In January, I spent all day every day for a week with a reMarkable. The plan: sit on the beach; read; write; think. Being able to use my whole library outside in the sand—with digital ink!—was so freeing.
Alas it has many flaws, so I returned it…but the price just dropped 45%!
Alas it has many flaws, so I returned it…but the price just dropped 45%!
It's now $279 for a refurb first-gen model. Even with rough edges, I'm happy with that price to enable me to do this type of work outside, in sandy environments where I might not like to bring books / my nice notebook. remarkable.com/store/remarkab…
Some reflections on the device:
Some reflections on the device:
The hardware is solid. Good materials; light; good industrial design; decent battery. The stylus is fine. The inking is tolerable.
The software's pretty miserable. A new model is shipping this summer, but apparently with the same software—which is where the problems are.
The software's pretty miserable. A new model is shipping this summer, but apparently with the same software—which is where the problems are.
The main issue is that the device doesn't take itself seriously as either a digital reader or a digital notebook, at the book level. It takes the micro, page level quite seriously. One-page sketching, drafting, etc—that's all fine. But the levels above that are basically absent.
If you sketch or hand-write ideas across dozens of pages, good luck finding or arranging them or doing basically anything with them after the fact. Few real affordances.
It's the same with reading—the fixation is on the single page you're looking at. Everything else is onerous.
It's the same with reading—the fixation is on the single page you're looking at. Everything else is onerous.
Stepping up a level from that, to a broader professional workflow, it's extremely unserious. A device like this doesn't exist in isolation—it wants to ingest documents from some living source and produce work to be consumed by other tools. It's truly awful at this.
The Kindle is also bad at all these things. Kindle has *slightly* better high-level affordances as an e-reader. But what makes the reMarkable *so much* better than the Kindle is that you can read books—in their original layout—as PDFs (which is good bc rM's EPUB reader is awful).
Here's that photo again. This is the actual, professionally-typeset page from the original print edition! I can write in the margins! In fact, the margin's bigger than in the print book (& I can make it bigger)!
EPUBs are a terrible reading experience. Give me typesetting!
EPUBs are a terrible reading experience. Give me typesetting!
Since the hardware's solid, perhaps the software flaws will improve. They sure have more velocity than the Kindle! But beyond the flaws, the real bummer for me is a deep lack of imagination in the software design. It takes the metaphor too literally. It so just wants to be paper.
But this thing's *not* paper! In a 2014 meeting on the iOS redesign, Jony said (paraphrasing): "Why put pictures of screws attaching that button to its housing? It's made of pixels! It's not going to fall off! We can do whatever we want!"
rM forgets that it's made of pixels.
rM forgets that it's made of pixels.
So, but anyway: the high order bit is that you can have a stack of books and your nice notebook, in the sand/dirt/etc, without squinting hopelessly at an LCD. Not many other options for that! Working outside is wonderful.
