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ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

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Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#411

Post by inamberclad »

wenc wrote: post #262
krick wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how your comment immediately makes me want to buy it, because the description on the site with all these silly photos and such for some reason got me thinking like "looks kinda nice, but since it's obviously something very Apple-like, it will be as restrictive as it gets, I won't be able to use it without some obligatory shitty web-account and I probably even won't be able to read *.cbz comics on it, so...…

I think you hit on a good reflection there. I've half a foot in the consumer space and my intuition is that if consumer product marketing targeted their strategies at the HN crowd, they will likely have a small market share. Certain cognitive styles are over-represented in the HN comments section which, from my empirical observations, do not match that of the broader population. The glossy pictures are visually impac…

> Certain cognitive styles are over-represented in the HN comments section which, from my empirical observations, do not match that of the broader population.

I'd call it groupthink but your assessment is probably fairer.

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#412

Post by ShakataGaNai »

polemic wrote: post #329
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #305

I've been interested in eink displays and eink readers for a long time. Kindle owner since version 1. But... Is the ReMarkable really worth $500 ($400 + the $100 pencil which seems like a requirement)? For that amount you're getting a low end iPad which has greatly wider use cases. I understand that for the "paper on pencil" feel an iPad is no where near... but then again you can also just write using real paper and…

I co-work with an architect who loves his ReMarkable 1. He'll do initial sketches on it, keep meeting notes, read contract docs etc on it, and so on. It's an ideal "work support" device for what he does, vs an iPad which can do everything _if_ you find a good app, but still won't do those things as well, and is full of distractions like notifications and other anti-productivity cruft.

That makes sense. I supposed professions with lots of contracts or similar documents could benefit from "reading and note taking like paper" experience.

To be fair, the iPad is only as anti-productive as you want to make it. The default is distracting, but those notifications can easily be turned off or not installed.

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#413

Post by blisseyGo »

jbeard4 wrote: post #13

I have been very happy with my ReMarkable 1, and have ordered the ReMarkable 2.0. Hacker News might be interested in the active development community around the device: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable The device is open. It's just an embedded linux device. You can ssh into it, and run arbitrary code. The SDK is based on Qt. You can also connect a keyboard to it over a USB-on-the-go port. I have been…

they really should also use this ability to be able to ssh and develop etc in their marketing material. It might get even more users.

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#415

Post by svat »

obmelvin wrote: post #404
jron wrote: post #248

I almost impulse per-ordered the RM2 when I first read about the SD card mod here on HN. I decided to wait after hearing about the limitations as a reader and the slow software development. If you're considering the RM2 for anything other than a sketch/note pad, I highly encourage you to watch this fantastic review from My Deep Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iIAYMsugzM Full review: https://www.youtube.com/pl…

> Things as simple as font resizing are 30x slower than on a Kindle Wow, thanks, I was very interested in this for marking up documents + notes. I guess I could still use my kindle for most of my reading anyway, but the video gave me the impression the RM2 was very fluid and fast. If I'm understanding correctly, the screen's responsiveness to input is great, but the UI's responsiveness is not?

I've been using the RM1 for a few months. The screen and UI responsiveness are both fine. What is astonishingly slow is their ereader implementation. Basically, the model is something like this:

• The ReMarkable is primarily like a sheet of paper you can write on (or a paper notepad).

• This "sheet of paper" can also have a background template (like dots, a grid, or an arbitrary image), different for every page. (You can add your own images/templates onto the device with scp and editing a JSON config file.)

• When you read PDFs on it, each page (at your specified zoom level / crop region) is rasterized (reasonably quickly) into such a background image, with the result that you can write on the PDF page if you want. (These won't be "PDF annotations" in the PDF-standard's sense AFAIK, which some people complain about: it's just like writing/drawing on some image. But you can export your annotated PDF as PDF/PNG/SVG.)

• When you read EPUBs on it, the whole epub gets converted by some incredibly slow process into the equivalent of what it does for PDF (my understanding is that it's basically rasterizing each page). This means that if you're reading an EPUB (that you downloaded from the internet or transferred from your Kindle or whatever), and you do something as simple as changing the font size, you can expect it to take tens of seconds(!) even for a small 200-page book, as it's "regenerating" an image for each (resulting) page of the book. Once that is done, though (i.e. you don't change/resize font again), it's reasonably quick and straightforward to use.

So, now, I don't bother with trying to read EPUBs on the device; I convert to PDF first on my computer (where I can more quickly and interactively tweak font size, page size, etc), then read the PDF on the device. That works very well.

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#416

Post by Foxboron »

jboynyc wrote: post #15
haasted wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the correct question is probably how it competes with something like Kindle. The presentation made me fairly intrigued.

It's not an e-reader but a tablet computer. The founder of ReMarkable is (or was?) a KDE developer, so they supposedly do a lot of things right when it comes to developer experience, openness, and documentation.

> The founder of ReMarkable is (or was?) a KDE developer

The CTO is a KDE Developer and a long-time member of the Arch community.

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#417

Post by shados »

jron wrote: post #248

I almost impulse per-ordered the RM2 when I first read about the SD card mod here on HN. I decided to wait after hearing about the limitations as a reader and the slow software development. If you're considering the RM2 for anything other than a sketch/note pad, I highly encourage you to watch this fantastic review from My Deep Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iIAYMsugzM Full review: https://www.youtube.com/pl…

> It seems obvious to me that management doesn't understand the target audience for the device

> If you're considering the RM2 for anything other than a sketch/note pad

It is marketed as a sketch/note pad and that's about it. The e-reader feature is like the youtube functionality on a Switch. It's there because "lolwhynot" and little more.

I have one and I really love mine. But all I wanted was a digital notebook. If I wanted more than that I would have gotten a Surface tablet or an Ipad Pro. It's definitely expensive for what it is, but it's not really marketed as a mass market device either.

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#419

Post by jrib »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #249
owenversteeg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's miles ahead of almost any other consumer device you can buy today. I'll take it.

I think it's not as good as you think. There is a difference between "it happens to be open" and "manufacturer cares", and here it's more like the former. The experience here is in fact identical to e.g. using any device whose bootloader has been cracked. You are locked to very old kernel versions, or attempts to run a mainline kernel in various degrees of stability (or lack of). You cannot really modify the existing…

> It's in no way comparable to a some other devices (mentioned on HN too)

what sort of devices?

Re: ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

#420

Post by crooked-v »

jbeard4 wrote: post #13

I have been very happy with my ReMarkable 1, and have ordered the ReMarkable 2.0. Hacker News might be interested in the active development community around the device: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable The device is open. It's just an embedded linux device. You can ssh into it, and run arbitrary code. The SDK is based on Qt. You can also connect a keyboard to it over a USB-on-the-go port. I have been…

This reminds me that what I'd really like in an ebook reader is something that will sync a local library down from 'the cloud' in some automated way over wifi, without having to manually go in and update or import or whatever with books like everything else I've seen. ReMarkable seems like it wouldn't be practical for that for lack of enough storage for my Calibre library, though.
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