More energy after work day and improve
| of sleep quality -No Bluelight exposure
|
| Disadvantages: -Only BW so need to look at normal screen for
| graphics -Needed two eink screens otherwise two small to work
| (but ordered now the 25inch one)
|
| Here is a pic of my setup (actually Dasung featured it):
| https://twitter.com/DasungTech/status/1391693381726658561/ph...
|
| The 25 inch screen is already out and ordered mine, can't wait
| for it to come:
| https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-253-the-first-2...
| solarkraft wrote:
| E-Ink devices are cool. Anything above 6" is just way too
| expensive.
| oggy wrote:
| I bought a Remarkable 2 for note taking and annotating scientific
| papers. As far as it's promise of "better paper", I think it's
| only partly fulfilled. I haven't returned it, but I'm sadly also
| not using it regularly.
|
| It's obviously better than paper since you don't end up with
| stacks of printed articles. The feel of reading and writing is
| also exactly like paper, which is great. You get some basic
| select/cut/paste functionality, which improves on paper. But.
|
| I used it to take notes at work, create simple TODO lists etc.
| The issue with this is that the resulting notes are way harder to
| navigate than a simple paper notebook, as the software doesn't
| support even basic bookmarks. Whereas with paper I can add
| bookmarks as I please, a paper organizer notebook allows me to
| navigate my calendar easily etc. I'm still amazed that the RM
| software offers absolutely no functionality for such navigation.
| This is a huge drawback for me.
|
| When using it to annotate PDFs, the app offers you a few tools
| (pencil, pen, eraser, etc). Ideally you'd like to fit the article
| on the remaining portion of the screen, possibly cropping the
| margins if your the article is created for a different page size
| and your eyesight is as bad as mine. But the support for this
| sucks, as the toolbox always covers a piece of the document, so
| you end up having to hide/unhide it constantly.
|
| Next, while the pen feels quite good, and feels almost as precise
| as a real pencil, I find the eraser quite hard to control. It
| erases an area somewhere around the end of the pen, but unlike a
| physical eraser, you don't see its boundaries. There's no support
| for stroke-based erasing. Finally, stating the obvious, the
| device is black-and-white. But I find different colors helpful
| when annotating papers, or creating sketches of systems etc.
|
| So right now I can't really recommend the device, but I'm still
| holding onto mine hoping it will improve. I think the hardware
| can serve as a basis for better paper - but I think the software
| would need many of the features of http://www.styluslabs.com/ to
| get there
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I've been thinking of buying a ReMarkable, but all I really want
| is a reader without a backlight that can handle PDFs smoothly.
| (Ability to mark up is a plus but not necessary.) Based on this
| thread it seems like the RM/Boox are not really what I'm looking
| for.
| jessmartin wrote:
| I read PDFs (and highlight and annotate) on my RM2 daily. It's
| a _fantastic_ PDF reader, IMO. It's the ability to annotate
| that's killer for me. I mark things up extensively, writing
| notes in the margins, starring items, underlining, and writing
| on the RM2 screen is a paper-like writing experience.
|
| It's e-reader software is a bit meh, so I still read books
| (fiction, mostly) on my Kindle Paperwhite.
| noobly wrote:
| So you don't have issues with the lack of PDF reflow? I just
| want something that works for reading and doing math/cs while
| laying in bed.
| jessmartin wrote:
| Oh, I absolutely _don't_ want PDF reflow! The PDFs I read
| are formatted a specific way for a reason. 2-column, latex-
| generated academic papers, etc.
|
| Reflow is one of the worst things to happen to digital
| publishing, IMO. I get it that it makes ebooks readable,
| but typesetting is an art, and one we haven't even come
| close to nailing in the digital realm.
| agentultra wrote:
| I have an RM1 and RM2 and love the device.
|
| My kid has been doing remote learning during the pandemic and
| using my RM1 for her school work. Wrote some scripts that sync
| the handouts her teacher posts online to the RM1 and she can work
| on them as if she was drawing on paper handouts like she would in
| school. This is much better than what the teachers were trying to
| teach her to do: using Adobe's PDF reader and marking up the PDFs
| using all those menus and buttons and typing things in.
|
| I enjoy writing long-form especially when I need to _think_. I
| find that I get a lot of subtle anxiety and distraction using a
| modern computer these days that I can 't just sit and think
| deeply about a problem anymore while using one. Instead I can
| take the RM2 to a quiet place, take my notes, and I can use the
| transcribe features to email myself plain text later or send a
| copy of individual pages where I've scribbled diagrams, etc. I
| then refine and edit my thoughts down later on a computer.
|
| I want to be able to do more of my computing this way to be
| honest. Document-oriented, using long-form writing, being able to
| step away into different physical spaces without missing
| anything.
|
| Overall though I am really happy with my RM2. It doesn't replace
| my paper journals... I still prefer those for longevity/archiving
| -- but it does great for ephemeral notes, books, marking up
| papers, etc. It's great for capturing the seed of ideas and
| letting me work without distractions.
| KuhlMensch wrote:
| I wonder what the average age of an E-Ink Tablet purchaser is vs
| a purchaser of a traditional tablet (traditional tablet being an
| iPad, not a wax-covered slate)
| [deleted]
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| I love my Remarkable 2 but I will say their customer service
| experience was pathetic.
|
| When I received my Remarkable 2 I had an issue with the WiFi card
| as it would connect and then after syncing once it would
| disconnect and required a restart to get it working again. So I
| emailed support to discuss a replacement. The support had me
| adjust MY router to specific channels so that the WiFi card could
| work (the only device I've had to do this for, and I have my
| channels tuned to not interfere with the neighbors). The problem
| persisted for the first few months I had the device and after I
| made the adjustments. I even offered to use my software
| engineering skills to help diagnose this issue on the device.
|
| Worse still, the customer support agent stopped responding to my
| emails. I don't know if there was a software update that fixed
| this issue, but the way the customer support black balled me and
| gave up, I will probably not buy another device from them again,
| especially if there are similar devices on the market.
|
| Why? I tried to support this company by preordering and go
| through the proper channels and it lead me to a place where a
| customer support agent decided my questions and time were better
| shoved into the abyss rather than address my concerns. That
| doesn't happen from a customer support agent actions, but rather
| how management and C-suite trains customer support agents.
|
| I've actually been saving the emails from companies that do this
| to me. Anyone know somewhere I can report and share my poor
| experiences with companies (ex BBB)?
| abawany wrote:
| Their CS seems to have improved a lot in the last few months
| and there is now an accompanying survey at the end of each
| interaction (ime) so if you still have your device, I would ask
| you to retry. Also, consider joining the Discord/Matrix/Reddit
| forums for the device if you like - someone might be able to
| help you anyways.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| The problem has been fixed by a software update or some
| change I did not perform. If a company wants me to use a chat
| service or forum to solve my problem, they should direct me
| there and/or maintain that service. I contacted them directly
| to their support service, which should be trained to deal
| with questions, not push them into the abyss. While I
| appreciate your feedback I think it's a band-aid to the
| problem.
|
| There's nothing wrong with saying:
|
| "We have found that your problem is common and are working on
| a solution. We will reach out in a few weeks once this has
| been resolved."
|
| Then the company can gather like problems and triage for
| later resolution.
|
| I mean really sometimes it seems like companies act like
| support is a mystery and they have the first buggy product
| ever on the market.
| theodric wrote:
| I had an Onyx Boox 1 and it was slower than my 5-year-old iPad,
| the touchscreen would only register touches from the stylus they
| didn't provide so much as a storage strap for, and the OS was
| Android 6 with a custom spin so you couldn't load a lot of normal
| apps on it, and was abandoned and never upgraded. Total dogshit
| waste of EUR400. I gave it to my dad after a week. I hope he used
| it as a rifle target, but I never asked.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For anyone reading this, finger-touch may be enabled or
| disabled on BOOX devices.
|
| My BOOX cover has a stylus loop.
| Bayart wrote:
| I've been tempted to get one of those for my coding hours as I'm
| back in the office and can't use the whiteboard I have at home
| (on top of having a hefty amount of technical books and articles
| I want to get through in PDF), but I had doubts on the refresh
| rate and the cost. The feedback from the thread quite convinced
| me.
| jcfrei wrote:
| I keep reading that reading stuff on a paper or e-ink display is
| easier on the eyes than a monitor. Certainly makes sense if the
| comparison is to a CRT but compared to a standard LCD? Are there
| any medical studies that confirm this? As far as I know modern
| life exposes us to far little brightness, causing myopia for a
| lot of people. If anything a very bright backlight display should
| probably be better for our eyes...
| illwrks wrote:
| I think it comes down to emitted light vs reflected light.
|
| If you're looking into an LCD panel and the light it's emitting
| is not adjusted to match the environment you're in, too bright
| or too dull, then you will strain your eyes.
|
| With an e-ink screen, anything printed, or even a cinema
| screen, it doesn't usually emit light and therefore relies on
| the light emitted from other things around you to reflect off
| of the surface, illuminating the surface of the thing you're
| looking at. This is more natural and provides less strain on
| your eyes.
|
| On a personal preference side of things, I can't look at bright
| sources in the evening. My wife is a terror for looking at her
| phone at 100% brightness, it's blinding if she hands it to me
| to look at. Where as my devices are setup to dim and be as low
| as possible in the evening, even the profile on the TV.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I work a lot in the sun (even in the shade here there is a lot
| of sun) and a lot of times I have to get inside to do any work
| as normal LCD is simply not readable. While eInk is readable
| like, well, paper. So works fine in sun and shade.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I don't think that's true as long as you provide healthy
| lightning. Light is light, doesn't matter whether it came from
| the sun or from backlight lamp. E-ink obviously is preferable
| when you're reading in the direct sun light, because LCD could
| be barely visible in those conditions.
| tzs wrote:
| One significant difference is that with e-ink you _can_
| provide healthy lighting. With an LCD display you are stuck
| with whatever backlighting is built in.
| rlkf wrote:
| Light from the sun contains a much greater number of
| wavelengths (and different depending on time of day) than
| that from the backlight; it's not the same.
| noja wrote:
| Why the ReMarkable doesn't have a backlight I do not understand.
| mariusor wrote:
| The new Kobo Elipsa has lighting. I'm wondering if the writing
| experience will suffer on it.
| sarreph wrote:
| Pure speculation, but could be a combination of keeping the
| thickness down (it's only 4.7mm thick), and the _purism_ of
| recreating the pen-on-paper feel.
|
| That being said I wouldn't be bothered at all about a thickness
| increase, or breaking out of the pen-on-paper "immersion"...
| Perhaps there's a more technical reason.
| martin_a wrote:
| The whole purpose of E-Ink is to use "passive" displays which
| are more comfortable to the eye. Adding a backlight would
| remove that.
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| I have an Onyx Boox Max Lumi [1], there are 2 reasons why the
| "backlight" is very useful.
|
| First off it's not really a backlight like you see in most
| LCD displays, it's a front-light, or edge-light that projects
| directly on to and is reflected by the e-ink display (the
| transparent top layer of the display acts as a wave guide for
| the edge lighting, and it's really quite an impressive
| engineering feat that they got it to apply so evenly on a
| 13.3" display area).
|
| Obviously this will be useful when ambient lighting is too
| dim to even read paper, but the fact is current e-ink
| technology is just not as reflective, or high contrast as
| regular printed text on copy paper. The front-light
| illumination at low to mid levels (at least on the Onyx
| series) goes a long way towards making the screen background
| look almost as white as real paper. Granted if you are
| outside in the sun you will not notice the frontlight even at
| max brightness. But in dim indoor lighting, it's the
| difference between looking at greenish-grey kinda washed out
| image, and something that might fool a casual passer by into
| thinking it really is paper & ink.
|
| 1: https://onyxboox.com/boox_maxlumi
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Most e ink doesn't use a true backlight, but an array of
| lights along the inside of the bezel that light up the screen
| reflectively. It's still very good for battery life. Both the
| kindle Paperwhite and the onyx tablets have this feature.
| Onyx even let's you tune the warmth of the light.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The Kindle Oasis also does this
| fsloth wrote:
| IMO lighting on an E-Ink display does not increase the strain
| any more than illuminating a paper with reading lamp does.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| You can turn off the backlight
| ploek wrote:
| I'm going to guess it is to keep it slim. And while I normally
| think this fad to make everything thin is stupid, in this one
| case I feel it makes sense. You want the thing you're writing
| on to protrude from the table as little as possible.
| oblio wrote:
| Thin (and especially light) tablets are not stupid.
|
| I have the fact that especially "pro" tablets are becoming
| heavier. They're not comfortable to hold.
|
| In my opinion the "perfect" tablet should not weigh more than
| 250-300 grams, we just don't have the tech for a flagship
| tablet that can weigh that much, yet.
| tzs wrote:
| I find weight particularly important for reading in bed or
| when lying down on the couch.
|
| Experimentally, I've found that my Kindle (320 grams
| including case) hurts a lot less than my iPad (470 grams)
| which hurts a lot less than my Surface Pro 4 (790 grams)
| when dropped on my face.
| ploek wrote:
| You are right of course. I was primarily thinking of
| phones, where the battery life is sacrificed for half a
| millimeter and laptops, where ports are eliminated for a
| millimeter or two.
| emodendroket wrote:
| From what I've read, consumers will not admit it, but
| thinness is one of the biggest factors that influences
| their purchasing decisions
| codethief wrote:
| AFAIK adding backlight means that the distance between the
| display and the pen tip needs to increase, so you end up with a
| small parallax effect and writing doesn't feel as natural
| anymore.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Also, paradoxically, the added light layer reduces screen
| contrast when the light itself is off.
|
| (Have an Onyx BOOX Max Lumi with Frontlight. The display is
| good in strong light, but even under fairly-brightly-lit
| indoor conditions, the Frontlight is useful.)
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| I would probably buy it if it had one, but I want to read in
| the dark often without turning the lights on and bothering
| others.
| teekert wrote:
| There are probably cases with small leds.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Buy a book light?
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Still too bright
| mrfusion wrote:
| I made a dimmer for mine and works great. I Just put a
| few layers of tissue paper over it but really anything
| you find around the house.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Boox Note Air has a front light built in.
| bradklein wrote:
| Same here. I'm so used to reading with the backlight at night
| for years (kindle paper white and Oasis) that going back to
| clip-on external light (I haven't used one since the paperwhite
| came out, do then even sell those still???) is a non-starter
| for me.
| paultopia wrote:
| I have a remarkable 1, and, honestly, I'm deeply disappointed in
| it. It'd pretty slow just in terms of hardware responsiveness,
| which maybe the RM2 corrects, but it also just... gets most of
| the little things wrong in a way that makes it feel so much worse
| on a day to day basis than most consumer-grade tech projects.
|
| For example: it comes with its own cloud sync. Which is extremely
| slow and unreliable: if you upload a pdf from a laptop, it might
| show up right away, or it might show up tomorrow, there's no way
| to tell and no reliable way to force synchronization.
|
| Or this: the software is super clunky. For example, there's no
| direct switching between documents. If you're reading a PDF and
| trying to take notes in a separate file (a good idea because it
| is also really hard to just get annotations out of a PDF), it
| takes a looong time to close the pdf, open the other notebook,
| take the note, close the notebook, and reopen the PDF again.
|
| Honestly, the remarkable experience has soured me on the entire
| class of products. I really want to get that color onyx book
| thing, but I'm too skeptical.
| fancy_pantser wrote:
| > For example, there's no direct switching between documents.
|
| In case you haven't seen it already:
| https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks
|
| The ddvk hacks are easy to apply and reversible. They add a
| bunch of gestures like instantly flipping between documents.
| One of my other favorites is a quick swipe gesture to switch to
| the last-used tool.
|
| I don't want to annotate PDFs and then only save the
| annotations, but it sounds like biff would help with that if
| you don't mind another tool in the chain:
| https://github.com/soulisalmed/biff
| sydd wrote:
| do not get a boox. First they do not publish their kernel
| source violating GPL, second the device constantly phones home
| to China and third the color display is really clunky: low
| contrast, washed out colors and very low DPI (around 160).
|
| Wait a few generations until color eink tech is fleshed out.
| paultopia wrote:
| Thank you. Really good to know those things.
| amval wrote:
| I bought the ReMarkable 2 when it was released. The hardware is
| beautiful (as well as the packaging and presentation). The
| software was pretty underwhelming, but they seem to be speeding
| up and fixing glaring deficiencies.
|
| For my use case, it's lovely (reading and annotating technical
| books and papers, meetings, writing, even the drawing experience
| is better than expected).
|
| Right now there are things that I could imagine myself wanting
| but not really _needing_. Maybe plugging in a keyboard would be
| appreciated.
|
| I can really recommend it if you enjoy "thinking" with paper and
| writing by hand. I am barely use traditional notebooks anymore.
| Plus: it's a very open and hackable device.
| rbanffy wrote:
| the ghosting of e-paper displays is somewhat reminiscent of paper
| magazines, when you see the ink from the other side of the page.
| u678u wrote:
| Hisense has some eink phablets that look awesome too.
| https://goodereader.com/blog/product/hisense-a7-5g-e-ink-sma...
