BIT-101
Bill Gates touched my MacBook Pro
Well, I finally did it. I went and got myself a Remarkable 2 eInk tablet.
I’m a big fan of eInk. I got my first Kindle in 2009 and have been doing most of my reading on eInk tablets ever since. After a few Kindles I wanted something a bit larger and was really interested in writing, drawing, sketching on eInk. So I got a Onyx Boox Nova tablet. That device was around 8" and included a stylus for drawing. A bit later I wanted something larger and got on Onyx Boox Note Air - a 10.3" tablet with drawing capabilities. I loved that but silly me, I wanted something a bit more portable - pocket sized, so got an Onyx Boox Poke 3. This had the same screen size as the Kindle Paperwhite I had just before that, but much smaller bezels, so utterly pocketable. Sadly, it was so pocketable, that I sat on it and cracked the screen. I replaced it with an Onyx Boox Go 6, which is essentially the same device with a new name.
The Note Air is great for reading PDFs or books with code or lots of diagrams. I’ll still use it often for that, but most of my day to day reading is done on the smaller Go 6. The writing/drawing capabilities of the Note Air are pretty good. I’ve sketched out a ton of ideas, often when I’m doing some creative coding or trying to work out some trig problem. I did try and use it a few times for organization, general note taking etc. But it started to show its weaknesses there. I’d say it’s a great ebook reader with an OK drawing/sketching ui.
I watched the coming of the Remarkable with some interest but never saw it as compelling enough to take the plunge. Although it can display PDFs and epub books, it doesn’t have many advanced ebook reading functionality. It’s bare bones in that area and doesn’t have a ton of storage, so I was happy with my Onyx devices. It seems like the drawing/writing aspect was really good though. But would the upgrade be worth the price? Did I want an eInk device as my note taking and organization device? It wasn’t a stunning success on the Note Air, so I wasn’t sure.
But then more and more people I knew got Remarkables and raved about them. Finally a good friend / coworker got one a few weeks ago and it really got me looking deeper. I read a lot and watched a lot of videos and decided it wasn’t for me.
But I kept thinking about it.
Then read some more and watched some more and bought one. It arrived earlier this week.
I knew I wanted to go all in on the organization aspect of the Remarkable and after digging around, I purchased a customizable PDF workbook from On:Planners. I got the “Ultimate Organizer for Remarkable”. It wasn’t all that expensive, and the cool thing is that you can customize the hell out of it. Which pages to you want to show for each year, quarter, month, week and day? A whole bunch of other templates and layouts you can add on to the end of it. When you’re done planning your planner, you export the PDF. Don’t like it? Go back to the config page and change it and export again, unlimited times.
I created the planner I want and although it is designed for the Remarkable, it fit well on my Note Air. So I made two copies, one for work and one for personal and started using them there for a few days while waiting for my Remarkable 2 to ship.
I hate to sound dramatic, but it’s been kind of life changing. I’ve gotten in the habit of writing everything down and have realized how often I have a thought and don’t write it down and five minutes (OK, one minute) later I’m like, “what was that thought?”
Now I’m trying to catch those as they come up. If my Remarkable is not at hand, I try to capture it some other way. I was using Google assistant voice recognition to make notes, but I told it I wanted to “buy dental floss” and “charge my Garmin (running watch)” and it made notes to “eye dental plus” and “George Gorman”. No lie. I wonder if they’ve dumbed down the original assistant so they could push people to Gemini. I don’t remember it being that bad. Anyway, I started carrying a small paper notebook and Space Pen in my pocket if I’m out and about, just for capturing stuff.
Capturing all of those things I want to do and having them in a good, easily navigable system has been huge in improving my focus and productivity - both at work and personally.
I started taking a lot of notes. Like in meetings. After doing this all week I realized something - notes are not super useful for the future. How often does anyone really go back and read old meeting notes? But they are super useful in the present, helping me to stay focused and more fully understand what’s going on. If I don’t know what to write about something that was said, I find I usually don’t understand it and I can clarify it then and there. And the act of writing it helps me remember it better even if I never look at the notes.
Oh yeah, that’s what this is about. So I was doing all this organization and note taking all week - first on the Note Air, and then on the Remarkable.
I have to say… it was night and day. The Note Air is fine, but very klunky in terms of navigation. PDF workbooks (that you write on) are in one part of the device, but notes, which can have layers and a template, live in another part of the device. And the UI for drawing/writing is a quite a bit different in the two apps, so it gets confusing. Palm rejection is not great, so I was always accidentally navigating away from where I was on the Note Air - super annoying.
