Review : a ReMarkable device

My 40th birthday has, horrifyingly, come and gone and the world hasn't ended. I don't have crippling arthritis or the need to constantly discuss mortgage rates, so I think I can continue to hold True Adulthood at bay for a while longer yet.

What I do have is something ubiquitously advertised on reddit : a ReMarkable 2 digital notebook. Normally the incessant advertising frequency alone would put me off, but (a) it seemed like a genuinely useful idea and (b) Shirley already knows someone who has one and likes it.

Oddly enough, I think they're almost underselling this. "No one device will transform the way you work", they say, "it's about fostering better habits". But I have to say, while it isn't perfect, it genuinely is transformative. I've read more papers since I got it than in the rest of the year combined and I've actually enjoyed doing so. For that alone I find it astonishing. 

For comparison, I had a Kindle some years ago, and while I liked it for books very much, reading PDFs on it was hopeless. On this it's a whole new experience. You can't compare the two. Likewise I have a Rocketbook digitizable notebook (you can't call it truly digital since it uses actual and paper and pen and you have to scan it manually with your phone). That's surprisingly good for what it is, but again it just isn't in the same league as the ReMarkable. Writing wasn't pleasant because of the glossy paper and too-thick marker men, and though the scan was better than I was expecting, it just wasn't good enough for easy reading. And erasing the notebook when full was downright tedious. It was a clever idea but not really a practical solution.

Whereas for the ReMarkable 2, to cut to the chase, I give it an easy 9/10. What it does well, it truly excels at. However, what's useful to me and what's important to you might be different, so as well as singing its praises I'm also going to tell you every minor niggle I wish I didn't have to contend with. There are in fact quite a lot of these, but for me at least they are so minor that they seldom if ever detract from the core experience. A big plus here is the 100-day trial period in which you can return it.

I wouldn't normally write about a product like this so soon after getting it, but because of last week's conference I've had disproportionate use out of it already. I've read and annotated a dozen papers and written 56 pages so far (journals, meetings, and random thoughts – the last post on this blog was originally written on the ReMarkable, this one was made from notes I kept while using the device). That, I think, should be more than enough to give a detailed review.

Let me start by saying that the branding for this is wrong. Badly wrong, actually. It's not the world's thinnest tablet because it's simply not a tablet*. Comparing it to a tablet is like comparing a duck to a mongoose : sure, there are some similarities, but it's a bit of an odd thing to do. No, what it is is a digital notebook. All of the more negative reviews I've come across fail to understand this, expecting it to have a web browser and suchlike whereas this is something it quite rightly deliberately avoids. You wouldn't complain your paper notebook doesn't have a built-in radio or detachable legs or allow you to communicate with horses so don't expect it from this one either. It doesn't even have a clock, nor should it. There's nothing to distract you whatsoever. You can just get on with stuff.

* Their other slogan, "paper tablet", is a bit better, but not much.

It is, in a very real sense, a metaverse product. It seamlessly merges the digital and physical worlds, and by and large succeeds brilliantly in combining the best of both. The instant auto-saving help it feel exactly like a paper notebook while the auto-sync, erasablility, and powerful editing tools (drag a box around your handwriting and you can scale, rotate and translate it – this is genuinely useful and far from a gimmick) make it, equally, fully digital. 

Every so often I would jot down my thoughts about the device using a file on the notebook itself, and then to write this post I opened that file on the PC app. Combine this with the mobile app and you essentially have access to all your notebooks all the time. There's even an extension so you can add long webpages straight to the tab... sorry, digital notebook*. What's more, the quality of the handwriting when shown on the PC/mobile is perfect, allowing for easy reading with no strain except in terms of trying to decipher my own rapid scrawl.

* EDIT : I've just started using this and I'm very impressed so far. It makes it far more convenient for reading long web articles. However at least once it's cut the end off a piece, but I haven't used it enough to say how frequently this occurs.

But beware : like upgrading from SD to HD, it's definitely something I would find very, very hard to downgrade from. There's no going back.