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Wait until the Kaleido 3 color 10'' panels.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| With how hackable the remarkables have been (u/rmhacks on Reddit
| even booted straight Debian on them), I'm somewhat surprised
| there hasn't been an effort to completely replace the stock
| firmware with a tailored replacement.
|
| Maybe that should be my side project...
| stakkur wrote:
| _" E Ink is easier on the eyes than OLED and iPads and the
| like."_
|
| This is a popular anecdotal claim, but as far as I know there is
| zero research to solidly back it. There is research showing
| there's little difference, however. One example:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22762257/
| sireat wrote:
| I have RM2 and use it less than I would like to.
|
| RM2 is fine as a note taking device but is suboptimal for
| reading.
|
| As many other have said the Remarkable 2 hardware is impressive
| but the default software is weak for basic reading tasks.
|
| With Koreader RM2 is quite decent.
|
| Latest RM2 update seems to have bricked Koreader though so I will
| have to reinstall it.
|
| Still, I prefer the original Sony DSP-1 13inch e-reader or even
| Kobo 6.8 inch e-reader for long reading sessions.
| oblio wrote:
| I wonder which will happen faster:
|
| A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a
| point where the quality and power consumption are so low as to be
| indistinguishable from paper
|
| B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use,
| movie watching, etc.
|
| Maybe someone who's an expert in display tech can chime in? My
| money's on A) since so much is invested in it.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think A is fundamentally impossible. A backlit display is
| always going to look different to a reflective surface.
|
| My money's on C: a new display tech which works similarly to
| color E-ink, but isn't actually E-ink. Qualcomm's Mirasol
| technology looked amazing for this, but sadly it never made it
| into any mainstream products and they've basically shut it down
| at this point.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| In principle it's possible to measure the ambient light and
| set the emitted light to simulate reflected light from paper
| so that an OLED looks indistinguishable from paper. Next gen
| QLED displays might have the brightness to pull this off even
| in bright sunlight.
| simias wrote:
| If you really want to simulate reflected light you also
| have to be able to control the angle of the light that you
| emit, and you want to absorb incoming light almost
| completely otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in
| particular).
|
| I suspect that it might be easier to improve reflective
| displays, but I have no expertise in this field so maybe
| I'm completely wrong about that.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| > If you really want to simulate reflected light you also
| have to be able to control the angle of the light that
| you emit
|
| Uniform emission is fine because paper has close to
| Lambertian reflectance. "The apparent brightness of a
| Lambertian surface to an observer is the same regardless
| of the observer's angle of view." [0]
|
| > and you want to absorb incoming light almost completely
| otherwise there'll be a conflict (glare, in particular).
|
| Or make sure that the display itself has close to
| Lambertian reflectance and take into account its color in
| the emission calculations.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambertian_reflectance
| taneq wrote:
| > I think A is fundamentally impossible. A backlit display is
| always going to look different to a reflective surface.
|
| Not all LCDs are backlit. Some are purely reflective or
| 'transflective' (eg. the screen used on the old Gameboy.)
| That's not to say they look like paper now but it's not 100%
| impossible.
|
| Edit: Also the screen used on the Pebble Time watches looks
| reasonably close to a colour print-out with the backlight
| off. These are a "memory LCD" made by JDI (although they were
| somewhat confusingly marketed as "e-paper" despite being an
| LCD.)
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a
| point where the quality and power consumption as so low as to
| be indistinguishable from paper
|
| I thought in relation to eye strain and ability to read in
| sunlight the quality would be theoretically impossible to ever
| be indistinguishable?
| robinsoh wrote:
| I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen.
| Lets start with B.
|
| > B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use,
| movie watching, etc.
|
| There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today.
| Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on
| top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.
|
| E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called
| Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s
| to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not
| 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the
| industry to buy in and start making products using this
| technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their
| production to then start producing 7 color panels in much
| smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the
| numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it
| will be a commercial success.
|
| When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll
| never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate
| physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or
| it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get
| both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like
| ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video
| speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't
| exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't
| exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display
| tech when they could invest in some new internet services
| startup or AI/ML startup instead.
|
| As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by
| their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to
| whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.
| gnicholas wrote:
| What do you think of ACEP v2?
|
| https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/e-ink-has-developed-
| ace...
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _these are all emissive technologies_
|
| LCD doesn't have to be emissive. Black-and-white LCDs are
| most often not. It's unlikely but not impossible for there to
| be some breakthrough in colors LCDs
| gdubya wrote:
| TL;DR: no, because physics! :)
| gego wrote:
| I did buy the little ( boox poke 3) and the big boox note air,
| mainly to do some reading and drawing on the go.
|
| What I also used it for during the lockdown was to switch it for
| the tablets my kids use to control their screen time (not so much
| fun in black and white) while allowing them to listen to music
| and audio books...
|
| I like this trend also because I observe myself using the device
| different than my mobile or tablet... I am just starting out but
| I think it definitely has a niche to fill.
| rvz wrote:
| I was interested in purchasing a ReMarkable tablet last year then
| realised the ReMarkable 2 just released months ago and was very
| surprised that to see that they still don't have a color e-ink
| version.
|
| Until then, I am skipping it since I don't think it is worth the
| price.
|
| Downvoters: So I disagreed with the HN hivemind with a point I
| made about saving money for a better version and now I get
| downvoted for wrongthink? So somehow, this device is worth $400
| to spend on a 32 bit machine with 8 GB of space and 1 GB of RAM?
|
| That is more like spending $400 on an over powered Raspberry Pi 2
| just to read ebooks. (In black and white). You also might as well
| buy the latest iPad then.
| CandyFace wrote:
| Why you would be surprised baffles me. There are only a few
| e-ink tablets with color and they're all small and expensive.
| Setting that aside, they're not focusing (that much) on e-book
| comic reading, their focus is note taking, drawing and pdf
| reading. I use mine to do all three things and it works
| excellent, couldn't be happier. The remarkable is expensive no
| doubt but it's a much better device at what it does than an
| ipad or any other tablet for that matter if you ask me.
|
| I can't comment on the other tablets mentioned her as I haven't
| used anything else but ipad previously and now the remarkable
| 1. gen.
| teorema wrote:
| I love eink devices but got turned off by the first couple of
| generations because they always underdelivered with PDF display,
| which seemed like a central use case to me. I should be able to
| open a random graphics-heavy PDF and have it display perfectly
| (ignoring color) and in a reasonable amount of time for an eink
| device to be worth it to me.
|
| This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want
| to purchase one without being able to stress test in person.
| gspr wrote:
| I understand that. I gotta say I was blown away with how well
| the RM2 handles complex PDFs.
|
| Edit: As a stress test, I just opened the most complex PDF I
| had on my computer -
| http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf . I
| think it works really well on the RM2. The gradients in some of
| the fancier features look ugly, but other than that everything
| is quite readable, and flipping pages is quite spiffy (I know
| some ordinary computer PDF readers sometimes have noticable
| loading times for certain pages in this document).
| efficax wrote:
| The latest kindles are great with pdfs, that was my main use
| for them in grad school. I haven't tried the newer eink tablets
| though
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I use the Boox with papers (so almost only PDFs) on the
| internal reader and on Android readers; it works really well.
| In the end I keep using the internal reader because it has
| split view for me to scribble notes next to every page.
| Disclaimer: I am older with glasses but not reading glasses; I
| read fine with incredibly small fonts; I prefer it that way. So
| YMMV but for me and for PDFs it is an ideal device for sure. If
| the built-in reader is not good enough, you just get one from
| the Play Store; there are enough very good ones there.
| ducleonctor wrote:
| Using a HLTE202N to type this, that phone has changed how I view
| the web on mobile.
|
| Textual information is perceived more clearly and less
| noisy/biased due to E Ink screen.
|
| Great for navigation under sunlight and lasts very long with
| backlight disabled.
|
| It's always a small shock to temporarily use a regular
| Android/iPhone, so noisy and glaring in my eyes.
|
| Wouldn't want to switch back to an OLED phone. Only reason would
| be color video/photo viewing.
| codethief wrote:
| > Later this month I'll take a look at Supernote which already
| has a enthusiastic community and promises to have a rich API for
| 3rd parties to explore and expand.
|
| I tried the Remarkable 2 for a month but ended up returning it
| and ordering the Supernote A5X instead - I couldn't be happier!
| Its main advantages (IMO):
|
| - The Supernote acts as a regular USB mass storage device, so
| syncing files (w/o resorting to the cloud) is not as hard as with
| the RM2 (which serves a really buggy web interface over USB,
| pretending to be an ethernet device). Sure, the RM2 gives you SSH
| access but that doesn't help much because it's using a shitty
| proprietary file system, so you can't just scp your documents but
| need to convert them first.
|
| - The Supernote comes with much better PDF reading and annotation
| capabilities. (The RM2 has pretty much none.)
|
| - The Supernote's soft non-glass surface is more comfortable for
| long writing sessions - writing on it feels like writing with a
| gel pen. Plus you'll never need to replace your pen tips as
| they're made from ceramic.
|
| - The Supernote A5X is running Android instead of a barebones
| Linux system, meaning that it comes with more features out of the
| box and it'll be much easier to extend it in the future when
| Ratta opens up their platform. (Sure, you can "hack" your RM2 but
| the chances that the next official update will then completely
| brick your device are rather high - /r/RemarkableTablet/ is full
| of these stories.)
|
| - The company behind the Supernote actually values the
| community's input, see https://www.reddit.com/r/Supernote
| dhucerbin wrote:
| I learned that 9-10 inches is to small to annotate pdfs so I
| decided against remarkable or supernote a5. To be honest, most
| science-y documents I read by the computer, because I try to
| use knowledge right away in some notebook and/or repl.
|
| But then I noticed that I also read substantial amount of soft
| skill/self help/popscience books and they're easily obtainable
| in epubs. I pulled te trigger and bought supernote a6x. It size
| is perfect. I can read and annotate on the go, I can jot during
| coffee breaks. I take notes on the meetings and then I can put
| supernote on the stand beside monitor and see bullet
| points/todo lists for this day.
|
| Supernote support and community is very helpful and constant
| upgrades take user requests into account.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I got the reMarkable 1 pretty early and
| I've been debating ordering the reMarkable 2. I've heard almost
| exclusively good things about it, but right now I'm happy
| enough with the original device. I hadn't heard of Supernote
| until seeing this comment, but it's definitely something to
| keep an eye on when I think about upgrading.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty
| much none" when it comes to PDF reading and annotation
| capabilities. That's pretty much exclusively what I use my RM1
| device for and it works great.
|
| EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to the
| RM2, it's very enticing. (Once you throw in the folio and the
| pen for the RM2, the A5X is comparable if not cheaper.) Since
| my old Kindle Keyboard died a while back, I haven't replaced
| it. Looks like the A5X can also read Kindle books which is a
| huge draw for me. Do you know if there's any API that allows me
| to write my own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I
| want to be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically
| that will be eventually synced the next time I use it.
| boudin wrote:
| I don't use those features but currently you can sync it
| using Ratta's own cloud (which is optional by the way, no
| obligation to create an account), dropbox or email. Otherwise
| you can copy files via USB. There's no APIs that i know off
| and currently the device is not hackable so there's no
| alternative software.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Thanks! Syncing via Dropbox would not be my first choice,
| but probably sufficient for my use case. I'll definitely
| have to keep an eye on this :)
| codethief wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty
| much none" when it comes to PDF reading and annotation
| capabilities.
|
| Well, all you can basically do is scribble within a PDF. The
| RM2 doesn't offer proper PDFs annotations and it doesn't even
| come close to the Supernote in terms of other useful features
| like bookmarking, digests, etc.
|
| > EDIT: Wow. Looked at the A5X and for the price compared to
| the RM2, it's very enticing.
|
| Yup, exactly. It seems more expensive upon first sight but
| it's actually a pretty good deal.
|
| > Do you know if there's any API that allows me to write my
| own utilities to sync with the A5X? Specifically, I want to
| be able to send PDFs to the device programmatically that will
| be eventually synced the next time I use it.
|
| This is exactly what I'm waiting for, too! My hope is that
| once they open up their platform I'll be able to install the
| Syncthing Android app and sync my Supernote with all my other
| devices over WiFi.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > RM2 doesn't offer proper PDFs annotations
|
| This is true and I don't really mind that personally
| although having read up a bit more on the Supernote, the
| annotations it generates do seem much nicer.
|
| > it's actually a pretty good deal
|
| Pricing seems about the same really. Especially when you
| consider the bundle of table, folio, and pen together for
| each. I was disappointed to see that the standard Supernote
| pen does not include an eraser and the LAMY pen which does
| lacks the ceramic tip and instead requires replacing nibs
| just like the reMarkable pen.
| gpm wrote:
| > Sure, you can "hack" your RM2 but the chances that the next
| official update will then completely brick your device are
| rather high - /r/RemarkableTablet/ is full of these stories
|
| No... they're approximately 0.
|
| The next update will wipe out your modifications, everything
| outside of the home directory is wiped, but the device will
| still work.
|
| People bricking their devices are people actively doing things
| that brick their devices, not updates coming along and bricking
| them later.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| How is it better than the remarkable?
| codethief wrote:
| I updated my post! :)
| fossuser wrote:
| Interesting - thanks for writing up the differences.
|
| For me, lack of android is more of a feature for this kind of
| device.
| clvx wrote:
| I would like remarkable 2 or any of these devices to be used as a
| pen tablet in an easy way with the different OS. It would make
| much easier drawing diagrams while working in a presentation.
| Even better if they at some point can be hooked to some kind of
| software for collaboration editing. How I see myself using it.
| Prepping diagrams early in the morning, pulling that on the
| computer, keep editing while presenting to my coworkers, let my
| coworkers add any other information(even better using their own
| devices).
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| I'm always super intrigued by the reMarkable 2, but I think it's
| because it paints an image of the type of person I think it'd be
| cool to be, someone who can just write down notes and draw stuff
| with a really cool, slim device. Someone who carries around
| moleskines and uses them, instead of just buying so many of them
| in different shapes and leaving them in a drawer packed to the
| brim with notebooks.
|
| The problem keeps coming back to the fact that I'm absolutely not
| the type of person who wants to carry that thing around
| everywhere and who likes or is good at hand writing or drawing. I
| realize I won't base all my life and processes around this one
| device that is also supposedly hard to get info off of easily
| into things like OneNote. If I was somewhere without a computer,
| then I wouldn't be carrying this big tablet on me. I've bought
| enough tablets and laptops with writable screens and MS surfaces
| over the years to know that I still never drew or took notes with
| the pen, but I still keep buying them hoping I will.
|
| The thing is still so cool and I want it, but maybe I'll wait for
| version 3 or 4 and extra disposable income that will go to waste
| on it!
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I have put Working Copy (a git client with a half decent editor
| - ie it does not do autocorrection) on my phone and if the
| moment strikes I put a note into one or two books that I
| Promise To Publish Real Soon now.
|
| was out jogging today and had a thought and popped it in. is in
| gthub right now so i think of it as safe.
|
| But yes. I completely understand - i too want to be one of
| those people.
|
| in fact watching this i thought there is a market for business
| pads - that look like your are taking notes and updating
| tickets not thumbing thorugh facebook in a meeting.
|
| Slap a specialised JIRA client on this and I think you have a
| package winner.
| eloisant wrote:
| I'm actually using my moleskine quite a bit, but it's
| frustrating because everything is chronological, all mixed up.
| I'm not using it enough to justify having different ones for
| all activities. And when it's full and I get a new one I never
| have have my older one at hand, it stays at home.
|
| So this kind of tablet looks really nice...
|
| The reason I prefer to write on my moleskin rather than my
| laptop is because if I have my laptop, I get distracted and I
| do stuff I'm not supposed to.
|
| Additionally I find it rude to be on your laptop when you're in
| a meeting, because people might think you're doing other stuff,
| and also because having your screen between you and other
| people creates a kind of "barrier".
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I've got a ReMarkable 2 and love it. I also have written and
| sketched in notebooks so there is that habit. But a couple of
| things in your comment made me say "hmm".
|
| This stood out _"... and who likes or is good at hand writing
| or drawing. "_
|
| Over the years many folks have seen me writing in my notebook
| and said, "Wow I wish I could make notes like that." It
| motivated me for a time to carry around copies of pages from my
| early notebook notes which compare unfavorably to cro-magnon
| cave drawings :-). I would explain to them they are written for
| an audience of one (me) and serve to help me recall details
| that I might otherwise forget, so there isn't anyone judging or
| evaluating them. At the same time, the more you write and draw,
| you tend to get more capable (this is especially true if you're
| somewhat self critical of your own results).
|
| So I would agree that something like the ReMarkable is a big
| chunk of change to spend on something you don't feel you would
| use, but consider that a 5 pack of quadrule or lined
| composition notebooks is a couple of dollars/euros when school
| starts and can be thrown away. A stack of those, a variety of
| writing instruments (I like 1mm gel pens or the BIC 4 color
| pens, but others like mechanical pencils or roller ball type
| pens) And be intentional about writing things down for a few
| weeks (the various habit books suggest six as a minimum number
| of weeks but its an experiment right?)
|
| Then at the end of your experiment go back and review your
| notebook(s) and compare your awareness and "presence" in that
| time with a time where you were not taking notes.
|
| My guess is that either you will say, "this is a good thing, I
| should do this more" or you will say "interesting but not my
| cup of tea." Either way, you have a good understanding of
| yourself and how note taking and notebooks fit into your life.
| At which point the decision to buy something expensive or not
| has the backing of your lived experience of whether or not you
| find it useful.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >instead of just buying so many of them in different shapes and
| leaving them in a drawer packed to the brim with notebooks.
|
| That was me until I started bullet journaling. My notebook
| becomes whatever I need at the time. Todo list, calendar,
| journal. Flexibility with structure.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| This is pretty accurate, from someone who just got one as a
| gift. They are useful devices, however your criticism is spot
| on.
|
| That said, a couple big advantages I haven't seen advertised:
|
| - I don't have a dozen notebooks around, just one - easy to
| start a new notebook, plus the centralization, is sort of an
| "organized by default" mode - I can't take notes on my
| computer, so it's either this or paper - distraction free is
| good, and the physicality of the pen and screen is a much
| better experience than an iPad
|
| Your other criticisms are valid and a little too accurate. It's
| still a useful device, there's just a bit of a premium price
| because of the fancy factors you discussed.
| sork_hn wrote:
| One of the things I love about mine - I never realized that I
| get 'anxiety' about wasting paper or space on paper. Being
| able to write and keep a few lines per page has been great.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| And being able to move text around once you write it!
| plutonorm wrote:
| You have different selves working at different time scales.
| Your problem is that your short term self is winning out
| against your long term self. The remedy is to learn to hold
| your attention where you want it, so when the short term self
| directs your attention to the line of cocaine you can keep it
| on the long term goal instead. To get better at directing your
| attention... meditate, particularly deeply focusing on a
| sensation. Practice practice practice.
| d0mine wrote:
| You can meditate (it possible that it works for somebody). It
| is easier to create an environment where you don't have to
| exercise the control most of the time e.g., don't buy/put
| cookies on the kitchen table unless you intend to eat them.
| Though one doesn't exclude another one.
|
| Make it easy for your "short-term" self to do the right (from
| the "long-term" self point of view) thing.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I keep mine at my desk and use it for relatively germaine note-
| taking and ideation...
|
| Why you gotta be a hipster about it?
