Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper

remarkable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 702 posts

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

#611

Post by iotku »

monkeydust wrote: post #602

Been seeing a lot of FB adverts on RM 2.0 did a second take when I saw it at the top of HN! Feels like and advert but its not I guess yet the product is not live so a lot of speculation on how good or not it might be. Just strange to see this on top of HN.

The review embargo just lifted so there's some extra interest currently.

That said it was announced months ago, so the seeing it on HN the first thought on my mind was PR campaign.

To a certain extent that is the point of sites like HN, but there's always the implication that it's just something someone stumbled upon rather than an "advertisment". (I figure more often than not OP is a stakeholder of some sort whenever it involves a product for sale)

Not accusing anyone of anything, but it took a surprising amount of scrolling to have someone actually mention the deficiencies such as the reading functionality being subpar.

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

#612

Post by teekert »

krick wrote: post #191
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…

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...…

Same here, but we are a super niche market, not even worth a couple of small letter on the landing page. I learned about that a lot as early adopter of products that inevitable had to switch to address a more mainsteam market and in the process completely alienate me. Examples are Pebble (I don't care about fitness, OI care about minimalism and battery life), bunq, a fintech "bank", went from nerdy minimalism, IT company with a banking license to a comapany that that integrated Instagram and Tree saving counter into the banking app. Another, less strong, example is OnePlus who lost me after the 3.

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

#613

Post by dkarbayev »

kawera wrote: post #528
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best UI would just be a page change foot pedal. Not particularly difficult to implement and very reliable.

That's what many big-name classical pianists use, a pedal hooked to an iPad.

Why iPad though? I’ve seen a specialized electronic music sheet (seemingly based on e-ink) in some videos, I guess pages are flipped using a pedal since I didn’t notice any visible interaction with it to do so, e.g. https://youtu.be/oB-gF2Ncphg

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

#614

Post by waterhouse »

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

It's not a constant factor. This is best understood as a bug. Here's what the reviewer demonstrated: If you change the font size, then the interface locks up and you can't do anything, until the backend has generated new page images for the entire PDF—no matter how many pages there are. He showed that, while it was fast for a small document, it locked up for about 50 seconds when resizing the font on The Count of Monte Cristo (a large novel, perhaps 1200 pages). Furthermore, he said that if, during that time, you changed any of the other settings (resizing again, changing line spacing, etc.), it would take another 50 seconds, and another if you pressed two of the buttons, and so on. It is very clear that no QA person (whose reports are heeded) tested out those operations on a decent-sized novel or technical manual. (If they tried Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—not the largest book in the series—then, going by word count, it would have locked up for 20.5 seconds.)

A sane viewer app—one of which the reviewer demonstrated—would redraw the current page, then give control back to the user, while continuing to redraw other pages in the background. It's a bit tricky, because until you render the previous pages at some level, it might not be clear where the page break for the current page would be; but you could choose an arbitrary point, use that temporarily, and eventually correct it when rendering catches up.

The reviewer did show convincingly that the viewer app is very lacking in features or basic polish. (Another example: You can zoom into a page, selecting a smaller section of it to view. However, you cannot drag this view around the page; if you want to see elsewhere on the page at the same magnification, you must undo the zoom, then select a new region to zoom into.) This is odd for an e-ink device, whose homepage has a section titled "An eye-friendly reading experience: Comfortably read PDFs or ebooks for hours on end without backlight, glare, or eye strain."

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

#615

Post by TeMPOraL »

inamberclad wrote: post #411
wenc wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Groupthink isn't the right term to describe a fluid group of Internet commenters that post semi-anonymously, and only on the topics of their choosing. There's no pressure forcing a common belief system, other than self-selection.

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

#616

Post by TeMPOraL »

krick wrote: post #228
capableweb wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here last time ReMarkable came up. Saw the marketing page and really liked the hardware and expected it to be locked down, so moved on to reading the comments. Bunch of comments describing how it's open, runs linux and you can basically just ssh into it and run stuff. Made a pre-order right there and then and now waiting for it. I think we're simply such a small user-base that they don't think to include it on t…

That's why I'm saying I'm not sure about the average customer, so I'm not feeling comfortable assuming people responsible for sales strategy (who are obviously professional marketers) are bad at their job. But I seriously don't want to dismiss this thought. After all, are we "such a small user-base" that it doesn't matter? Maybe, but I don't know. We likely would be if they actually had customer base Apple has, but t…

It's not incompetence, it's most likely just resource prioritization. There's nothing in principle stopping companies (not just ReMarkable) from having a separate landing page / marketing copy targeted at the hacker audience. With a device like this, it would most likely have a positive ROI. Just not positive enough compared to other things the marketing team could be spending their time on.

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

#617

Post by mkl »

Twirrim wrote: post #580
mkl wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every screen I own is glossy, and I don't own any Apple stuff. External screens, laptops, all-in-ones, all glossy. The last matte screen I had was on a 2010 ThinkPad, and I think I had to pay extra for that. Maybe it's touch related? Every screen I own is also a touch screen (so's that old ThinkPad though), and with my physical needs I can't really consider non-touch.

> Maybe it's touch related? I got a Thinkpad T490 this year, which has a matte touch screen (I really wish it wasn't a touchscreen, my only gripe with it. I never want to interact with the laptop via touch. Never.)

It's probably pretty easy to turn the touch off, by uninstalling the driver or something. My ThinkPad developed a tendency to sometimes do that automatically, and I had to restart a certain .exe to bring it back.

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

#618

Post by TeMPOraL »

lloyddobbler wrote: post #448
throwaway_827 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure they realize what a big selling point this is. Feel free to tell them here: https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/requests/new Continually impressed with this company.

I'm impressed as well - but I do think many of us here are overestimating the size of the audience that sort of technical messaging would apply to. It being open is a big deciding factor for us on HN - but there's a much larger audience for whom it would simply dilute the messaging. (I'm guessing their product marketing team did a substantial bit of research on this before going live). I could, however, see them buil…

On the other hand, their marketing copy isn't going to win them a thousand-device order from a large company, the way satisfying a hacker who leads corporate IT can.

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

#619

Post by 8fingerlouie »

Looks like a nice device, but my main issue with it is the price. The regular price is €556, and i can get a regular laptop for that. Even at the discounted price of €399 i can get an iPad or Surface Go, all devices that has much more generalized use.

I have no doubt it's a quality product, and i guess i just don't value my handwritten notes highly enough to warrant one :)

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

#620

Post by waterhouse »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #66

But no mention and video evidence of the pen input lag and precision, which is what's supposed to set this apart from other eink display solutions. The 1 has some lag, just enough to still be a nuisance: did the 2 fix that?

A Youtuber made a Lego robot that moves a pen at a constant speed and took 480fps video of it. He says the 1 had a latency of 54ms and the 2 has its advertised 21ms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpwbVwfWIKE&t=17m53s

About precision, I'm not really sure. There's a bunch of writing footage in this video, which might have what you're looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9wudCMFWPQ&t=8m10s

Post reply on HN