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The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

gizmodo.com

21–30 of 259 posts

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#21

It looks promising, I hope it will be the begin of a new era of gadgets with less cognitive load... Does anyone know whether the software is user friendly? E.g. cloud integration, doesn't require to install shitty software, can email documents, etc... Is it hacker friendly? And perhaps write a small app for it (terminal viewer). I wish I could try it in Europe (Germany, Spain or France...)

I want the opposite. No cloud dependencies.

Always-connected is a plague on modern computing that has ruined the experience for anyone with slow computers and/or unreliable networks. If you proposed a 3MB web page with 300ms API calls for every action and called that a replacement for an app for anyone with an unreliable/heavily metered connection you would be laughed out of the room. Yet that's the status quo of 'modern stacks'.

It's eye-opening how useless a $1000 smartphone is in the middle of the outback, in the Yukon, etc. We've regressed to dumb terminals with the cost of decentralized computers.

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#23

Nice. I'd like to see e-ink continue to develop. What I want is an e-ink laptop with simple but good word processing, coding, text-mostly browsing, emails and such. I like my reader. It doesn't feel like "device" and I'm much more relaxed using it. Im on my third one and all three were on airplane mode since the day I bought them. Reading on tablet/phone triggers my hyperactive "device mode". Checking emails, hn, tin…

Dasung and Boox are working on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj2Lvuc28k0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pw-oCItgx8

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#24
I had a CrossPad twenty years ago. And it feels like this device has improved extremely little from it. The CrossPad was recording what you wrote in a notepad placed on top of it, it had a little radio in the pen, and later you could download what you did, if I remember, in a vector format so it was better than a scanner. The ReMarkable on the other hand, records what you are writing on a screen and later you can download what you did because it seems the device is not capable of doing a thing with it.

In twenty years, we got... nowhere. Now you can wipe the writing surface with a button press instead of turning a page. Twenty. years.

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#27
Paper is just one of those things where everyone thinks they know what they want to use instead, but who really knows! Maybe what we all want is smart glasses to record and transcribe everything we write onto physical paper / surfaces. I can also see the appeal of a device that facilitates both writing and reading, but the issue is that computers (desktops / laptops) are already so damn good at this.

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#28

It looks promising, I hope it will be the begin of a new era of gadgets with less cognitive load... Does anyone know whether the software is user friendly? E.g. cloud integration, doesn't require to install shitty software, can email documents, etc... Is it hacker friendly? And perhaps write a small app for it (terminal viewer). I wish I could try it in Europe (Germany, Spain or France...)

> Does anyone know whether the software is user friendly? E.g. cloud integration, doesn't require to install shitty software, can email documents, etc...

You need to install a Qt desktop app for the cloud integration or its equivalent mobile version.

There are however some projects out there already that are working on alternatives for the cloud integration such as this one [0].

[0] https://github.com/juruen/rmapi

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#29

Nice. I'd like to see e-ink continue to develop. What I want is an e-ink laptop with simple but good word processing, coding, text-mostly browsing, emails and such. I like my reader. It doesn't feel like "device" and I'm much more relaxed using it. Im on my third one and all three were on airplane mode since the day I bought them. Reading on tablet/phone triggers my hyperactive "device mode". Checking emails, hn, tin…

Feels like Emacs would be perfect for e-ink since by default it doesn't really do any scrolling or "dynamic"/moving-across-screen stuff

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#30
I have this device, and for hackers, this review misses some stuff:

* the company behind it is based in norway, so you can be pretty sure the techies got treated well

* they abide by the GPL very well

* by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local

* I really hope they start a good opensource community program. There are already efforts underway for hacking on this, and in theory making custom applications for this could be very fun

* last I saw, some of the developers are active on reddit and HN, so I hope they comment on the last point

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