Pretty much all of those complaints went away on the Remarkable. All docs, whether notes or PDFs just live in the pseudo-file-system. And you get access to recents and favorites as well, so swapping to some other document you want is generally pretty easy.Writing and palm rejection is fantastic.
Now every review you will see on the Remarkable gushes about how it “feels just like paper!” and “it even sounds like paper (holds microphone up to the tablet and writes, so you can hear the scratchy sounds)”. I’m surprised nobody is reporting it smells like paper. Whatever. The pen and screen are good and it’s not like you’re writing on glass, so that’s nice. I could care less what it sounds like.
Some of these are minor, some more serious.
I mean that from a cost perspective mostly. Yes, it has a nice build and good components, but it’s freaking expensive. Especially considering how much of a single use device it is. I’m not complaining about the single use aspect. I like that, but it costs a LOT for a single use device.
Not just the device is expensive. The cases, OMG. The case with a keyboard in it is like $200. The leather one is like $170. The cloth case (CLOTH!!!) is like $130. WTH? They are nice cases. The device snaps into them solidly with a magnet. But $130 for a piece of cloth wrapped around a piece of cardboard with a magnet in it?
As it is, I bit the bullet and got the leather case and upgraded pen. Spent a lot more than I should have, but YOLO.
I’m not talking about fancy bells and whistles, but things that just surprised me.
None of the cases support wake/sleep on open/close
There’s no light on the device (Remarkable 2, that is. The newer color Paper Pro version does have one).
Pretty small storage (8 GB) and no way to upgrade.
None of these are deal breakers, but it really surprised me that a device in such a premium price range would skip all these things.
I have no interest in the keyboard case, but it’s the only supported way to use a keyboard with the device. There’s no Bluetooth and USB keyboards are not recognized.
Since the Remarkable runs on Linux, smart people have written programs to make using USB keyboards possible, but you gotta be a bit tech savvy. Supporting external keyboards is something they easily could have made possible, but they chose not to in order to sell their own add on.
I know I already said that, but there’s more. Templates. The Remarkable comes with a good handful of templates for various grids, lines, planners, etc. If you sign up for the paid Connect service $29 per year, you get access to a bunch more.
But there is no supported way to add your own templates. No supported way. Again, if you have the know how to SSH into the device, navigate a Linux file system on the command line and edit a JSON file, adding your own templates is a piece of cake. And if you do all that, your custom templates will get wiped out when you update the device, so be prepared to set up a way to copy them over again.
I’ve already made three custom templates that I use every day.
Yup, I said it again. This time for the syncing system. If you register your device, it will store all your documents in the cloud. With a caveat. Any backed up document that hasn’t been edited in a certain amount of time (50 days I think) will be removed. It won’t be removed from your device, but it will no longer get backed up. Of course, you can overcome this limitation by signing up for the Connect service ($29 per year).
You can also back up docs to Google Drive, One Note, Dropbox. But I think this just backs them up as PDFs, not the editable native format. I don’t plan to go that route, so I don’t know the details for sure.
I’d kind of rather they just made the backup service paid. You pay, we back up. You don’t, we don’t. But to do that, they’d have to offer some kind of local backup functionality. That would be nice, honestly.
Instead, if you don’t pay for Connect you get a confusing half-assed free backup service where you never know what’s backed up and what isn’t. That is horrible.
Once again, if you have some Linux experience, it’s super easy to SSH in to the device and find out where the docs are. I set up an rsync script that copies them to my laptop. Piece of cake.
Again, the complaints about missing basic features (auto sleep/wake, light, storage) are really more surprises. I can live without them.
The lock in stuff is more concerning. The fact that they explicitly made simple things “impossible” (local backup, custom templates, external keyboard) in order to sell exclusive services and addons is very disappointing. For the premium price they are charging for the device, they should make these things possible to someone who is not a complete Linux nerd. It makes me question the company’s attitude towards its customers and gives me concern over what they will lock down next.
Luckily, I am a Linux nerd! So I can overcome all of these, I have my custom templates and local backup. I don’t need a keyboard but if I change my mind, I can hack one in. Honestly, once you dive into the Linux aspect, you realize it’s a great hacker device!
So, in spite of sounding super negative in all of the above, I’m happy I got the the Remarkable. No buyer regret. It’s a keeper.
In short, I love the device itself but I question some of the decisions of the company that made it.
I’ll probably post occasional tips or tricks I discover. Anything that’s not already been mentioned by a hundred other Remarkable users.
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