| jmspring wrote:
| I'm in no way cool or carry moleskins, but for some dumb reason
| I thought doing a second Masters in an area unrelated to
| anything I do - my first is in computer engineering, this new
| one is GeoEngineering - would be a good idea. I'm someone that
| needs to write thoughts and notes on paper and then construct a
| doc around such. I have a Remarkable2 and it was great for note
| taking, it was also great for hand writing out some advanced
| math courses / problems I had to revisit.
|
| In some classes where we used Excel, I would do a mix of an
| iPad Pro (with pencil) and on the computer excel.
|
| I like the simplicity of the Remarkable2, but it doesn't handle
| all my needs, but it does many.
| jamra wrote:
| There is a book called Visual Thinking by Williemien Brand
| which goes over drawing basic things. I love it because the
| author did amazing research into how to draw things with the
| least effort. I use it to supplement my notes.
|
| The beautiful part of the remarkable 2 is that you can erase
| and redraw. You can also copy and paste. When making diagrams,
| the arrows will look identical. Recently, they added zooming
| in.
|
| I used to take notes on paper. I bought thick, quality paper. I
| used a nice Japanese made fountain pen. I loved taking notes
| that way. I still miss parts of it.
|
| When I started, my writing was not very beautiful, but I used a
| couple of cheats that helped. I write in all caps and I write
| quite small so that there is some padding above and below my
| letters. I write slowly so as to have consistent lettering.
| Even if they are imperfect, they look consistent. The focus
| should be on letter spacing.
|
| Before covid, people used to come up to my desk and say it was
| the most beautiful writing they have ever seen. It wasn't, but
| the techniques do work.
|
| As far as the feel of the notebook. I let my kids play with it.
| They love it.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I bought one and work from home and it suits me really well.
|
| I have never been more organised, I used to scribble notes on
| random bits of paper that would get lost - now o can refer back
| to meetings weeks ago.
| DenisM wrote:
| Put a stack of 3x4 index cards in you back pocket, and write
| thing down as needed. In the evening, (eg when you pull
| keys/wallet out of the pocket) review the cards briefly and
| toss the used once into trash unless you really need to keep
| one.
|
| This is a low-commitment device that still achieves half the
| benefits of _really_ writing things down.
| fastball wrote:
| Shameless plug, but if you like note-taking on index cards
| but are still looking for a slightly more digital solution to
| the problem, we've[1] built an online note-taking platform
| that is based around digital markdown note-cards, which is a
| bit different from most other digital solutions which are
| usually document or bullet-list based. I realize that many on
| HN want to "own" their data a little more than you typically
| expect of a cloud-platform, but you owning your notes is very
| important to us which is why we've spelled it out in our
| T&Cs[2] and why we have a publicly-accessible API[3] for
| maximum flexibility.
|
| [1] https://supernotes.app
|
| [2] https://supernotes.app/terms/
|
| [3] https://api.supernotes.app/docs/swagger
| fencepost wrote:
| This got some discussion as the "Hipster PDA" some years back
| (originally 2004 from Merlin Mann), along with some low-cost
| options to simplify managing it - multicolor cards, bullet
| journal rules, cutting out card-sized pieces of plastic from
| a cheap folder to make a "cover" and of course various sizes
| of binder clips.
|
| I found a medium to large binder clip to work better than
| hole punching and a ring - you can't just open it up and use
| it while standing, but it holds together better and easier to
| add/remove cards.
|
| A big advantage of this over journals (Moleskine, Field
| Notes, etc) is that there's no mental block of "I don't want
| to write something stupid or trivial in my journal/notebook."
| jrm4 wrote:
| If you want something _slightly_ more techy; the ONLY app
| that I absolutely cannot live without is Blitzmail on Android
| (I believe there 's an Apple equivalent?)
|
| It's simply an an ultra-simplified one destination email
| client.
|
| One button on your homescreen opens up a little text input
| window. Hit send, and it emails yourself. That's it, and it
| has been absolutely life changing, I've retained _so much_
| and simplified so many things. Ideas, scheduling, notes, etc.
| disruptthelaw wrote:
| What is your workflow to process all the emails to
| yourself?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I use Telegram to take notes on my phone. You can "message
| yourself", they changed it to "saved messages" but it's
| essentially just you chatting with yourself. Each message
| is a note, beginning with "Topic :", e.g. "Game design :".
|
| Then about once a month I copy paste the whole chat into a
| text file on my workstation PC, date and archive it, and
| clear the chat. Telegram includes the exact time and date
| of each message in the paste, and my consistent "tagging"
| of the notes with the topic means that I can
| programmatically parse the text files later to organize
| them, maybe on my website.
|
| After years of note-taking in various forms, I find that I
| rarely actually need to peruse my notes archive. It's the
| act of taking notes itself which helps with retention of
| ideas.
| smusamashah wrote:
| There should be card size rugged reMarkable mini to put in
| pocket and take notes anywhere.
| fragmede wrote:
| Not to make it personal but: Do you do this? How do you find
| it? It's a simple and alluring solution plus I've been
| looking at the remarkable2, but this answer sounds like doing
| the dishes. I like a empty kitchen sink, but I honestly pay
| someone to come in twice week to have that, because the low-
| rent solution of just doing the dishes is beyond me. I'm
| never going to sit down and review the cards, and then the
| benefits of going _digital_. Globally instantly accessible by
| others, indexed, impossible to lose, etc.
| DenisM wrote:
| Off and on. Started on it again just yesterday, hence my
| comment.
|
| >I'm never going to sit down and review the cards
|
| Well, don't sit down then. Standing up flip through the
| cards you filled during the day and toss them into garbage,
| unless one is really important. You're strictly better off
| than writing down nothing at all during the day, which is
| the default state for most people.
| eloisant wrote:
| But what kind of things to you write?
| BlueDingo wrote:
| I do this. Todo items that pop into my head, little notes
| about ongoing projects. Things I want to remember or
| process but aren't an immediate task.
|
| Later in the day when I pull them out, many do get
| trashed. Lots of Todo items never make it to my digital
| Todo list because my brain processed them mostly in the
| background during the day. I find the physical nature of
| the cards means I can't avoid that processing step. The
| times I revert back to digital first, my notes end up
| everywhere (I input them in the fastest way, rather than
| finding the right place) and immediately begin rotting
| because now I have remember and force myself to condense
| and organize rather than it occurring naturally.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| When I was in the Navy I carried a little memoranda pad in my
| left breast pocket. I'd take notes each day, at the beginning
| of each new day, I'd carry any necessary information from the
| previous day to the next page and then fold the previous page
| along the diagonal, alternating the folds right and left each
| day.
|
| The effects of pulling out a notepad and jotting notes are
| markedly different than pulling out a phone or tablet-
| especially in a conversation or meeting. IME a phone signals
| disengagement, while a notepad signals the opposite. When I
| pulled out my pad, I could see body language and word choices
| change almost immediately. If it was a positive or neutral
| conversation, people tended to show appreciation for my
| interest in what was being said. If it was a negative
| interaction, people started to be much more careful about
| what they were saying.
|
| Now I carry an attache case and use larger, more professional
| looking, notebooks. Even in the age of Zoom, I angle my
| camera to ensure it's obvious I'm taking notes. Sure, it's an
| extra step to digitize the important stuff, but I think it's
| worth it.
| redsummer wrote:
| What's the state of digitizing notes from an image? I mean,
| can you convert text and simple diagrams. And maybe just
| leave anything more complicated as an image.
|
| The next macOS can select text in images:
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/07/macos-
| montereys-l...
|
| ... but that's not handwritten text
| the_af wrote:
| > _The effects of pulling out a notepad and jotting notes
| are markedly different than pulling out a phone or tablet-
| especially in a conversation or meeting. IME a phone
| signals disengagement_
|
| This! It matters even if you _are_ paying attention; in
| this day and age pulling a phone strongly signals
| disengagement. Even if you 're actually the most attentive
| note taker, the rest of the attendees don't know this...
| and once one person signals disinterest, many will follow.
| It's like you're "giving them permission" to stop paying
| attention.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've noticed that early on; 15 years ago, I was keeping
| notes on a "feature phone with sliding keyboard". I was
| pulled by my manager for being disrespectful after the
| meeting; I showed him the notes and demonstrated that I was
| by far the most attention / had the best retention / was
| most involved in the meeting, but still... the message was
| - it looks unprofessional, stop it.
|
| Thing is:
|
| * My handwriting sucks (I literally can't read my own; I'm
| 42yo - don't tell me to practice / it'll improve, just
| don't be that arrogant ignoramus ;).
|
| * I'll never be organized on paper. Ever. My circles are
| potatoes, my lines are squiggles, and everything is all
| over the place and disheartening to read (I love
| whiteboards but it's a whole other thing, somehow)
|
| * I love love love my typed notes. I can type fast and
| asynchronously while I listen and look at the speaker. I
| can search them, retain them, review them, summarize them.
|
| But I'm aware that I'll always look disengaged on my laptop
| compared to somebody with their notebook :-/
| jagger27 wrote:
| I wonder if something like old school Graffiti (from Palm
| OS) would work for you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I did use Palm devices extensively, and found Graffiti
| shockingly intuitive - it took me no time at all to be
| fully fluent in it. All the way up to Palm Treo, I loved
| them and couldn't figure out why people went Gaga over
| iPhone when it came out - I felt that I mostly had that
| same thing for years already (I recognize there are
| important differences in retrospective, not the least
| that iPhone was fashionable and cool to use;)
|
| I would definitely work better with Graffiti-style input
| rather than full writing recognition; but:
|
| a) I am a dorky minority - pretty much always a negative
| focus group for these things :P
|
| b) even for me it's not ideal and modern lightweight
| laptops are a better solution -- I type at speed of
| speech these days; I don't think I could ever write /
| squiggle that fast.
| MivLives wrote:
| Does anything modern support this? Does the remarkable?
| Because this would be killer for me. I have terrible hand
| writing and being able to type without hauling out a
| keyboard would be great for notes.
| eloisant wrote:
| There is an Android keyboard called Graffiti Pro that
| does exactly that.
|
| I don't think there is anything equivalent on the
| Remarkable, I think the idea is handwriting then if you
| need you can OCR it.
| asoneth wrote:
| I've noticed that as well -- no matter how engaged
| someone is, if there is a screen that they can see but
| others can't then it is an information imbalance that is
| disruptive to the normal flow of conversation. It's like
| hearing half a phone conversation -- your brain works
| overtime trying to reconstruct the part it can't see. And
| it makes some sense; when I am talking to a person and
| they keep glancing at their laptop, phone, or watch it's
| exceedingly off-putting and they seem disengaged even in
| cases when other evidence indicates they are paying
| attention.
|
| I've similarly noticed that interacting with someone
| wearing a bluetooth headset or smart glasses is off-
| putting no matter how much they indicate they are paying
| attention and not watching or listening to something I
| can't see.
|
| Like you, I prefer to type my notes. I've found that
| angling the screen down so that I can't see it either and
| then maintaining normal eye contact with everyone makes
| the problem mostly go away. Possibly because I'm not
| constantly breaking eye contact to furtively glance at a
| glowing screen that they can't see. Or possibly because I
| wasn't paying as much attention as I felt like I was --
| there is some research that indicates that people who can
| see a screen or TV while they are accomplishing a task
| often significantly underestimate how much time they
| spent looking at it and how much it negatively impacted
| their task performance.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Agreed; that one thing, has actually been made easier
| with Covid-induced remote work at my project. On Zoom,
| people don't know I'm typing furiously - I'm a touch
| typer and can do reasonable amount of formatting/bullet
| lists without looking down, so I can look at and engage
| with and react to person maintaining eye contact while my
| fingers do their own thing :).
| [deleted]
| akiselev wrote:
| I haven't had a chance to use the remarkable 2 in an in-
| person meeting (covid) but with the stylus/pen and its
| shape, it's really obvious that it's not a consumption
| device. If it's flat on the conference room table,
| everyone in the room with decent eyesight will identify
| it as a monochromatic screen for note taking (as long as
| the pen is in the picture). Depending on camera angle,
| it's also obvious in video chats and easy to screen share
| using their app. Other thoughts:
|
| * Remarkable's handwriting recognition is some of the
| best I've seen (but that's a low bar). Works well even on
| doctor chicken scratch but it's tied to their cloud
| stuff. The calligraphy pen setting helps with the
| aesthetics of bad hand writing
|
| * This is why the remarkable has been a game changer for
| me. The pen selection tool allows me to draw an arbitrary
| shape and selects all strokes that fall within it. I can
| then drag or copy/cut/paste the selection, which I use
| all the time to rearrange my diagrams and copy/paste bits
| that I draw with a straightedge as a template. The big
| missing pieces are shape drawing tools and an infinite
| canvas so you can infinite scroll to the sides to keep
| drawing but with pinch to zoom, I usually just zoom way
| into a page when I open a notebook i know is going to be
| huge. Even zoomed out the resolution on the display makes
| it really readable (I can barely identify individual
| "pixels" with a 10x loupe)
|
| * If the process of hand drawing/writing/annotating
| doesn't appeal to you or help with retention, the
| remarkable 2 is a really expensive ebook reader... with
| ssh.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I enjoyed this review of Onyx Note Air by a grad student:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELXnytHZY2c
|
| It seems Note Air has potential but is not priced well.
| You might think reMarkable 2 is also expensive, but with
| Note Air you have to buy additional stylus too. The video
| above shows how Note Air works with reMarkable 2 Marker
| and Staedtler stylus.
|
| I personally think if latency and price would get solved,
| Note Air has much more potential than rM2. I couldn't
| believe they actually put a lot of thought into designing
| the software that run Note Air, but the guy in the video
| explains things in detail.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| If all you want is an ereader with ssh, a Kobo with
| Koreader will do that for you. They just run Linux, so
| it's quite a fun device for hacking around in.
|
| Plus Koreader itself is in Lua and is relatively easy to
| make changes to.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| >My handwriting sucks (I literally can't read my own; I'm
| 42yo - don't tell me to practice / it'll improve, just
| don't be that arrogant ignoramus ;).
|
| I am close to 40, 2 - 3 years ago, I re-practiced
| handwriting with my daughter who wanted to learn (out of
| school) writing. To my surprise, my handwriting did
| improve and I was actually surprised by the result
| (cursive, I am French), hers was miles ahead of mine but
| really I was damn surprised by how effective it was.
|
| I used to have teachers that refused to correct my copies
| because of my handwriting, so it's never too late.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| It'd be interesting to try hooking up some basic storage
| to a keyboard and just touch type without having a screen
| handy
| jodrellblank wrote:
| And make sure the keyboard is a chording one, so you
| don't have to look while touch-typing, and you get:
| https://www.friedmanarchives.com/dataegg/
| georgeecollins wrote:
| That's so funny- that makes me think: 2007 (or so) a
| manager asked me not to use a Windows Pen Tablet in a
| meeting because it wasn't respectful.
|
| 2011 Every senior manager brings an iPad to meetings and
| seem to get distracted.
|
| 2015 (Tech co) Everybody brings an MacBook Air or a
| MacBook pro to every meeting
|
| 2018 (Entertainment Co) Any electronic device is
| considered disrespectful in a meeting, especially phones.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| and this is why I love remote work in a tight team.
| Cameras are really only on for standups / outside of team
| meetings / coffee breaks. Instead we do _whatever we
| think is appropriate_ during meetings.
|
| I normally make notes on paper and use the computer to
| fact check myself and the conversation (where it
| matters). It makes everything waay faster.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| You missed 2014 - Business Partners bring in their
| BlackBerry Passports :->
| moonbug wrote:
| still using mine.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I think there is a spectrum. |Disengaged
| <----------------> Engaged| |Phone Laptop
| Pen/Paper|
|
| So even though your phone had a keyboard, it still
| _looked_ like you were texting instead of paying
| attention. A small laptop would have probably had a
| better reception. But I agree, nothing beats taking notes
| on paper as far as giving the _impression_ of being
| engaged and attentive.
| athenot wrote:
| To add to that, with a laptop (tactile keyboard), it's
| also easier to type notes while maintaining eye contact.
| That goes a long way to show respect and look engaged.
|
| On a side-note, I do this on video calls too, keeping the
| window near where the camera is located so that there is
| still eye contact.
| tracedddd wrote:
| I've found the disorganization of writing is actually a
| benefit. I have a remarkable and I put almost everything
| in a single organizational notebook. There's no pressure
| to do things right, no fretting about space or making
| clean shapes, just thought dumps and open notes.. which I
| condense down later on a computer if I ever decide I
| actually want to "go forward" with an idea. Works for me
| given I feel a friction with long term cleanly organized
| notes that sometimes inhibits the process altogether.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| My handwriting sucks too, and much of it is nearly
| illegible, but I find that I have much better retention
| if I keep written notes rather than typing.
|
| Even if some of my notes are difficult (or even
| impossible) to read, it's still sufficient to help
| remember what I felt so notable that I wrote it down.
|
| I realize that everyone's not the same, but studies have
| shown that writing leads to better conceptual recall (but
| typing tends to record more information)
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| My wife's version of a shopping list is a bunch of lines
| of "running writing Ws". The typed approximation being
|
| Wwwwwwwww
|
| Wwwwwwwww
|
| ...etc
|
| At the shops, I have no idea but she knows what she
| wrote.
| nofunsir wrote:
| Exactly what I do. Even made a simple 3x5 holder that is two
| pieces of leather riveted on one short edge. If needed, I
| pick up colored 3x5s to color code. For example, yellow = my
| Home Depot shopping list, or measurements notes.
| ip26 wrote:
| Great comment that also gets right to the appeal of the
| moleskines (and GoPros). Everyone wants to be this person who
| is so flooded with genius insight every thought must be
| transcribed, or whose athletic prowess is so unmatched every
| minute should be recorded. Of course in reality, that's mostly
| not how either one works.
|
| For my part, all my best ideas are incredibly simple, abstract,
| and writing it down is both incredibly difficult and also
| worthless. Sometimes I doodle to work through an issue, but
| that takes little more than a napkin and a crayon.
|
| All that said I really, really love eink. I could almost buy an
| RM2 just to support eink development.
| musingsole wrote:
| The remarkable tablet allows me to go sit under a tree and
| design system diagrams or draw mindmaps. And then recover them
| for reference later. It's particularly helpful for work-
| thinking. For personal thoughts, having written/drawn them is
| often enough to cement them and I'll reference them
| months/years later as a novelty.
|
| But the core of all this is that the sitting-under-a-tree-habit
| came after the device. Before, it was a bit of a romantic idea
| I'd tried with moleskines, but it didn't really scratch my
| itches.
| samstave wrote:
| You know what would be a dope addition to something like the
| remarkable:
|
| Voice memos, so you can add some audible context to each
| diagram
| jeremyleach wrote:
| Great idea.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Are you me, you sound like me. I feel the pain.