The Good

I must admit that the writing experience on this is, contrary to the sales pitch, not quite like writing on real paper. Not only is the tactile sensation different, but despite many other reviews claiming otherwise, there is in fact a little bit of noticeable latency between the act of writing and the the e-ink appearing. But I would stress heavily that this is not enough to cause any issues, and the latency is now something I only notice if I deliberately watch for it. We're only talking a very small fraction of a second here.

Likewise the feel of paper isn't perfect, but it's more than close enough. A critical threshold is certainly exceeded : my handwriting on this is indistinguishable from my handwriting on real paper. And this required no effort on my part to "get used to" anything. Crucially, I don't at all enjoy the physical sensation of writing on standard glossy screens, but this matte screen and specialist stylus instantly met with my approval, even if it doesn't feel as much like paper as I was expecting.

The resolution of the display is exquisite. You can zoom in and out, pan around, and the touch screen controls are intuitive. Adding more pages is done by flicking forwards on the final page and tapping a button. You can use your fingers or the stylus for most operations; I slightly prefer the latter. You can always hide the menus except for the very small, unobtrusive control icon in the top-left, so there's nothing but you and the page. The screen size is spot-on perfect : large enough to make everything readable and give you lots of space to write and draw, small enough to be easily portable. And of course there's a complete impossibility of smudging, which given how I hold my pen at a weird angle, is a big benefit for me.

I have the Marker Plus stylus which comes with an eraser on the back. I have to say I do find this of benefit. You can also tap with two fingers to undo the last continuous draw you made, but sometimes being able to have the detailed control of the physical eraser is extremely handy. I don't think it's strictly necessary but it is certainly nice to have. The marker is magnetic and snaps to the side, but it took me a while to realise the magnetic attraction was much stronger if I put it near the top of the notebook rather than midway down the side. With that, there's no worries about it falling off. You can give it a good hearty shake and the marker stays in place.

The marker itself is expensive and the nib unfortunately wears down over time, with the website saying it lasts between 3 and 7 weeks, of course depending entirely on usage. But you get 9 of these nibs provided; there's no need to ever replace the whole marker unit just the nibs. It doesn't require any charging.

A major asset in terms of the digital side of things is the organisation. As well as a one year free trial to ReMarkable's own subscription storage options, you can also integrate with others for free. I set up OneDrive and the procedure was simplicity itself, giving me access to my ~1 TB drive which is essentially inexhaustible for papers and notes. Some file types can be converted on-the-fly to PDF so you can then download them to the device itself, though very strangely this doesn't include .txt files.

In the device and its own native apps you can arrange files in a standard directory structure and also assign them an arbitrary amount of tabs, so keeping things discoverable is as easy as possible. Essentially you can start a whole new notebook for every passing thought if you really want to, with no need to worry about paper and making it far easier to search through than the Leaning Tower of Notebooks of Random Notes that's accumulated on my desk.

Similarly, the user interface is a breeze. It takes a few minutes to learn your way around and becomes second nature in no time at all. In fact on the whole design front I have to give them full marks : they've really thought about all this very carefully. If it isn't quite perfect, the small details they're implemented are invariably bigger positives than any mistakes they've made. Using it just becomes so instantly normal.

In terms of document functionality, you get about 50 page templates to choose from and a variety of pen styles. I gravitated quickly to the smallest line-separation page style and the thinnest pen. I use a thicker one for headings but that's about it. Honestly it's unlikely I'll ever use much else but it's nice that they're there. You can also add (but not name) different layers of text so you can toggle what you see, but this isn't something I've played around with yet. Nor have I tried anything more than simple diagrammatic sketches, though I don't think it's designed as a drawing tool.

Moving on, battery life is advertised as up to two weeks, and I think this is probably not far off the mark. Leaving it on standby overnight, the battery doesn't drain at all. But in a very heavy, full day of continuous use of reading papers, you might drain it in two days. Note-taking uses quite a bit less power, which I'd estimate would get you three or four days. 