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| They say don't sell a product, sell a lifestyle, a future,
| possible version of one's self that they want to be.
|
| These guys nailed it!
| erickhill wrote:
| Might I recommend an Apple Newton? ;)
|
| Small(ish), syncable (bit of a learning curve to do so, but it
| is possible), and even comes with a physical keyboard if you
| want to really type things out rather than just use a stylus.
|
| In my experience its OCR software is on-par with the
| Remarkable, if not better.
|
| Good times.
| samstave wrote:
| Omg, I am the king of moleskin unused notebooks.
|
| What was awesome though was when my then 3 year old daughter
| found one of the moleskins and a pen and did a bunch of
| scribbles on every 10 pages or so.
|
| I truly love that little moleskin.
|
| I just recently (last week) bought an outdoor log with graph
| paper and some other logs....
|
| Your comment makes me want to prove you (myself) wrong and
| actually use it.
|
| I've always been impressed with the. Various engineers I have
| worked with, like John Blair of nerflix... he is really fn
| today keeping a solid tech journal
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| I literally have this comic on my wall:
| https://poorlydrawnstore.com/products/nice-notebook-print
|
| I also just bought a super mini and thick notebook for $10
| that I haven't used, but was just so cool looking. I still
| feel like an idiot for buying it, but maybe I will use it
| someday.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I have a $2 notebook from Muji sitting in my drawer but
| it's too nice to write in. It's $2!!
|
| Japan is on a whole other level with writing and
| stationary. Go to a Tokyo Hands or Muji and you'll feel
| like the type of person that should be writing constantly.
| I can't imagine we would fetishize writing so much if
| computers didn't exist.
| cstejerean wrote:
| That's perfect. That's exactly how I felt about nice
| notebooks and that's why the digital version is so much
| better for me. The freedom to erase and reorganize removes
| that anxiety.
| xsmasher wrote:
| Voice commands like "Hey Siri, add X to my
| [grocery/hardware/project] list" and "Hey Siri, remind me
| [tomorrow at 10] to do X" have made me more effective at pretty
| much everything.
| vogon_laureate wrote:
| You described my problem so well. I have aspirations to be the
| sort of person that makes stuff like this:
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniecristea/14-study-notes-tha...
|
| But I don't and I won't because that's just not how I work
| however much I'd like to. And that's OK. In fact, it's good to
| accept that about one's self.
|
| Now that I know I have ADHD, I at least have an explanation why
| my desire to be something I'm not has always failed, but even
| without the diagnosis, we all have our personality quirks that
| mean that certain things just won't work for us. It's nice to
| have beautiful notebooks to give away as presents for other
| people though. :-)
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Wow, I feel as if I wrote this. This is exactly how I feel:
| I've tried doing this many times and always fail at the note
| taking thing.
|
| Lately I'm using Notion though for journaling and I really
| enjoy it. I'm keeping up a journaling streak.
| cstejerean wrote:
| For comparison I rarely use the pen on my iPad Pro. I think
| partially because of all the distractions, as soon as I grab my
| iPad there's lots of other stuff I could be doing other than
| taking notes. And partially because the writing on glass never
| felt right. So it's been more of an occasional use when I
| really need to sketch something.
|
| I was on the fence for the RM2 for a while for the same reasons
| you mentioned. Would I really use it?
|
| Well I got it recently after trying a friend's and I've
| surprised myself by using it daily. We'll see if the habit
| sticks but so far the killer feature for me compared to a
| notebook is being able to erase, move text around and insert
| pages.
|
| This makes me much more likely to just start jotting stuff down
| without being worried about "wasting" pages in a notebook.
|
| By the way the device I hear comes with a 30 day trial period
| for this very reason. Lots of people don't know whether they
| would really use it. So you can order it, find out how it fits
| into your life and return it if it doesn't.
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| I've looked at it seriously a while back when it was on
| presale, but it's definitely a heavy chunk of change,
| especially since I'm Canadian and have to pay the exchange
| rate prices.
|
| I do like the idea of no distractions and being able to move
| stuff around and organize it, unlike with paper, but most of
| my life is at home (since I'm self-employed) and I already
| have a computer on all 3 floors of my house that I'm usually
| at with OneNote and Notepad++ with a ton of tabs on each, so
| I'm worried that I'll never really use it unless I want to
| sit on the couch and focus, but then will I be wishing I had
| all my subsequent notes and such already on OneNote and in my
| various notepad++ tabs? What happens when I go back and sit
| at my computer for the majority of the day where I do work,
| play, research, side businesses etc.? Do I need some stand
| and will I just be cross copying notes back and forth?
|
| Is it something I can comfortably hold and write on while
| sitting on a couch, or on some random chair or while leaning
| against a wall? Or am I going to be doing weird grips and
| being forced to counterbalance my writing on a floating pad
| if it's not sitting on a desk? I find writing in a small
| notebook way harder if it's not just on a table, so even that
| already worries me. Will I get less legible or not be able to
| as effectively write on the entire surface area of the device
| while holding it if not on a desk or having it setup on my
| lap (which may not even be that feasible without some cushion
| or stand)?
|
| A 30 day trial could definitely help me figure this out, but
| I'm leaning towards the fact that it probably won't work out,
| at least not with the current version and I'm always afraid I
| won't commit the time I need to really test it in those first
| 30 days, haha!
| cstejerean wrote:
| The hard back makes it like a clipboard so you could use it
| on a couch or sitting anywhere really, but I mostly use it
| for writing while at a table or my desk. I'd rather take
| notes by hand than type though. Previous attempts to type
| notes never worked out for long. Too many distractions on
| the computer for me.
|
| If you're already heavily invested in taking notes in
| OneNote then this probably won't help much due to the
| overhead required to sync back and forth.
|
| Getting OneNote on the Remarkable would be awesome though,
| I hope this will happen in some future version.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| The writing/drawing/painting experience of the Apple Pencil
| would be massively improved if it had a small high resolution
| haptic speaker similar to the Switch Joycons or Steam
| Controller to emulate different drawing tools and surfaces.
| Sanguinaire wrote:
| I'm somewhat like you (aspiration-based notebook purchaser),
| but I actually did buy a remarkable - both the original and V2.
|
| Bizarrely, I've ended up using the RM exclusively for work-
| related notes, and still keep all my personal ideas in a paper
| notebook. Aside from a subconscious desire to work through my
| stationery backlog, I have no idea why.
|
| RM is nice to use and I'd definitely recommend to note-taking
| gadget lovers, but the software quality prevents me from
| calling it a more general must-buy device.
| patrickdavey wrote:
| Like you I'd wanted a remarkable but could never justify it.
| Then a friend told me about the handshake crypto that was given
| away to GitHub users back in 2019 https://handshake.org/claim/
| and how it was worth real money now.
|
| Anyway, I claimed the coins, transferred them into dollars
| (just before the recent crash) and bought a remarkable for
| "free".
|
| Honestly, it's a nice tablet, but, I'm glad I got it for free
| ;)
| kabdib wrote:
| I've used a number of gadgets over the years (starting with an
| Apple Newton), and none of my notes on them have survived.
|
| On the other hand, I've got boxes and boxes of notebooks
| (Strathmore sketchpads and Moleskine-equivalents) that will
| outlast me -- to say nothing about cloud providers, backup
| media or outdated file formats -- unless I suffer a house fire
| or natural disaster.
|
| Notebooks are cheap, and even terrible ones will last decades
| with little or no care. You can toss them into backpacks, lend
| them, get them (a little) wet, leave them in the sun, sit on
| them, forget them at the coffee shop, and even lose them
| permanently and basically not worry too much. If I was using a
| $400 gadget instead, I'd never carry it to the places I
| currently carry paper. My note-taking and scribbling would go
| down. I'm not even going to talk about battery capacity
| anxiety.
|
| The gadget-lover in me would probably be happy with one of
| these things. My practical side and experience tells me that in
| the long run they are more trouble than they're worth.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I've been thinking of getting one (or something similar) since
| I tend to write short-term notes on stickies and leave them on
| my desk or monitor. I haven't found a computer based equivalent
| that I like using as much as writing.
|
| This works well when I'm working 100% at home or at the office,
| my notes are where I work, but my company plans to have a
| hybrid workplace with employees working from the office 2 or 3
| days a week, now my notes will be scattered between home and
| office. (well, worse, the office might move to a "hoteling"
| desk format where no one has a permanent desk, so I can't leave
| my notes on my desk at work).
|
| So one of the electronic paper products seems like a good
| solution - write my notes in epaper, and I can access them from
| work (or vice versa).
|
| Though they are still pretty expensive so more likely, I'll
| just switch to keeping notes in a notebook that I carry back
| and forth.
| chevill wrote:
| >hand writing or drawing.
|
| A few weeks of practicing 10 minutes a day or so will give you
| good handwriting.
|
| A few weeks of a basic drawing course with a small amount of
| practice will give you decent enough skills to get your ideas
| down on paper.
|
| People naturally do the things they like to do. I actually
| enjoy the process of writing with fountain pens, calligraphy,
| taking notes, etc. Strangely, I also really enjoy the
| experience of typing.
|
| Taking notes and drawing don't make me cool. Carrying a
| notebook and a fountain pen made people think I was kind of
| eccentric more than anything. Carrying an iPad Pro 12.9 with a
| stylus made people think I was a geek. No one was mean about it
| or anything, but it definitely doesn't make a person cool. Just
| be who you are and do the things you enjoy.
|
| If you think you would enjoy writing/drawing, put a little bit
| of effort into it and you will have pretty good results.
|
| As far as the e-ink tablets go, I'm hoping the large format
| ones become more affordable and more polished. I would love to
| have one but the value proposition vs an Ipad is terrible.
| Single-purpose devices can frequently be better than a more
| generalized device, but in the case of these E-ink tablets the
| few things they do (reading, writing, drawing) generally offer
| a worse experience than doing that same thing on an Ipad. The
| only upsides are battery life and the e-ink screen.
| colecut wrote:
| I purchased one a couple months ago, and it has definitely
| helped to 'become a different person' in that I have found a
| joy in both handwriting notes and sketching that I never had
| before.
|
| I downloaded some PDFs on how to sketch, and I can sketch right
| there in the PDF along side the examples..
|
| The futility of hand-written note taking was always my lack of
| organization, but the auto syncing of this really helps in that
| department.
|
| I can't say it is for everyone, but while I was definitely not
| the target consumer for this device, I am more that person now
| after buying it. I appreciate anything that pushes any of my
| time from consumption to production, and this helps me to do
| that.
| canoebuilder wrote:
| Links or recommendations for the sketching PDFs?
| colecut wrote:
| The book I am using and liking right now is How to Draw:
| Sketch and Draw Anything, Anywhere with This Inspiring and
| Practical Handbook, by Jake Spicer
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I have a similar but older device, the Likebook Mars.
|
| These no-name Chinese Android e-ink tablets are actually really
| great devices, when it comes to hardware. Where they fail of
| course is the questionable software. I find the Likebook actually
| works well enough, but I'm sure it's got untold security issues
| that prevent it from being useful for anything serious.
|
| I don't really understand why there really aren't any reputable
| companies in the Android e-ink tablet space, and I also don't
| understand why Google themselves seem to have absolutely no
| interest in Android for this use case. An e-ink Pixel tablet
| seems like it would be a real win.
| cainxinth wrote:
| > I don't really understand why there really aren't any
| reputable companies in the Android e-ink tablet space, and I
| also don't understand why Google themselves seem to have
| absolutely no interest in Android for this use case.
|
| Just guessing, but maybe they did the market research and the
| audience isn't big enough. After all, e-ink devices are
| primarily for consuming large amounts of text, and most
| peoples' reading these days is short form, multimedia content
| (articles, blogs, lists, slideshows, social media posts,
| explainer videos, etc.) which is better suited to existing
| phones and tablets.
|
| I'm still among those who read book-length content, but far
| less than I did in years past. I'd say the actual number of
| words I read every year has gone up, but the number of 300+
| page books I read has gone down.
|
| The upside is, I'm much more selective about the books I do
| read and mostly only read excellent ones.
| pklausler wrote:
| I preordered a rM2 and got it last October, and by November it
| was in my dead tech drawer. It doesn't come close to the
| experience of writing on top-quality blank notebooks with a good
| pen, and without a backlight it kind of sucks as an e-reader.
| echelon wrote:
| > It doesn't come close to the experience of writing on top-
| quality blank notebooks with a good pen
|
| We're all different, and I disagree. It's replaced all of my
| notebooks and pens.
|
| I just wish it had a faster processor so that the UI was
| snappier.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I want one but I don't know what I'd use it for. Weird problem to
| have I guess.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. If I could get Kindle e-books for free
| alongside the physical purchase of a book on Amazon, and these
| devices could import them I'd be all ears for a new toy to play
| with. Alas, two things which will never happen. :(
| growt wrote:
| You're not alone. I really like ePaper and I like working
| outside, but my handwriting is terrible and I'm faster typing
| anyway.
| wffurr wrote:
| Handwriting gets better with practice. You didn't start out
| typing fast either; you had to learn and practice.
| jcelerier wrote:
| my handwriting is also terrible yet this is so incredibly
| better than notetaking on computer as soon as you have
| graphs, e.g. here's my current page:
| https://imgur.com/a/D0m4okF
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I don't have any of these note taking e-ink devices but I plan to
| get one eventually. I've been aware of both the Book Note and
| reMarkable 2 but for whatever reason I've wanted to wait another
| few generations and see how products in this space evolve. For
| now I have an iPad Pro with paperlike.
|
| I followed a link at the bottom of this article to a product I'd
| never heard of before, Supernote [1], and something there caught
| my eye. Namely on the accessories tab, there's a link to a LAMY
| Series stylus [2]. For those who haven't heard of LAMY, they're a
| pretty big name in the fountain pen world. The page is pretty
| light on the details, but AFAIK this is the first ever
| collaboration between fountain pen giant & writing tablet. It
| even has their iconic pocket clip design... Definitely piqued my
| interest.
|
| Although interestingly, the tip of the Supernote pen that comes
| with the A5/A6 series looks more like something that would
| produce more of a pen-to-paper feeling with its 0.7mm tip.
|
| [1] https://www.supernote.com/ [2]
| https://www.supernote.com/#/part?id=SP-05
| beefman wrote:
| I have a Remarkable2. The hardware is fantastic but the software
| is so unbelievably bad I want to throw it in a river every time I
| pick it up.
|
| I also have the original Remarkable, an iPad Pro with Apple
| Pencil, a Boogie Board (2011), an iRex iLiad (2007), and I used
| Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing back in the '90s.
|
| The use case I've long wanted to digitize -- quickly working out
| problems -- is one I still do on paper. The Remarkable2 hardware
| is finally there, but the software makes it useless to me.
| mastazi wrote:
| In music production, during the 80's and 90's there was a gradual
| switch from hardware studio equipment to DAW software, as
| computers became more powerful.
|
| But in recent years, many musicians decided come back to stand-
| alone hardware devices, there is even a term for this: it's a
| "dawless" setup.
|
| The most commonly mentioned reason for this is "I want a
| distraction free environment", or something along the lines of "I
| don't want to create music on the same device where I receive
| social media notifications".
|
| To me, devices like reMarkable are basically responding to the
| same need, but in a different field (note taking as opposed to
| music production).
|
| I wonder if this could become a more general trend, where people
| at least partially move away from general purpose devices.
| noobly wrote:
| Opportunities to ask about these devices don't come up very
| often, so please help me decide what I want here:
|
| I want something that allows me to do math problems while laying
| down horizontally, mostly before bed. With a book and paper, it's
| a mess trying to do this, and I require e-ink. So I need good
| support for reading PDFs _and_ writing on screen, which is a
| niche apparently. I need split screen functionality or something
| like it, so I can have half my screen be scratch paper, and in
| the other half I can flip through the text (and I need a
| reasonably sized screen to accommodate all this). If I cannot do
| this, the device is not usable enough to purchase imo. I have no
| desire to take notes, draw or convert my writing to text. It
| would be a big plus if it could also read epubs as then I
| wouldn't need my current ereader.
|
| I'm leaning toward the Remarkable 2, mostly due to it shaping up
| to be 'hacker friendly' (so I can lean on the community to write
| some features) and the writing supposedly feeling real, but I
| don't like how expensive the little pencil nubs are and having to
| replace them is kind of a drag. I tend to binge research my
| options a couple times per year but haven't pulled the trigger
| yet. I get frustrated because I feel like I want something so
| basic that it should already exist - just a book and scratch
| paper in one device, with a screen that doesn't keep me awake at
| night or distract me with a web browser. Anyway, last I checked
| the Remarkable 2 didn't quite have a splitscreen feature or
| anything close enough, so I opted to wait.
|
| Would appreciate any input, I'm probably going to break down and
| buy one this month.
| h3ctic wrote:
| The remarkable is not able to do split screen (for now).
| Instead, you can install the [ddvk
| hacks](https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks) for fast
| switching between recent documents and a swipe to the previous
| document.
|
| I'd recommend the remarkable2 as the hacker friendliness makes
| quite a difference
| noobly wrote:
| >fast switching between recent documents
|
| This is what my research told me last I looked too, thanks
| for the confirmation that this is still true. I believe RM
| will deliver long term, hacker friendliness goes a long way.
| Not sure if it's worth the price atm, but I'll look out for a
| cheap used one. I could do so much more critical reading if I
| could do it while lying down.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| I love my rm2 as a mental scratchpad, list maker, PDF reader,
| ebook reader etc. Etc. I have a trick, I bought the Lamy pen
| compatible with the rm2, and pushed the rm2 pen nib up it,
| makes for an awesome writing experience!!!!
| noobly wrote:
| I am reading the rm2 doesn't reflow pdfs? Has this been a
| problem for you?
| maxrev17 wrote:
| I suppose coming from a Kindle, the screen space increase
| for me means I'm not that bothered. For me pdfs are
| formatted intentionally - so maybe take my words with a
| pinch of salt!
| maxrev17 wrote:
| Link: https://www.lamy.com/en/emr/?languageRedirect=1&cHash=3
| 7ce4a...
| dzogchen wrote:
| Can recommend a Onyx Boox Max Lumi. It has a 13 inch screen and
| good split screen notes functionality.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/2CPy5O9
| noobly wrote:
| That looks great, 13 inch screen ensures no reflow issues
| too. Are you able to flip through the pages with minimal
| issues while in split screen mode, or do you have to manually
| resize the page each time? Also, it looks like you have this
| in 'landscape' mode - is that correct? Awesome feature if so.
| Too bad these are still so niche and therefore pricey, $800
| is a painful price point for such a device imo.
| Tho85 wrote:
| I bought the Onyx Boox Note Air some months ago, and I must say
| that I'm really happy with it. Screen refresh is good, there's
| almost no ghosting in default mode, and refresh rates are
| acceptable.
|
| There are only two downsides about it: The vendor does not
| respect FOSS and does not publish the sources for their modified
| Linux kernel, and the device constantly phones home to China.
| However, the device can be rooted easily [1], and you can install
| a firewall to stop the preloaded apps from phoning home (verified
| it with Wireshark).
|
| [1]: https://blog.tho.ms/hacks/2021/03/27/hacking-onyx-boox-
| note-...
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Any chance to block this via my router for example?
|
| Is there an IP list anywhere?
|
| And, do you know what data they send?
| dominotw wrote:
| I bought this last year during pandemic. My reading time has
| grown exponentially, i couldn't update sure . I like that i can
| use play store apps so i use kindle, libby, pocket and oreilly.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Man, I don't know. I have the Onyx Poke 3 and I find the
| software pretty janky. For instance, in order to install a
| dictionary, I have to jump through a whole series of hoops to
| download one to a PC and then upload/install it on the tablet.
| I could install the Kindle app (after I enable the Google Play
| Store), but then I might as well buy a Kindle. In order to
| upload epub or pdf documents to the Poke3, I have to interface
| through a browser on a page with a very limited interface. They
| do not have upload by email, bluetooth, or any other convenient
| interface with my phone. All in all, it's just felt like a
| half-baked product to me.
| Tho85 wrote:
| I use Syncthing [1] to do all the syncing, works like a
| charm. I have a folder synchronized between my reader, my PC
| and my phone, and whenever I need to send a document to the
| reader or from the reader to my PC, I just put it into that
| folder.
|
| [1] https://syncthing.net/
| rchaud wrote:
| I discovered Syncthing last week, and it's exactly what I
| was looking for: a local server that syncs between Device A
| and Device B on the same network. No need for a middleman
| like Dropbox.
|
| This is why I'm leaning towards the Note Air. The Kobo
| Elipsa is coming out soon but it syncs with Dropbox only.
| westpfelia wrote:
| Syncthing is maybe my favorite software discovery this
| year. It does exactly what I want it to no fuss. I'll shill
| for Syncthing all day.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| You can install a dictionary on the device, they are just
| stardict dictionary files...it's literally putting a file in
| a folder. They also have some available to download although
| mainly focused on Chinese/Russian.
|
| It runs Android. You can just sync things through the cloud
| provider of your choice. Put the Dropbox, OneDrive, NextCloud
| etc. app on and just download it from there.
|
| Most eReaders don't have upload by email just Kindles and
| that doesn't let you send a more recent better formats like
| KFX or AZW3, just ancient mobi. Ditto Bluetooth.
|
| And guess what? At least with Android phones "Nearby Share"
| works too (although that may require setting up Google Play
| Store.
| powerapple wrote:
| I thinks he is looking for a "kindle" and really should get
| a Kindle. I actually own a Kindle and a BOOX Nova 3, they
| are two different products, not interchangeable if you are
| picky about which is better at doing what. I would have a
| E-ink tablet, a Kindle and a iPad depending on the tasks.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Anything you've installed on the nova3 that you use?
|
| Apart from Kindle, Firefox and safari books online
| reader?
|
| I've found that 3rd party drawing apps don't work well
| with the screen.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Yeah maybe. I use my Nova 2 as an everything eReader. Run
| the Kindle app for Kindle books, Kobo for kobo stuff,
| etc. Plus it will do things like Marvel Unlimited,
| Tachiyomi that readers from Amazon and Kobo won't.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I want a Kindle for DRM free epubs
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I don't use most of their stuff on it; anything Android works
| and that's what I use. However I do like their reader. Never
| tried a dictionary installation but the rest is all
| resolvable with Android apps I would think; for synching
| anything you would use on an android phone works here too;
| dropbox, google drive etc.
|
| The fact it runs Android is vastly better than some custom
| software (like Kindle and others) because of this reason.
| vinni2 wrote:
| I don't like the software on my Onyx boox. It's over engineered
| with too many options often not intuitive. Unless you opt in
| for their cloud service syncing sucks. I still can't figure out
| how to access documents from Dropbox and edit them and sync it
| back.
| dominotw wrote:
| I use google drive from the play store. There is an extra
| step to enable play store.
| zmk_ wrote:
| Try Dropsync [1], you can sync particular folders to your
| Drobpox. The sync is bidirectional. There is a similar app
| for Google Drive as well.
|
| [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttxapps
| .dr...
| stewbrew wrote:
| Is there any information on what data it sends home? Is the
| problem the server is in China? My Android phone always phones
| home to some US servers.
|
| P.S. I own a rm2 but I'd be interested in an e-ink android
| tablet.
| Tho85 wrote:
| It's been a while since I looked at it, but here's what I
| remember:
|
| In the UI, you can choose if the device should communicate to
| Chinese or US servers. Both of them are available under the
| boox.com domain, so I assume they are both controlled by the
| Chinese manufacturer. The device uses this to check for
| firmware upgrades, to sync notes, for their own book store
| and IIRC to send some basic usage statistics. As per firmware
| version 3.0 (v3.1 is current), this traffic was only partly
| encrypted.
|
| Besides this, the software seems to include some kind of
| Tencent SDK, which tries to contact Chinese servers quite
| aggressively, regardless of which setting you choose in the
| UI. The traffic is encrypted, so I couldn't figure out what
| it does. The servers seem to belong to Tencent's QQ service
| [1], so they supposedly use it for their on-device support
| feature. However, because the device tries to contact the
| servers immediately after startup, I assume it does some kind
| of analytics tracking as well. Blocking the service's domains
| on the DNS level doesn't work though, as the SDK will start
| to contact fixed IP addresses if DNS resolution fails.
|
| Luckily, all of this traffic can be blocked after rooting and
| installing a firewall (see my post above), since all of this
| is implemented under Android user ID 1000, which makes it
| easy to block in AFWall+.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ
| nzmsv wrote:
| It doesn't just phone home to China. The company actually
| refuses to comply with the GPL because of "anti-China
| sentiment" and closed down their support forum when people got
| angry (https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/hsyig
| m/on...)
| echelon wrote:
| > The company actually refuses to comply with the GPL because
| of "anti-China sentiment"
|
| Seems like just cause for a multinational import ban. This is
| flagrant law breaking and theft.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> because of "anti-China sentiment"_
|
| Because yet another Chinese company flagrantly flouting a
| licence is _really_ going to help with that situation...
|
| I was considering one of their devices. I am now not.
| bjornjajayaja wrote:
| If it phones home to China count me out. I'll go for the
| reMarkable tyvm
|
| I can just see me working on a brilliant invention (one can
| dream , right?) and putting my notes into the note boox, only
| to realize it gets patented before me by a Chinese company.
| est wrote:
| > If it phones home to China count me out.
|
| About 1 billion Chinese customers think the same like you,
| except they refuse products that phone home to USA.
| bserge wrote:
| As they are free to do.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Makes sense? After all, you're crossing legal
| jurisdictions.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| US (and EU, and indeed everywhere else), companies do not
| have as long and detailed a recent track record of IP
| theft.
| msie wrote:
| Don't forget that Facebook and Google steal all sorts of
| information about you too.
| est wrote:
| And that's relevant with customer choice because?
| selectodude wrote:
| Because people create IP on their tablets.
| eloisant wrote:
| Because you might be taking work-related notes on your
| device that you don't want to be stolen as industrial
| spying.
| yitchelle wrote:
| I know that this is obvious, but worth noting.
|
| This anxiety is not just China as a destination, but it just
| as relevant if it phones home to any company in any
| _country_.
| tomComb wrote:
| I don't agree. Remarkable is based in Norway and I have
| more confidence in a Norwegian companies handling of my
| data.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Maybe not _just_ as relevant, but certainly still annoying.
| asdwerwasdf wrote:
| please get over yourself
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I am happy with the Boox; it's a great device (hardware + the
| reader too) I think and I use it every day. Besides the China
| nature (which means what user Tho85 already explained here), I am
| a huge fan of the idea more different eReader types. For a lot of
| tasks. I often work in bright sunlight and it works really well
| while my laptops, including the MacBook m1 will give me a
| headache in 15 minutes glaring against the sun; this is just
| perfect and powerful enough to be a big screen for another
| device.
|
| Because of this device I now have the weird hallucination of my
| perfect device; seems it would be a surface pro x lte (but later
| gen; it needs to at last get closer to usable software wise) but
| with a color eInk screen. I know they will never make this but
| yep, that would be basically my daily driver. The Boox people
| could come quite far but they focus on eReaders.
| fnord77 wrote:
| the price on the reMarkable is a tough sell. I think I'd pay $150
| for something like this (and still feel like I was kinda blowing
| money)
| varispeed wrote:
| I have reMarkable 2 and I think it is brilliant, however it has
| one deal breaker that is there is no encryption on the device. If
| you lose it, you risk your documents landing in a bad actor
| hands. One may say it's the same with actual paper - sure, but
| reMarkable 2 can store much more data than a suitcase of
| documents.
|
| Then I have no idea whether documents on their cloud are
| encrypted and who has access to it beside myself.
|
| So reMarkable has become an expensive paperweight.
|
| I saw some people tried to get encrypted fs working, don't how
| well that works though.
|
| I wrote an email to support about this and I never got any reply.
| Says all...
| CandyFace wrote:
| The latest update includes the ability to open password
| protected PDF's https://blog.remarkable.com/software-
| update-2-7-small-steps-...
|
| Might be worth taking a look again
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Their cloud is fully optional - you don't have to use the rM
| cloud, or even create an account. To me that is itself one of
| the killer features of the rM, it works as an offline device
| with local storage.
| gspr wrote:
| I'm a very happy ReMarkable 2 owner. I only wish it had been
| available many years ago: maaaan this thing would have saved me
| lugging around (and losing!) a gazillion duplicates of papers
| with different sets of notes on them during my PhD. I'm an
| incredibly disorganized person, and the RM2 has been an absolute
| godsend for me.
|
| Positives:
|
| * Build quality feels great.
|
| * Screen is super responsive when writing. And responsive
| _enough_ when flipping pages (although I am not familiar with the
| state of the art ebook readers).
|
| * Pen feels really good against the surface. After one day of
| getting used to it, it started feeling as natural as paper for
| me.
|
| * Hacker friendly: Tick a box under "settings" and it gives you
| the root password, and you just plug in a USB cable and SSH in as
| you please. Inside is a pretty standard Busybox-based Linux. All
| the cloud gizmos are optional. See also
| https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
|
| * Eternal battery life and perfect viewing angles and everything
| else you'd expect from this kind of screen.
|
| Negatives:
|
| * I would have like the screen to be just a liiiittle bit bigger.
| Some papers on A4 paper with smaller fonts cause me to squint a
| little unless I zoom in to crop out the margins (and if the
| margins aren't the same on each page, that's annoying).
|
| * The upselling price of the nice carrying cases and the "fancy"
| pen are a bit ridiculous. Thankfully, the fancy pen isn't really
| that useful to me, because I prefer the fill-erase mode anyway.
|
| * I often accidentally hit the power on button when carrying the
| thing.
|
| * I know they're trying to minimize physical buttons, but I would
| personally have loved a physical button (preferably on the pen!)
| to flip into (fill-)erase mode.
| lovelyviking wrote:
| I have rM1 and tried many things with it even wrote some software
| to run there. Yet the usage is rather limited so far.
|
| This page contains a list of free software for rM on github:
|
| https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
|
| And this amazing guy even made a full alternative GNU/Linux OS
| running on rM:
|
| http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
|
| Still I have some unresolved issues. When I say 'unresolved
| issues' I mean I tried a few things but didn't found something
| comfortable 'enough' to use. I need something that 'just works'
| without me dealing with it constantly.
|
| * How would you sync notes between rM and Mac quickly?
|
| Of course syncing through their online service/apps is out of the
| question due to the privacy.
|
| * How would you sync quickly books with it? I
| know you can connect it directly to a computer and use Web
| Interface. It's too slow and not always works. I perhaps works
| for one or two books but not very practicle for everyday use.
| Besides my new Mac doesn't come with normal usb port (thanks
| apple) and dealing with adapter is too much of a headake each
| time.
|
| * How would you read HackerNews on rM1 comfortably?
|
| * How would you use it as second monitor for Mac to read some web
| articles and work?
|
| I know there is: https://github.com/matteodelabre/vnsee I've
| managed to configure it as second screen for linux virtual
| machine running on Mac but this is not the same as running it as
| second screen to the Mac itself.
|
| Also since my last model of macbook pro (2016) had successfully
| died lately due to the quality of this garbage I had to buy a M1
| model. The virutal machine configured for this purpose was based
| on Virtual Box which is if I understand correctly doesn't work
| very well on M1 and so far there are no plans to make it work
| there. So I am still looking for good alternative option to make
| it run at least this way. If you have some advice I would be
| happy to hear.
|
| * What is the 'safest' or 'correct' way to backup the whole rM
| and be sure that you can restore it without a danger to brick it
| completely.
|
| * How to connect BT Keyboard and configure it properly.
|
| * All these 'issues' basically about how to make it usable for
| programming.
|
| If you have any good solutions/ideas about those issues please
| share.
| colordrops wrote:
| There is some 3rd party software for remarkable, but mostly to
| enhance the standard operation of the tablet, i.e. reading,
| drawing and writing. I really wish a better open source launcher
| and more apps were written. I would prefer to check a checkbox
| and sync my todos off the tablet rather than write them out then
| erase or cross them out them when done. Or use an app for habit
| tracking, etc. There's a big underserved market here. I am going
| to give a go at building something if I can find the time.
| modzu wrote:
| adding a different perspective here: we're still comparing 2
| technologies that, to me, are not yet mature enough for the
| mainstream. i have both but still use my pen and notebook. why?
| firstly, its not quite a joy. they are slow (janky, glitchy
| refreshes, latency, etc, depending on your specific device..) for
| example changing a page is still jarring. in some lighting the
| screens dont look good (grey, low contrast). and sometimes i
| reach for the boox, and woops, dead battery. what i thought i
| would benefit from the most was having a "single notepad to rule
| them all" (i have multiple notebooks for various purposes and
| thought it would be cool to just have one device, with the
| multiple notebooks inside, and searchable!) well, in some ways
| its more convenient, but in others its clearly lacking polish.
| its a pain to move a page from one book to another for instance,
| or to open up the section i want, so i end up with notes mixed up
| sometimes anyway. i cant be as precise as with a real pen, so a
| single page in my real book is about 2 on the tablet. etc.
| anyway, there werent many dissenting voices here so i thought id
| share a dose of reality for anyone with an itch. im very excited
| to see what comes in the next generation of both, maybe then ill
| finally be able to recommend them
| imroot wrote:
| My biggest complaint about the ReMarkable is the lack of any
| meaningful business management tools -- I love using it, but, I
| need to be able to limit sharing, specify a specific SMTP service
| to use for sharing pdf files, remotely wipe a device, enforce a
| password on the device before storing and sharing notes from a
| sensitive meeting amongst my team.
|
| Outside of that edge case, I love it and it's indispensable and I
| use it at least 3 times a day for meetings and other to-do lists
| for myself.
| zachruss92 wrote:
| I pre-ordered the Remarkable 1 and ended up returning it due to
| buggy software and the battery life not performing as advertised
| (had to recharge literally every day). I pre-ordered the
| Remarkable 2 when it came out because it was much more
| affordable.
|
| I've had it since November and have used it virtually every day.
| It's light and portable and I think I've charged it three times
| since November. They've definitely improved their software a lot
| and I love the OSS community around it.
|
| The only feature I wish it had was full text search on my notes.
| But I and willing toive without it as I want a lower tech
| solution for note taking that is still portable.
| michaelmior wrote:
| Interesting. That hasn't been my experience at all with the
| reMarkable 1. I do agree the software needed some work, but it
| has improved significantly since I first bought it. I have been
| debating purchasing the reMarkable 2 and although it looks
| great, I think I'm happy enough with the first device to keep
| it for now.
| markroseman wrote:
| Has anything improved recently for RM2 around secure sync to a
| LAN? Would like to experiment with one for my psychiatrist wife
| to replace her paper chart notes, but anything hitting an
| external cloud service is out of the question for patient
| information. Sync via cable would be too obtrusive. And I gather
| handwriting recognition etc. is done via cloud.
| gpm wrote:
| There's no official solution, but,
|
| It's just linux. It has ssh installed (it tells you the
| password in the "copyright and licenses" menu, and you can
| private keys on the device like normal). It connects to wifi.
| You can write a script that runs on the device and periodically
| syncs notes somewhere (I have this setup with restic for
| backups).
|
| Handwriting recognition is done by cloud, and, I mean, unless
| you want to set up your own software for handwriting
| recognition (doesn't sound easy) you would need to give up that
| feature (I have)...
| pomatic wrote:
| DIY handwriting recognition is actually really easy using
| Microsofts SaaS offerings. The results are _astonishingly_
| good too - it makes mincemeat of my awful handwriting.
| gpm wrote:
| That's really interesting actually, thanks for letting me
| know!