Under more regular use (56 pages in a week is something I could only manage during a meeting, I'd never come close to this normally !) I think a week would be easily possible, though a full two weeks might necessitate only light use. Right now, I charged it a week ago, used it moderately for the first three or four of those days and it's still on 47%; a nasty little cold has meant I've barely touched it in the last three days. So standby time is excellent, maybe even longer than two weeks. You're unlikely to get charge anxiety unless you really have a total writing fixation-fetish, in which case you probably need to see a psychologist.

Lastly I'll repeat that the lack of features is an asset, which I mention again because I was initially skeptical about this. It seemed a bit like a minimalist gimmick deliberately avoiding the need for the designers to do any more work, but I was dead wrong about that. Having one device that does one thing really well is far superior to having one that does a billion different things with inescapable notifications. When they say it lets you focus, they aren't being lazy and they certainly aren't being pretentious.

The Bad

There's very little about this I could really say is genuinely "bad". There are two points I don't like though. First, my only point of real frustration is that pinch zoom is unresponsive with PDFs, usually taking several attempts to get it to do anything – and then it zooms in too much or too little, requiring a good deal of tweaking to get things right. A GUI slider or something would have been far easier. 

Fortunately landscape mode is an acceptable workaround in most cases (since this makes things large enough for readability) but still there's real scope for improvement here. Many PDFs come with a substantial border than means the zoom-to-width setting isn't always accurate, so better control of this would certainly be a big improvement.

Secondly, searching PDFs. You can do this but it's slower than a hibernating tortoise, which is extremely strange. There isn't a workaround for this except to use the device in combination with a PC or other device. That said, I haven't found it a major imposition, just an occasional nuisance.

The Ugly

No, there's nothing ugly about this device. It's a premium product and it shows.

But... there are plenty of minor deficiencies, stuff I thought was obviously missing or could easily be improved. In brief :

• I want a shortcut to quickly switch between pens. Reading papers I frequently need to highlight text and then add my own annotations, and using the menu is just that bit slower than it needs to be.
• While the highlighter pen can snap to text, the eraser can't do this : you have to erase a whole section of highlighted text to erase the highlights, rather than word-by-word.
• A landscape mode for the whole OS would be nice. As it is it remembers your preference per document, which is fine but makes things inconsistent.
• The PC app should default to the last directory used when uploading files, which would make things more convenient. It's always annoying to have to go down through an entire directory tree to find a file.
• I want to be able to order tabs in the tab menu alphabetically ! This is the most bizarre omission.
• The book folio cover should have been designed to also act as a stand. The keyboard folio (which I don't have) can do this, but I'm not sure if I'd benefit from this enough to make it worth forking over the really quite substantial amount of cash.
• Converting text : actually this performs better on my horrible messy scrawl than I was expecting, though I haven't used it much. Still, it'd be nice to have this option on the PC app and allow conversion of whole documents rather than one page at a time. EDIT : You can absolutely convert multiple pages all at once, my mistake.

My Verdict

Sometimes, lots of little niggles accumulate into a major annoyance. Not so here. The core of it, being able to do handwriting digitally either on empty pages or documents, is outstanding. The vast majority of the time you can just get stuff done, such that when there is any sort of interruption, it's so minor that you still come out well ahead. For me the ability to hold a PDF file at any angle and write on it however I like, with that convenient hard surface rather than the flexible printed page, is a godsend. I need to annotate academic texts to read them, and having ready access to them on multiple devices, not needing to wrestle with the printer any more.... bliss !

It's hard to guess how this would be for other people, but my suspicion is that you'd have to be really anal about handwriting to reject this on grounds of writing quality – the sort of person who insists on vinyl or magnetic tape in place of streaming. But for those of us who aren't twats, I doubt anyone would have any real issues with this for its designated purpose as a reading/writing device. Ignore anyone who says it doesn't do feature X if feature X has nothing to do with what you can do with regular paper books.

The elephant in the room is the price, which is not cheap. Not cheap at all. Would I have got it for myself anyway ? I can only say possibly yes, as a treat, and even then only thanks to the return policy (my experiences with the Rocketbook having made me wary). But would I have kept it despite the price ? Unhesitatingly : oh hell yes. It should be cheaper, but having made the plunge, I don't want to climb back out. It's lovely.