|
| Not sure trading out remarkables cloud for microsoft's
| cloud is exactly what OP wants though ;)
| [deleted]
| wuschel wrote:
| Is there any solid PDF/epub reader that has a display size of A4
| (8.3 inch x 11.7 inch) and OK scribbling capabilities?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I'm really glad I bought my ReMarkable2 (and Marker "Plus"), as
| it suits my use case extremely well: replacing stacks of 8.5x11"
| graph notepads, while adding digitization / sync, undo/redo,
| select/cut/paste/resize/move, (modest) pan/zoom, etc. Battery
| life and form factor are great. The writing UX is really
| something: low-latency, ~perfect hand detection, and the "feel"
| of writing. Yeah, the software's mediocre, but it's gotten
| noticeably better since I bought it ~6mo ago. And it's still
| early days. The OSS community did wonders for the RM1, and I
| expect RM2 to follow suit. It's not a do-anything kind of device
| (I absolutely love my Kindle Oasis for reading) but for me it was
| easily worth the $.
| zaphar wrote:
| I have a remarkable 2 as well and It's a fantastic notetaker
| and pdf annotation device. One benefit I didn't think about
| beforehand but use somewhat frequently is signing documents
| while working from home. Just print to pdf, copy to remarkable,
| sign, email back to sender. Way easier than printing, signing,
| scanning, and then emailing back.
| darkwater wrote:
| In those cases I usually take the PDF, open it with
| LibreOffice and paste over my signature, scanned once upon a
| time. Never got any complaints, but it could be easily
| discovered for sure.
| vinni2 wrote:
| I bought Remarkable 2 and returned it sadly. It does one thing
| very well which is writing. But not a great tool for reading
| PDFs. When I figured pinch to zoom was not possible that was it
| for me. It's a really polished tool for wiring but they have a
| lot of room to improve for reading experience.
| nosianu wrote:
| As others have said, pinch to zoom works now.
|
| Although that only helps to zoom in to one spot, if I were to
| try using that to read a page where the font is too small,
| having to shift the page left and right while zoomed, it
| would be a nightmare to read a document.
|
| My gripe is I cannot switch the device to show a PDF in
| landscape mode. Then at least pretty much all documents'
| fonts would be large enough, if I use the height of the
| device for the width of the PDF. Then I would only have to
| scroll down and only after reading half a page. That would
| work well, scrolling left-right-left-right-.... while zoomed
| in does not, unless the page has two columns of text so that
| I don't have to scroll right-left-....
|
| I use my RM2 mostly as epub reader. For the price - I got the
| preorder discount - it was the same or even lower as other
| pure readers of a similar size.
|
| The software does have some weaknesses, for example sometimes
| I have to edit the epubs and remove some CSS background color
| because it ends up black on dark gray (unreadable of course),
| or it has set defaults for font, line height and such
| settings and I cannot set new defaults so I end up setting
| those for each and every document I sync to it anew. Still,
| it's acceptable for me, it's just a few (now muscle memory)
| clicks. To sync I sometimes have to start the Windows app to
| which I added a document a second time before it uploads it
| to the cloud server. That too now is a muscle-memory action.
| I hope they fix it some day but it's not a deal breaker.
|
| I did a bit of writing and that just works and feels very
| good too. Other than the base use cases the software is very
| barebone. As others have pointed out, that's a goal. The
| device does everything I expect from it, which is just some
| basic writing and the epub reading. I can send webpages to
| the device (while it's online) by clicking an extension icon
| in the browser, which I do for RoyalRoad chapters, for
| example. WebToEpub creates epub files for entire Webnovels,
| which have to be uploaded using the Windows app though.
| vinni2 wrote:
| For me main use case is reading research articles annotate
| on it and sync it with my desktop and share it with my
| colleagues. Ideally I wanted a bibliography library tool
| like mendeley or zotero and keep all my annotations and
| notes synced. But that is far from possible on any e-ink
| tablet so far I have tried.
| Terretta wrote:
| I'd pay real money for something like LiquidText
| rethought for e-Ink.
| jessmartin wrote:
| That's interesting, because I read PDFs (and annotate) every
| single day. Pinch-to-zoom works great, and it's the best PDF
| reader I've experienced. Can't recommend highly enough.
| gspr wrote:
| Pinch zoom is available in PDFs now. I'm on 2.7, but I
| believe it was added in 2.6. It works really well. Of course
| it's far slower than on a normal tablet due to the e-ink
| screen, but it's definitely fine for me.
| vinni2 wrote:
| Ok I gave up too early then. Ah well I didn't have
| patience.
| szszrk wrote:
| I think it's actually impressive speed-wise. Not a real
| tablet speed but in my case even large, graphics heavy
| documents work quite well.
|
| I'm surprised they pulled this one off.
| gspr wrote:
| Absolutely. I just added the comment because I've had
| some friends who are unfamiliar with e-ink screens
| expecting tablet behavior.
|
| I just refereed a research paper with complex (color!)
| graphics on the thing. It was an absolute breeze!
| szszrk wrote:
| Yeah, I'm on some facebook reMarkable groups and it's
| stunning how many people bought it without watching a
| single video from manufacturer. They though browser,
| video, dropbox/google drive/others will be available, or
| that it will integrate with their decade worth of notes
| from various services...
|
| Those tablet e-ink devices does some of that. reMarkable
| is just a notepad with very simple cloud sync to their
| cloud.
| infinitezest wrote:
| That's disappointing to hear. I've been on the fence about
| way to pick one of these up but I had heard that the reading
| experience was sub par. I have yet to find an e-ink tablet
| that's attractive enough to spend money on.
| auggierose wrote:
| I bought it as well and returned it. It is just too small for
| reading PDFs comfortably.
| sork_hn wrote:
| Me too!
| szszrk wrote:
| I'm using ReMarkable 2 as well and am happy with it, but if I
| would just wait for other devices to come up I'd consider boox
| nova or something like that for their completely different (and
| better) text convertion and so on.
|
| But still - the device is quite awesome and I tough myself some
| drawing. Use it all the time to prototype diagrams and show
| architecture. Love it that I can draw some weird system
| connections on a diagram, copy and paste, and change some
| parts. Then I send a PDF and use it as a flip-book on zoom cals
| :)
|
| Opensource tweaks are pretty good now. Some are actually
| obsolete as ReMarkable did nice improvements to zoom and
| document links. But most tweaks support RM2 already.
| jessmartin wrote:
| Same here. I had literally dozens of moleskines that I've been
| writing in for nearly 15 years. I'm a huge fan of paper, but
| was looking for a solution that allowed me to digitize my note-
| taking without giving up the ergonomics of paper.
|
| As you point out, the "writing UX" was so astonishing, it was
| probably the quickest "adoption" of any major tech upgrade for
| me.
|
| I wrote some notes on my experience and the transition from
| paper here: https://jessmart.in/articles/remarkable
| katabasis wrote:
| This is my experience too. I used to keep a stack of notebooks
| around, and I never seemed to have the right one on hand. Now I
| just have to keep track of one notebook that will never run out
| of space. With the most recent updates the e-reading experience
| has also gotten much better.
|
| At this point the only feature I'd say is lacking is some kind
| of e-book store integration. I'd like to be able to purchase
| books from mainstream publishers to read on the device (it's
| sad how few publishers distribute books in non-DRM, plain ePub
| files these days).
| Grumbledour wrote:
| I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device. Hardware
| wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the
| software, only that it is "improving" for years now.
|
| Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and
| graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much
| energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that
| instead of having something great to do technical sketching,
| email or even interactive notebooks like Jupiter on, you get a
| really over engineered piece of paper.
|
| Now, it's pretty open, which is great, but I am not that
| convinced it will necessary remain so, and at that price, buying
| it only in the hopes of some people making better software in
| their free time always seems like a bigger gamble I like to take.
| I accept that for me ~120EUR ereader, but for 5 times the price?
|
| I really wish they would embrace mobile computing. Combining an
| e-ink tablet optimized for text with a moldable operating system
| like on the old xerox machines could be so incredibly good.
|
| By the way, does the hardware allow connecting an external
| keyboard?
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yeah so you want the Boox with Play Store installed. Then you
| have all that stuff.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| Well, in theory. One could write an app for that I guess. But
| the whole complex android stack does not really appeal to me.
| Simplicity I think, would also be really important. And I
| think openness goes hand in hand with that.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Boox is easy to root and the remarkable is open. Not sure
| how well the remarkable would work with a keyboard, but my
| Boox included a keyboard (it's just a BLE one but it has
| good support). On the remarkable at least you should be
| able to run some tiny linux distro with a simple as you
| want stack. Guess in time we will get something; just not
| sure how to make sure it's more open.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > I accept that for me ~120EUR ereader
|
| There is no point chasing hardware customers who would only pay
| $120 for a device like this. You're never going to be able to
| make a sustainable business at that prices and those people are
| always going to be comparing your product to Amazon Kindle
| prices yet also demanding way beyond that.
|
| Better to find an audience that is passionate about what you're
| building and passionate for a new alternative and willing to
| spend the money that can keep your business sustainable. I
| understand you'd be more interested if it was Jupiter notebooks
| tablet but eInk but that's an even more niche product than note
| taking and would therefore cost way more than the current
| price.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| I'm a fan of the remarkable, use v2 every day. My high school
| daughter uses my old v1 every day. We both love it.
|
| But it is absolutely very opinionated- entirely oriented around
| hand-writing use cases, specifically those that involve being
| away from power and network. So its power budget is low and it
| has amazingly robust synchronization.
|
| You can read and do some other things on it, but that's not
| what it solves for.
| lovelyviking wrote:
| >By the way, does the hardware allow connecting an external
| keyboard?
|
| I know for sure that RM1 hardware does allow you to connect
| external keyboard becase I have done it.
|
| I can't tell about RM2 as I do not have it.
| spinningslate wrote:
| >I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is
| "improving" for years now.
|
| I think that depends on what you want out of the device. It's
| definitely limited - but, as other posters note, that's an
| explicit design choice. A design _goal_ in fact. But what it
| does, it does pretty well. I 've had my RM2 for maybe a year
| now. And I use it daily. It's become my preferred note-taking &
| sketching medium, replacing the paper notepads I've used for
| years.
|
| I don't use it for anything else: but it supports those two use
| cases very nicely. It's simple but subtle things that I've
| found useful, for example:
|
| 1. Keeping my notes in folders. 2. Being able to add notes to a
| subject (folder), rather than interleaving in a paper book 3.
| Being able to move things about when sketching. I'd often get
| to the edge of the paper in a notebook and need to cram
| something awkwardly. Now, I can just select and move.
|
| I've tried using a wacom tablet connected to the PC instead,
| and much prefer the remarkable. The ergonomics just feel so
| much better.
|
| It's not perfect: live sync can be a bit unreliable, and I'd
| prefer the "todo" template to be a bit more app-like (move
| items off the list when complete).
|
| But I can live with those. I like the fact it's focused,
| efficient, pleasant to use, and doesn't try to be all things to
| all people.
| 83457 wrote:
| What I can say is it just works. If you keep a notebook, it is
| a viable alternative with few drawbacks and many advantages in
| my experience.
|
| They have been very careful and deliberate with their features.
| At first it was odd or even frustrating that the capabilities
| are limited, but over time I have started to understand their
| approach and wanting to align with their goal of being a
| focused and distraction free experience.
|
| It seems like they have little real competition in this niche
| they have carved out, so can take the time to slowly but
| continuously role out enhancements. It reminds me of how the
| iPhone has been limited in overall capabilities compared to
| Android but stays more streamlined as enhancements are made.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Boox Note Air does through Bluetooth or USB C. It just runs
| Android so you can pretty much do whatever. It's literally an
| Android Tablet with an eInk screen.
|
| Remarkable you can hack in keyboard support. They are just
| focused on making a good digital notepad. Even their reading
| software is sub-par.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Remarkable is really a device for people who explicitly _don 't
| want_ those features. They're betting hard that the market
| exists, although it probably isn't as large as the market for
| an as-powerful-as-possible general-purpose computing device.
|
| I've seen it mentioned that someone got an USB keyboard
| working, and the device is pretty hackable overall (you can SSH
| to root over wifi out of the box!), but I think if you want to
| connect an external keyboard then it probably isn't for you
| anyway. You can't even type text in documents.
|
| Disclaimer: reMarkable 2 user, pretty happy with their focus,
| but I wish the device was more responsive in some scenarios
| (complicated drawings are very slow) and there's certainly many
| missing core drawing/writing/reading features.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| Let me just add that I am not talking about a powerful all
| purpose computing device, because I think we pretty much have
| this with modern tablets/laptops.
|
| But I do feel the computing part could be much more utilized
| to make taking notes and reading text better. I am thinking
| of Hypertext, drawing tools like sketchpad, simple
| programming tools etc.
|
| Not a device that does as much as possible badly, but one
| that could really push forward computing and text to get
| something more akin to digital paper we have seen for years
| in science fiction.
|
| I don't begrudge people who like the extremely limited use
| case it has today, I personally just don't really get it why
| I should spend hundreds of dollars on something that I can
| pretty much get with a notebook and my smartphone camera.
|
| On the other hand, this is a general problem these days that
| hampers innovation. As hard as hardware seems to be, it is
| obviously much easier than software, which is why so many
| devices these days fall short.
| fouric wrote:
| > But I do feel the computing part could be much more
| utilized to make taking notes and reading text better. I am
| thinking of Hypertext, drawing tools like sketchpad, simple
| programming tools etc.
|
| The problem is that even those "simple" things are a
| _massive_ amount of work to get right (where "right" means
| bug-free, performant, well-documented (or intuitive - pick
| at least one), flexible, and with an ergonomic interface).
| Additionally, they're significantly more work than the even
| simpler restricted feature-set that the reMarkable
| currently offers.
|
| I believe that the reMarkable developers are shooting for
| "quality over quantity" - polishing a small feature-set to
| a blinding shine, rather than trying to implement a larger
| feature-set poorly - that is, an _intentional trade-off_. I
| 'm happy with that trade-off, but I know that others might
| not be - in which case, you'll probably get the Android
| device that other people in the thread are discussing.
|
| Also, the reMarkable is open - you can add all these things
| yourself, if you're sufficiently motivated.
|
| > something that I can pretty much get with a notebook
|
| The reMarkable's features, as limited as they are, are
| still _miles_ beyond what a notebook gives you. You have
| backup, synchronization, document export (PDF, raster,
| SVG), undo /redo, multiple documents, digital storage,
| cut/copy/paste, erasing (pen can't be erased, pencil
| usually leaves marks and has other problems), multiple
| brushes, page reordering, multiple page templates (lined,
| grid, music, blank canvas, and more), layers, really good
| handwriting recognition, and more.
|
| Yes, it's light-years behind what we could have - but we're
| stuck in the place we're at because of a number of
| computing decisions that we made in the past (and continue
| to make now) that hamper creativity and flexibility, and
| overcoming those choices requires a lot of resources and
| the ability to ignore/bypass/counteract a _massive_ amount
| of market inertia. The reMarkable team simply doesn 't have
| those resources, so they have to make a trade-off - and the
| trade-off they made was quality over quantity (of
| features).
| atatatat wrote:
| > you can SSH to root over wifi out of the box!
|
| Yeah. Let me rush to put that on my main network.
| ryanianian wrote:
| You have to explicitly turn on SSH access, and each device
| has its own unique SSH password which is only accessible
| from the device itself. It's not a set of generic
| admin/admin creds.
| darkwater wrote:
| Do you have SSH-exploiting self-replicating worms running
| on your main network?
| asdf123wtf wrote:
| One would hope not, but it makes connecting to less
| trusted networks much more risky than it needs to be. And
| I'm sure that's something users will regularly do.
|
| Software updates are infrequent and they certainly aren't
| pushing out standalone security errata that I've seen.
| asdf123wtf wrote:
| Wow, I didn't realize it exposes root ssh over it's wifi
| interface. I just tested it and it works. I don't like that
| at all.
|
| The documentation makes it sound like it only exposes ssh
| through it's ethernet over USB interface.
| marvindanig wrote:
| > Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things
| about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now.
|
| It was pretty much DOA for me. Over the years I have
| learned/trained my hand to keep away from pen and paper. Well,
| mostly. Asking the same limb to now go back into taking notes
| by hand or drawing free-hand is a no-go for me. I learned this
| the hard way. And yes, laggy software makes it worse.
| karpour wrote:
| I have a reMarkable 2 for a while now, and I'm super happy with
| it. I specifically didn't want an Android device because of the
| obsolescence. The reMarkable doesn't run much in the background
| and does its job well.
|
| I bought it to read my IT books, works perfectly. I'm also an
| artist, and even though I didn't expect much from the pen,
| sketching on it is very fun and I find myself filling a page of
| sketches almost every day.
|
| Having full access to the underlying OS is also a big plus,
| even though I didn't do anything with that yet.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I can tell you my wife absolutely loves her Remarkable 2. I
| kinda want one myself now, but am not sure I can justify the
| cost for myself because my technology usage is different.
|
| In her case, the ereader functionality is secondary. She's big
| on writing in notebooks and the Remarkable's experience there
| justifies the cost. It's really a device for writing, not
| reading.
| varispeed wrote:
| Lack of computer features is refreshing to be honest. You can't
| be distracted just like sitting in front of blank page of
| paper.
|
| That being said, a deal breaker for me is lack of encryption.
| bipson wrote:
| E-Mail and Python notebooks? I don't think they these are the
| primary use cases for a "digital paper" device.
|
| What you consider an "overengineered piece" of paper might be
| intentional. Maybe you don't need paper - some people do.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| But should a more modern, digital paper, not enhance the
| human intellect? Why should I not be able to jot down a math
| formula that the computer then solves for me? Why cant I draw
| a triangle and let it compute the sides? Why not write a
| letter to a friend and send it directly to them and also read
| their answer on the same device?
|
| This would be enhancing paper for me. Combining the at this
| point pretty natural way of writing on paper with many of the
| modern computers amenities. Sure, you might not need all
| these, but paper is also cents if you really need "Not
| features". Minimalism and focus on core features is fine, but
| artificially limitations in this way does not seem to help
| remarkable to deliver good software. So what does it achieve?
| criddell wrote:
| > So what does it achieve?
|
| Sustainability. The device isn't for everybody. The
| constraints are features.
|
| Sounds like you want something more like an iPad.
| dTal wrote:
| Except e-ink, and ultra-low-latency pen input, and ssh-
| able...
|
| I think the "interactive paper" vision is very different
| from the "ipad" vision.
| criddell wrote:
| The RM2 pen latency (20 ms) is double the iPad's (9 ms).
|
| I wouldn't call the RM2 interactive paper. It's digital
| paper. Remarkable has focused their device to that niche
| and I think that was very smart of them. It's all about
| e-ink, crazy battery life, no distractions. I know a lot
| of people want more functionality - especially in the
| reader area, drawing apps, and calendar functions. So far
| Remarkable has managed to stay focused on the core
| functionality and I think the longer they can remain
| focused, the better off the company is. Every feature
| they add is something they have to test and maintain
| forever and that's a lot for a small company to do and
| still sell the device for about $400 (which is a bargain
| IMHO).
|
| What I'd like to see is a bigger option. It would be nice
| to have at least a full A4/letter size screen. It would
| make dealing with PDFs a much better experience.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think that as e-ink gets better and better refresh rates,
| that having it as a grayscale monitor for things like
| textbooks/markup and browsing the web will make sense. Having
| an e-ink tablet to browse HN, check email and read the
| morning paper sounds pretty nice. I used to get the NYTimes
| delivered to my Kindle each morning.
| asdf123wtf wrote:
| Forget grayscale, E-ink is going color. Early color devices
| are on the market already. And there are displays in the
| works that are fast enough to render video.
|
| I'm really looking forward to the future of e-ink displays.
| Arainach wrote:
| That's not this product. The point to a device like the
| Remarkable is that it _can 't_ do those things. I could
| have an iPad Pro with a better pen, the full power of
| OneNote, etc., but it's way too easy to go get distracted
| by HN or email or a news flash. The Remarkable is a _focus_
| device.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I picked up the Onyx BOOX Max Lumi, a 13.3" e-ink tablet and
| bookreader earlier this year. I'm mostly happy with it. I'm far
| happier with it than I have been with my earlier Android devices
| (10 years of phone and 6 of tablet use), though the BOOX is in
| fact an Android 10 device, though not fully Google-compliant. It
| also has 4x the onboard storage of the Remarkable2, at 64 GB
| rather than 16 GB (more below). That alone was the convincing
| factor for me.
|
| The display is gorgeous. 1650x2200 pixels at 207 dpi 16 shade
| greyscale. It reads wonderfully in direct sunlight, and well
| under any interior lighting conditions with the "Frontlight" to
| assist. Unlike emissive displays, frontlight + increased room
| light _increases_ readability.
|
| The stock bookreader software ("Neoreader") is good at reading,
| less so at organising (more below). Well-processed books directly
| rendered from markup can generally be viewed landscape at 2-up,
| for a more booklike experience (ePubs of course as well). Even
| lower-quality scans of 3-column articles from before the age of
| computer typesetting are readable without having to zoom the
| page. (Most recently I've been going through the Whole Earth
| Catalog's back-editions --- the pasted-in layout, often with
| patterned or coloured overlays, is ... almost always ...
| readable. It's a good test of bad quality typography.)
|
| I'd written a bit recently on the fact that tablets are for the
| most part _not_ a viable device cateogory, with far too many
| design compromises. The notable exceptions being ebook readers,
| baby pacifiers, and watching videos. For any other task, a laptop
| (even a small and cheap one) is far more capable. See the
| following, most of the meat is in my subsequent comments:
| https://joindiaspora.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e1002590d8e...
|
| My principle uses are as a book/document reader, accessing my
| Pocket archive (more below), and some Android use (Web, podcasts,
| Termux). I _hadn 't_ expected to use the note-taking feature at
| all, but that is actually surprisingly good and habit-forming.
|
| The BOOX is, of course, a tablet, but it's one with a few
| interesting twists.
|
| - Display: Pixels are cheap, paints are expensive, persistence
| costs nothing, viewability _increases_ rather than _decreases_ as
| ambient lighting increases, and colours are nonexistent. (There
| are colour e-ink devices, performance is middlin ', price is not
| ... _too_ outrageous, sizes tend to the smaller.) Contrast is
| lower than paper, though it 's good. Video is possible, if far
| from optimal. Issues with colour-discrimination can be an issue
| in apps and websites. Multiple modes trading increased quality
| for faster refresh. Video can be viewed, though it's not pretty.
| Line-art and halftone rendering is excellent.
|
| - Battery: Claim is a month of standbye, a week of normal use. I
| am _not_ a normal user, my goal was to not have range-anxiety. I
| can go a day or two between charges, and charging is fast (1--2
| hours to full), whilst using the device for much of the day.
| _This is more than sufficient and exceeds expectations._
|
| - Storage: My goal is to have a portable and _well-organised_
| library (more on the 2nd bit below). I have well over 64 GB in
| texts alone, and also use devices for podcasts. I 've already
| chewed through most of the capacity of the BOOX (system and apps
| also require some space), and would prefer a 128--256 _or larger_
| storage option. The fact that Remarkable2 is limited to 16 GB
| _given the pitifully low costs of storage_ , for a device
| principally aimed at reading, is ... inexplicable.
|
| - WiFi: 2.4G & 5G (unsure what specs). Slightly less range than
| my earlier tablet, though still adequate and reliable.
|
| - Bluetooth. Mostly for the optional $35 keyboard, though also
| capable of sharing audio to speakers.
|
| - Touch: Works better than expected. Note-taking in particular is
| excellent. The display depth is slightly increased (due to
| various layers?), so drawing may be difficult, but for text notes
| and rough diagraming, it's actually pretty addictive.
|
| - Audio: Two speakers and (counter to my initial belief) an
| onboard mic. More than sufficient for listening to podcasts.
|
| - Camera: None.
|
| - Security: A mixed bag. Device password is only available with
| Onyx's Cloud service, which is inexcusable. No device encryption.
| I treat the device as largely untrusted.
|
| - Interface: Usable, with some kinks and personality. Occasional
| instances of Engrish / Chinglish.
|
| - Android: On basis, this was a strike against the device, though
| given it's reasonably Google-Free, the Google App store does
| _not_ work, and F-Droid offers a useful selection of much-better-
| behaved applications, a feature. Access to some Android settings
| (e.g., device UUID reset) aren 't provided. The device is
| actually a rather better tablet than I'd hoped (which increases
| distractions).
|
| - Stock apps: The bookreader, storage manager, a web browser (re-
| badged and e-ink optimised Chromium AFAICT), clock, calendar
| (with no alarms!), calculator, and a few other stock apps exist.
| Most are specifically designed for e-ink and benefit by this.
| Features are fairly spare.
|
| - Note-taking: Surprisingly good. This wasn't a key interest, but
| the ability to simply _write what I want to capture_ , as well as
| diagram and annotate freely, makes up for much of the keyboard
| lack.
|
| - Apps: Supposedly the Google App Store can be enabled, though
| I've found this doesn't work. I consider this to be a feature.
| Instead I rely on F-Droid and APK Mirror to install Fennec Fox,
| EinkBro (a browser, more below), Pocket, Termux, a Feeder (RSS),
| VLC, Wikipedia, and a _very_ small handful of other apps.
|
| - EinkBro Browser: (Additional install, not stock.) This is a web
| browser specifically engineered for e-ink devices. It features
| full-screen immersive mode (no app or device menus), paginated
| navigation (fewer paints), a Reader Mode, print-to-PDF, a
| verticle-text mode (for Japanese text). It is lacking an
| Incognito mode, and some of the features are rough (adblock, JS,
| and cookie whitelists can be added, but not edited or
| individually removed). For pages which are painful in Fennec Fox,
| it's a very handy fallback option. I still principally use Fennec
| as a browser. As an exemplar of eink-aware UI/UX, it's excellent.
|
| - Pocket: Installed via APK Mirror (the F-Droid version is
| woefully obsolete). All my standard frustrations exist, though at
| least it's available. See:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...
| (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763106) But at least
| it's there.
|
| - Termux: The Linux-environment-on-Android utility lives up to
| its reputation of the one Android App That Does Not Completely
| And Specifically Suck. It also continues to be periodically
| garbage-collected by Android, though that's not Termux's fault.
| There's a black-on-white eink display style which suits the BOOX
| wonderfully, and "Speed Mode" display seems to work best on text.
| The Onyx hardware keyboard does _NOT_ include an "esc" key,
| which is quite frustrating for this vim addict.
|
| I do have some complaints.
|
| Storage. I'd prefer 128 GB -- 512 GB available -- enough to store
| thousands of books _and_ audio episodes, without any concern for
| running out of storage. It 's less a factor of "what's
| sufficient" and more "why allow a few dollars in cost stand in
| the way of sufficient storage?" 512 GB microSD now costs about
| $50. I paid more than that for the cover for the device.
|
| Root. I'd prefer a rootable device. AFAICT the BOOX is not.
|
| The bookreader and storage utility don't facilitate organising
| and managing content. This seems to be a weak point of many ebook
| tools. In particular: - I'd like to be able to edit / add
| metadata to documents _from within the document itself_ , based
| on the Dublin Core metadata + tags. I'm mostly be interested in
| title, author, publication, and date, though other fields also
| prove useful. Search should be metadata-aware. The storage
| utility should also provide for metadata managment. I'm
| interested in media / library management tools that integrate
| with tablets.
|
| Android management tools are generally lacking. Onyx's rebranding
| of Android removes most of the configuration tools.
|
| Instability. The device does crash and kill apps from time to
| time. That's probably on Android, but increases certain types of
| anxiety. Restarting every few days isn't a bad idea. No worse
| than any other Android device I've had. But I've rarely had
| printed books crash on me.
|
| Keyboard: Please include "esc" on tablet keyboards.
| wastholm wrote:
| I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a
| cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately
| started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking
| pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect.
|
| The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really
| black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and
| reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and
| there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered
| the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.
|
| I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I
| dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me,
| are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or
| EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works
| but isn't great).
| freeqaz wrote:
| You can actually SCP into the device without any modification.
| It's under the Copyright section of the device. It'll show you
| the default SSH password for your device and then you can drop
| files in there. :)
| gpm wrote:
| You can, but getting the reader to pick up a new pdf involves
|
| - Setting up a bit of metadata
|
| - Restarting the system service
|
| it's not quite as simple as `scp file remarkable:/folder`
| flatiron wrote:
| i don't haven the device but the above sounds like a 10
| line shell script to me. slap files in a local directory,
| execute script, see screen flash on device, items loaded.
| gpm wrote:
| That sounds about right in terms of complexity.
|
| Maybe 20, the metadata format is a bit verbose.
|
| Screen more than flashes, it exits to the entry screen,
| navigation state isn't saved.
| blumomo wrote:
| For me it's much easier to drop files to reMarkable using
| RCU [0], works over wifi, too.
|
| [0] http://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
| wastholm wrote:
| Sure, you can SCP all the files you want but even if they're
| PDFs or EPUBs they won't show up in the interface. (I can't
| remember if I actually tried this or if I just read it
| somewhere. Maybe it's worth a shot.)
| stewbrew wrote:
| Since you can connect via ssh to the device you should be able
| to use SCP too, shouldn't you?
|
| I personally prefer to mount the cloud via some fuse-based
| solution though.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| > inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device
|
| Do they support document delivery through email like Kindle?
| Recently I showcased[1] 'HN to Kindle' here and someone asked
| for Remarkable tablet support, But I didn't get an answer
| regarding email delivery.
|
| Update: A quick search on their website says documents can be
| emailed out of the device i.e. sharing, But there doesn't seem
| to be a way to email content to the device.
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27483159
| j6m8 wrote:
| Yup. That was my main complaint with it, too. I wrote this
| package to add email uploads:
|
| https://github.com/remailable/remailable
|
| The rM is a delightful product to hack on.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Man, I got the thing because I _wanted_ to use it as an ebook
| and document reader, but it 's totally failed at that for me. I
| spent hours working on a decent system for getting books on the
| thing and came up empty. I think it would be good for reading
| and taking notes on academic papers, but I mostly read books,
| and I couldn't figure out how to get most books on there. A lot
| of this is Amazon's fault for kindle being a proprietary
| format, but a lot of it is also the non-Amazon e-book community
| for failing to provide solutions that are as user friendly as
| Amazon is.
|
| Edit: But yeah, I _love_ the hardware. It just isn 't
| functional enough for me to use it regularly, which is a
| bummer.
| gspr wrote:
| > the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and
| have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).
|
| Are you aware of the web interface? It's only available over
| USB, and requires flipping a switch in the settings. That
| interface is so simple that I imagine that an scp replacement
| is just an novice-level curl invocation away.
| wastholm wrote:
| Yes, but the "only over USB" thing is unfortunate so I find
| myself mostly using the bundled cloud service, which is
| usually something I try to avoid relying on. Some sort of
| peer-to-peer sync like Syncthing would be great.
| pjerem wrote:
| When I had a Remarkable, I installed KOReader on it. It
| transforms the e-book experience from "really poor" to "really
| power user".
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Can you also get kindle on it?
|
| Nova devices are android so kindle, safari reader, and any
| ePub, pdf etc. book are a breeze to install.
| neves wrote:
| Is it good to read PDFs?
| keedon wrote:
| Pretty good, and you can make notes & highlight them too
| bm1362 wrote:
| Frankly no, it doesn't re-flow them so the text will often be
| too small. Quite a massive oversight and no one really talks
| about it.
| noobly wrote:
| That is really too bad. Hopefully there's either a larger
| device or upgrade soon, I've been waiting a long time for
| something like the reMarkable to mature into a product that
| fits my needs.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's a legitimate criticism, and one reason I've held off
| buying one. I wonder how long it would take to get a screen
| size of 13.5" (about the same as US letter paper size,
| which is what most pdfs are formatted for).
| Loughla wrote:
| That is legitimately the one thing I wish was different
| about the RM2 - the screen is 1/3 or so smaller than a
| regular sheet of paper. If it were 1:1 with a sheet of
| paper, I would absolutely love this thing.
| eloisant wrote:
| There is the Sony Digital Paper DPTS1, but it's very
| expensive.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I see it's been replaced by the Sony DPT-RP1, though
| that's still expensive. At least this is proof it's
| possible and creates hope for competitors to emerge.
| krastanov wrote:
| I am surprised anyone would want reflow in their PDFs (that
| is what epub is for). The PDFs I read would be completely
| ruined even by minor reflow (e.g. I work with two-column
| text with many inline figures and math). PDF inherently as
| a format is not meant to have reflow.
|
| With that context, I love reading PDFs on my remarkable 2.
| Zooming and panning also works pretty well (given the slow
| refresh rate of e-ink).
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Reflow is offered by Adobe:
| https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2020/09/23/adobe-
| unveils-a...
|
| Unfortunately you have to send the file to their servers,
| which is probably a no-go for many.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Actually you can. The IP address is shown at the bottom of the
| copyright notice, you can ssh into the device and once your
| have put your ssh keys onto it, just scp onto it (the ip
| changes on reboot). Unfortunately, you cannot just copy the
| documents, but you have to bundle them with some meta data, it
| is pretty trivial to construct, I made a small script, will try
| to share it at some time.
| flatiron wrote:
| you can fix the ip changing on reboot by pegging the MAC to
| an IP in your router. if you are also running something like
| pi-hole you can give it a local dns entry too, which makes it
| even easier to remember.
| krastanov wrote:
| On my OS at least (ubuntu and probably many others) it can
| resolve by hostname (after all that is the whole point of
| having hostnames). So I just do `ssh remarkable` without
| even having an `.ssh` entry for it.
| neilv wrote:
| That can work, if your LAN router's DHCP and DNS are set
| up to respect the hostname suggested by the client, to
| update it in the DNS for the LAN domain, and tell DHCP
| clients to use the router for DNS.
|
| For LAN devices you want to access as a server, I think
| it's usually easiest and most reliable to just designate
| a permanent IPv4 address for them with your router's DHCP
| server, like what OP suggested.
|
| Your SSH client will probably prefer static IP addresses,
| too, for the record-keeping it probably does about which
| servers it knows and at what addresses.
| nafizh wrote:
| Same here. RM2 is probably one of my best investments for
| research and learning ever. Only drawback is I cannot read it
| without light at night. Would have been perfect if there was a
| back light like kindle.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| I was seriously considering popping over to their site and
| ordering an RM2. But no backlight? That's a show-stopper for
| me - thanks for mentioning it as I think I just assumed it
| would have one given that most eReaders do.
| jader201 wrote:
| > I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing
| by hand.
|
| A bit unrelated, but I've often wondered if I'm in the minority
| that hates writing by hand. Compared to typing, I'm much
| slower, and it looks terrible -- I print in caps just so that
| it's remotely legible.
|
| I avoid handwriting at all costs, and loath the few times it's
| required.
| asdff wrote:
| It might seem obvious but the less you write the more
| illegible your handwriting seems to you. I noticed this
| during school. Over summers I would pretty much never have to
| handwrite anything, and in august I had all the same gripes
| that you do about my slow illegible terrible looking
| handwriting. Those kinks would be worked out two weeks into
| the school year, after your hand is back in shape from
| writing notes 8+ hours a day.
|
| The other thing about handwriting is that you remember things
| better. The act of transmuting something you've heard, put it
| into a thought, then taking that thought and stroking out
| words on a distinct location on a physical page taps into all
| these levels of comprehension and processing that you just
| miss if you take the stenographer approach with a keyboard
| and transcribe directly what you hear, or even writing
| digitally on the exact same 8x10 screen day in day out. I've
| fallen asleep in lectures with my hands on the keyboard mid
| sentence typing up some note, because the effort required by
| your brain is so much smaller and you are not nearly as
| engaged as when you are actually stroking out words and in
| the background thinking about how to fit relevant information
| on a unique 8'x11' sheet of paper.
| Nursie wrote:
| I'm terrible at it, but I enjoy fountain pens. They make me
| slow down enough that it's at least legible, where my biro-
| scrawl is very much not. It is hard not to let my brain race
| ahead though, as it does when I'm typing.
|
| Also fountain pens are shiny and you can get all sorts of
| inks and accessories!
| meristohm wrote:
| Have you tried writing with your other hand, if you have it?
| Writing with my non-dominant hand is slower and more precise.
| It's been twenty-odd years of practice, in part in case I
| lose a hand, and it continues to feel like a fun, healthy
| challenge.
| crussmann wrote:
| Over the last years, I felt my handwriting was deteriorating.
| I blamed my lack of practice and reliance on computers, and
| accepted that.
|
| But, last year I got glasses. With them, my hand writing
| quickly improved. As an aside, I can type a lot faster on a
| touch screen now too. Presbyopia snuck up on me somewhere
| when I hit 40...
| jfb wrote:
| I hate my handwriting, but the physical act of longhand
| absolutely helps me with retention, so I have a reMarkable.
| It's a pretty great device.
| musingsole wrote:
| Writing text by hand is certainly slower than typing.
|
| Unless you're filling out a form or writing an essay in
| school, handwritten things should use more symbolic language.
| Use a shorthand of words and images and arrows and circles
| that are meaningful to you. Whether or not someone else (or
| even you later) can read it is really a secondary concern.
| marshmellman wrote:
| Yes, I'm in that minority too. I've always had poor
| handwriting and always hated writing by hand.
|
| After introspecting about it, I realized that, for me, it's
| because of low grade stress during handwriting, as my
| attention is constantly churned between thinking about the
| content and about legibility.
| xattt wrote:
| I worked in positions that required me to write by hand more
| than I had in the last decade. I found that my handwriting
| found an equilibrium that balanced speed and legibility after
| a while.
|
| Perhaps consider changing your writing technique?
| renewiltord wrote:
| My handwriting is fine but I am slow af compared to editing
| in a vimlike. Definitely agree with you. None of this writing
| stuff appeals to me.
|
| The drawing maybe.
| eloisant wrote:
| When I take notes I usually don't limit myself to writing
| to lines, I write on the sides, makes arrows, etc... For
| this "visual note taking" paper (or e-ink tablet) is way
| better.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I use handwriting for thinking, not writing. I don't really
| expect to be able to recover the things I write down more
| than 2 weeks after the fact without some extra work.
| macintux wrote:
| I took the LSAT on a lark about 20 years ago, and at the time
| they required an essay written in cursive. Took me a couple
| of hours just to reconstruct my distant memories of how to
| write cursive, and I hated every minute of the essay itself.
| jader201 wrote:
| Yes, this exact single moment in my life is often recalled
| any time the subject of handwriting in cursive comes up.
|
| That essay was a complete mess. I was even thinking of that
| as I wrote my above post. Hilarious that someone else
| mentioned it.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| You're not alone. I appreciate that some people enjoy hand-
| writing (the act itself, the ergonomics, and all the various
| bits of physical ephemera that accompany it-- pens, papers,
| etc) but for me typing's sheer efficiency and inherent
| machine-readability (not to mention being readable by other
| humans) wins every time.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I long hated writing, and like you only wrote in block
| capitals, until I decided to re-learn to write cursive.
| Mostly I wanted to be able to write sweet paper notes to my
| lovers that didn't look like a 5th grader wrote them. I've
| found that when the process is approached as art, maybe even
| meditation, it's far more pleasurable than an act simply
| meant to record words on paper.
| akiselev wrote:
| The Remarkable 2 drawing app also comes with a calligraphy
| pen, which does wonders for the readability of many
| people's cursive.
| xeromal wrote:
| Anytime I write in print, I'm slow and janky but cursive
| seems to flow out of my hand. By default, it's not very
| legible except to me but I actually appreciate how it looks
| and it's easy to focus it when writing to someone else.
| Cursive definitely flows much easier than print. My only
| gripe with writing in general is that writing left handed
| excludes me from about 92% of pens that will streak under
| my hand.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Being left handed, you've probably found this, but the
| Zebra Sarasa Dry is what my left handed daughter uses.
| It's the only cheapish pen that she likes
| clairity wrote:
| yes, in cobalt blue, they're perfect. much better than
| the pilot g2's that preceded them.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can you share any resources you used to learn and improve
| your writing? My love letters can always be better.
| ngngngng wrote:
| I worked for about a month a few years back to improve my
| writing. I just found an example of handwriting I liked
| and would spend time each morning copying individual
| characters, then words. Very slowly at first, then it
| became natural. My handwriting has slipped since then,
| seems to be something you need to keep working at from
| time to time.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I've done it twice in my adult life. The first time, I
| was unhappy with my block capitals, and looked up the
| letter form references for architectural block lettering,
| and spend a few hours over a week or so just practicing
| letter forms. I, in a very literal way, installed a font
| in meatspace :)
|
| Cursive I think is really more just about getting a feel
| for the flow of script. There are some technical aspects,
| like the letter forms themselves, and the rules of
| joining them -- not all letters in a word can or should
| be joined, which is obvious to long-time cursive users
| but was not to me!
|
| But mostly it comes down to knowing the letter forms, and
| then just _using_ cursive. Write a dear friend a sweet
| note. Write a couple pages in your diary on occasion.
| Your forms will become clearer and will flow better with
| practice. Embellish! Draw huge risers and tails on your
| letters and pretend you 're writing in elvish or
| something. haha.
| hallarempt wrote:
| I wooed my wife with my handwritten letters... Thirty years
| ago. Of course, these days, I'm also her wife, and my
| handwriting isn't so good anymore. But my Remarkable 2,
| after the latest software updates is remarkably good. Now I
| wish we could reconvene our RPG club from thirty years ago,
| because it's the best RPG notes device I've ever used,
| better than paper, because it's more flexible.
| moelf wrote:
| https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1333952722849198084
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I have been looking at the Remarkable 2 and other devices in
| the category. My use case is taking notes on CS and maths,
| which both often require diagrams and other drawings. Can you
| speak to how well it works for something like this and how it
| compares to note-taking with a pen and paper?
| marvindanig wrote:
| My experience: iPad with a pencil is much better. But it is a
| personal choice in the end, I'd say.
| riidom wrote:
| I have a ReMarkable 2 as well, and there are zero drawing
| tools or alike, if you want some graphical object, you just
| draw it.
|
| You have a multitude of background-guides (lines, grids,
| etc.) for easier aligning.
|
| The only features you have that you don't get with pen&paper
| are a layer system and a select tool which you can use for
| copy/paste/cut or move parts around.
|
| Page management is pretty basic, but ok. You have notebooks
| which are folders of pages and you can change their order.
| noobly wrote:
| Are you able to achieve a split-screen-like functionality,
| so you can do scratch work while referencing the text?
| Groxx wrote:
| Unfortunately no. Not even with the 3rd party
| modifications. Though there are some full GUI linux
| installs iirc.
|
| It's a common question in the community Discord, and the
| official patches have been accelerating and implementing
| a lot of long-asked-for features (e.g. pinch to zoom),
| but nobody really knows what's on their roadmap. So hard
| to say if it'll ever get side-by-side.
| noobly wrote:
| Hopefully they add open sourcing the whole stack to their
| roadmap. That'd be the best thing they can do imo. I'm so
| eager for a device like this that I can 100% get behind.
| Terretta wrote:
| iPad Pro with Apple Pencil ... and the paper texture screen
| cover shown here last year.
| Loughla wrote:
| I use the Remarkable 2 daily. It feels like writing in a
| notebook - the screen gives you just a little bit of drag
| like a mechanical pencil and paper would. Very good to use.
| afandian wrote:
| My first thought was "if you can SSH then you can pipe" and,
| like magic, you can pipe the wacom device from /dev through SSH
| to a computer.
|
| The result was this: https://gitlab.com/afandian/pipes-and-
| paper
|
| Blog post https://blog.afandian.com/2020/10/pipes-and-paper-
| remarkable...
|
| It's kind of abandonware now, but some others have made some
| great forks!
|
| https://gitlab.com/afandian/pipes-and-paper/-/forks
|
| https://github.com/flomlo/rm2canvas
| owenfi wrote:
| This is amazing!
| [deleted]
| aerique wrote:
| I use rMAPI to push and pull stuff from the machine. Not sure
| if it works for the rm2 as well.
|
| Also, it requires storing your stuff on reMarkable's servers
| ('cloud').
|
| https://github.com/juruen/rmapi
| abawany wrote:
| I love rmapi and use it often with my rM2.
| sabauma wrote:
| I find rmapi + fzf to be the easiest way to send ebooks in
| my Calibre library to my rM2.
|
| Its probably possible to create a Calibre addon to do this,
| but its already makes syncing pretty easy.
| Jedd wrote:
| Have you looked at:
|
| https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_syncthing
|
| I don't have a remarkable, and have therefore not experimented
| with this software. But it's the approach I'd prefer if / when
| I get a device like this.
| wastholm wrote:
| I have not but it looks interesting so I will. Thanks!
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| I bought a Remarkable 2 myself, and I have to say I'm really
| happy with it. The built in e-reader was a bit mediocre, but a
| quick SSH session and a couple community scripts later and with
| just a long swipe across the screen I could access Koreader
| whenever I wanted.
| base698 wrote:
| Link?
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| I have an RM2 and use it a lot but the jagged lines bother me.
| I got the Onyx Boox and returned it, the software was just too
| clunky and did not have the paper feel, instead felt very
| plasticky
| mstipetic wrote:
| I don't understand how they put so little effort into software
| compared to hardware. They raised money recently they should be
| able to hire a decent software team, but I'm afraid they'll
| start pushing towards subscription only features now
| michaelmior wrote:
| I only have the reMarkable 1, but I've actually been pretty
| happy with the software on the device on the constant
| upgrades. What has been really disappointing is the clunky
| desktop and mobile apps and the fact that there's no Web app.
| Personally I wish they would just abandon the desktop and
| mobile apps and build a great Web app that works OK
| everywhere.
| gspr wrote:
| > but I'm afraid they'll start pushing towards subscription
| only features now
|
| Considering the hackability of the device, and how all the
| cloud services are opt-in, I don't see how that would do them
| any good.
| fouric wrote:
| "so little effort into software"? Quite the opposite, it
| seems like they've put a _lot_ of effort into the software.
| Everything "just works" and is _polished_ , unlike almost
| every other piece of software I've ever used.
|
| Don't mistake a lack of advanced features for a lack of
| software effort. reMarkable is making an intentional trade-
| off - more feature quality, less feature quantity.
|
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27516894
| Arainach wrote:
| I'm all for fewer polished features - but we don't get any
| of those.
|
| Prior to the latest updates I actively regretted my
| reMarkable 2 purchase. Now it's back to "a decent device
| that I would never recommend anyone pay full price for"
|
| Let's start with eReading: Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF
| didn't work. As such, your table of contents and index are
| worthless, you don't have quick access to footnotes, and so
| on. They only very recently finally added this in the 2.6
| update.
|
| If links don't work they must have some way to jump between
| pages easily, right? No, wrong again. Jumping to a page
| number is 3 clicks deep (pretty sure it was 4 prior to
| 1.17): Upper left corner, page overview, "Go to page". You
| then have to move from the top of the screen to the bottom
| to enter the page number and then back to the top since
| they couldn't be bothered to put an enter/OK button with
| the other buttons.
|
| Then there's the controls in general. To switch between
| writing utensils, you need the left menu. This covers your
| document content and there's no way to just scale the
| content into the remaining space. This means that to work
| on an entire document you need to be constantly opening and
| closing that menu. There's not even a way to have the
| button backgrounds be transparent so you can read what's
| behind them without interacting.
|
| Search is very slow. It takes FOREVER to index a book, and
| you're given no indication of if it's done. Instead, if I
| open a large PDF and search, I will be told that there are
| no results rather than that it hasn't finished looking yet.
| If I wait 15 seconds, things may magically appear on my
| screen unexpectedly.
|
| eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size requires
| you to wait while the entire book is rerendered (losing
| your notes in the process since they're image-based rather
| than proper annotations)
|
| This is primarily a drawing/creation device. A basic tool
| that would help here is stroke-based erasing. They have
| stroke knowledge since Undo supports that, but the eraser
| is a clumsy mess that reminds me of the worst cheap
| elementary school supplies.
|
| While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in "light
| mode" except for the settings app which is inverted into
| dark mode with no way to change it to a normal UX?
|
| Those are all off the top of my head. I have a much longer
| list of thoughts in a document somewhere. My overall point
| is that my expectations a full Android device with fancy
| editors. My expectations were an optimized focus/creation
| device, but the software lets the hardware down in a bad
| way even for their core scenarios of reading, annotating,
| and drawing.
| fouric wrote:
| > I'm all for fewer polished features - but we don't get
| any of those.
|
| I don't think that the rest of your comment substantiates
| this. You don't have any arguments that the _core
| functionality_ is lacking in some way - everything you
| say seems to be about non-core things.
|
| > Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF didn't work.
|
| Note the "didn't", and also PDF hyperlinks is not an
| "essential" feature for the purpose of the rm2, which is
| _writing and annotating_.
|
| > If links don't work they must have some way to jump
| between pages easily, right?
|
| Not core to writing and annotating. You're looking for a
| document-navigation system, which the rm2 is _not_.
|
| > Search is very slow.
|
| See previous comment about the rm2 not meant to be a
| document-navigation system.
|
| > eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size
| requires you to wait while the entire book is rerendered
| (losing your notes in the process since they're image-
| based rather than proper annotations)
|
| This might be the only valid complaint here, although
| it's still a non-essential feature. An _essential_
| feature is the ability to _take notes_ , which you can.
|
| > This is primarily a drawing/creation device.
|
| That's literally how it's marketed - "Writing, reading,
| and visualizing only".
|
| > A basic tool that would help here is stroke-based
| erasing. They have stroke knowledge since Undo supports
| that, but the eraser is a clumsy mess that reminds me of
| the worst cheap elementary school supplies.
|
| The eraser tool is perfectly functional. I use it
| continually with no problems. Could it be better? Yes,
| like almost every piece of software ever written. Is it
| "a clumsy mess"? Not even close.
|
| > While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in
| "light mode" except for the settings app which is
| inverted into dark mode with no way to change it to a
| normal UX?
|
| That's a single UX issue, among many things that they got
| right, that has little impact on the usability of the
| device.
|
| You neglected to mention how the drawing, cut/copy/paste,
| convert-to-text, eraser, templates, and almost every
| other feature "just work". You _do_ get all of those
| "polished features" - your stretch goals are not core
| functionality.
| Arainach wrote:
| >That's literally how it's marketed - "Writing, reading,
| and visualizing only".
|
| >Not core to writing and annotating. You're looking for a
| document-navigation system, which the rm2 is not.
|
| Document navigation is absolutely a core part of reading.
| When I read a book, I page around it because that's how
| books work. When I reference a book I've already read, I
| want to look in the index or the table of contents and go
| there.
|
| There are 6 things that reMarkable claims the device does
| on their homepage. "All your notes, organized and
| accessible on all devices" and "Take handwritten notes,
| read, and review documents" are two of them. Reading and
| searching are core scenarios.
| leadingthenet wrote:
| I don't personally own a reMarkable, so I have no idea if
| this is related to what you're mentioning, but version
| 2.7 does seem to have added improved navigation of the
| sort you're describing:
| https://blog.remarkable.com/software-update-2-7-small-
| steps-...
| mstipetic wrote:
| If a guy could create amazing ux improvements without
| access to code [1] and by binary patching I'd assume a vc
| funded company could also. I consider this patch to be
| essential for my sanity
|
| [1] https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| The software is fine for note taking, and reading and
| annotating PDFs, which is what I mostly use it for at work.
| The reader does however not feel set up for reading books.
| With it being fairly trivial to install Koreader however this
| turned into a non-issue to me.
| figers wrote:
| Onyx Boox Note Air Is extremely fragile. I had mine in a case in
| my backpack. Not a scratch on the screen, not a crack anywhere.
| The E-ink has crazy lines in it, not sure if it was pressure in
| the back pack but be careful. I loved the device, reading and
| writing on it was awesome but the company wanted $200 to fix it
| plus shipping both ways. Thankfully Amazon made an exception and
| I got all my money back.
| danShumway wrote:
| What's the situation with reMarkable 2's privacy? I'm interested
| in it as an extensible Linux device, but part of that would mean
| connecting it to a network to take advantage of SSH support.
|
| Is there a way completely turn off analytics so it _never_
| connects to a remote server at all without my permission? Can I
| disable updates without disconnecting it from the network? Or is
| there a replacement OS /hack that can disable any data
| collection?
|
| I get nervous around proprietary software, even if it is
| extensible. I like that I can SSH onto the device itself, I like
| a Linux base, but I want to know that I'm not going to be
| fighting with their UI layer for control in the future.
|
| I guess KoReader exists, but as far as I know from other
| e-readers KoReader doesn't actually replace anything, it just
| runs automatically after the normal OS has booted. I want the
| ability to completely disable any part of the OS that would be
| reaching out to a remote server without my permission.
| afandian wrote:
| It appears as a virtual network device via USB, so it's
| completely functional without WiFi.
| danShumway wrote:
| Sure, but part of the appeal to me is WiFi access. That's
| where things like Syncthing or using the device as a handheld
| tablet input during meetings would be very powerful.
|
| I can quarantine everything, but I don't want to quarantine
| the device, I want to be able to connect it to WiFi and take
| advantage of its networking features while trusting that it
| won't send a bunch of data somewhere.
| gpm wrote:
| > Is there a way completely turn off analytics so it never
| connects to a remote server at all without my permission?
|
| I could be wrong, but I don't think it sends any analytics. I'd
| be very surprised if it did for devices not connected to their
| cloud service.
|
| They're covered by the gdpr, and the privacy policy doesn't
| mention any... https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/36000041647...
|
| If it does you could certainly set up iptable rules to do so...
| but that would admittedly be a bit of a pain.
|
| > Can I disable updates without disconnecting it from the
| network?
|
| Yes, there's a toggle in the UI
|
| > Or is there a replacement OS/hack that can disable any data
| collection?
|
| Again, not sure if there is any data collection or even
| outgoing network traffic if you have the cloud services off.
| The hard part of a replacement OS would be controlling the
| screen, I don't think anyone has done that.
| hinkley wrote:
| "I will trim this part out."
|
| I've often wondered if they always say that, or only in 100% of
| the cases where they forgot to trim 'this part' out?
| JanisErdmanis wrote:
| I own both Remarkable and an the same size android eink tablet
| which I ordered on kickstarter. I use my remerkable tablet almost
| everywhere from reading and annotating PDFs to making excessively
| complex calculations for my PhD and sending them directly to my
| supervisour. The best part that I can just lay on the bed while I
| do so ;)
|
| I thought it would be great to read online articles as I read
| books on remarkable, check email and etc. so I ordered another
| Android eink tablet. It was a great purchasing mistake which I
| barely use today.
|
| The morale is that eink screen is very limited with it's refresh
| rate and lack of color making software as significant as
| hardware.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| I recently did a review of the RM2 vs Onyx Boox Max Lumi. I still
| own them both.
|
| https://sammorrowdrums.com/e-writers-remarkable-2-v-s
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