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The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

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Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#101

Post by gdubya »

robinsoh wrote: post #47
oblio wrote: post #6

I wonder which will happen faster: A) classic displays (LCD/OLED/Mini-LED/Micro-LEDs) reaching a point where the quality and power consumption are so low as to be indistinguishable from paper B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc. Maybe someone who's an expert in display tech can chime in? My money's on A) since so much is invested in it.

I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen. Lets start with B. > B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc. There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide. E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color a…

TL;DR: no, because physics! :)

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#102

Post by squarefoot »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #82

I want to switch fully to digital magazines (as PDFs or via the publishers apps), but I can't find the right hardware to do this. I've worked out that for almost 100% scaling of a magazine PDF, I need about a 13" screen, in 4:3 ratio (or thereabouts). 16:9 ratio is just too tall and thin. e-ink devices seem too expensive for this single use-case, as does the iPad Pro, which although ideal is massive overkill. I've ev…

The RPi boards aren't the best choice for low current consumption, even other competing but similar ARM boards are better suited for that use. However, the main processor is just one of the power hungry devices: a LED screen needs its backlight on to be read, while an e-paper screens don't, and their power consumption falls to zero when the user is reading a still image, which also allows the processors to enter in extremely low power sleep modes. Making a reader with LCD/LED displays in my opinion is doable, but tuning the power consumption to save as much power as possible will require a lot of effort, and would never compare to e-readers anyway. However, if one accepts a heavier and more thick device, then yes, it's definitely doable, and could also become a better platform for other uses too.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#103

Post by marvindanig »

Grumbledour wrote: post #43

I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device. Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now. Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technica…

> Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now.

It was pretty much DOA for me. Over the years I have learned/trained my hand to keep away from pen and paper. Well, mostly. Asking the same limb to now go back into taking notes by hand or drawing free-hand is a no-go for me. I learned this the hard way. And yes, laggy software makes it worse.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#104

Post by asdwerwasdf »

bjornjajayaja wrote: post #50
Tho85 wrote: post #14

I bought the Onyx Boox Note Air some months ago, and I must say that I'm really happy with it. Screen refresh is good, there's almost no ghosting in default mode, and refresh rates are acceptable. There are only two downsides about it: The vendor does not respect FOSS and does not publish the sources for their modified Linux kernel, and the device constantly phones home to China. However, the device can be rooted eas…

If it phones home to China count me out. I’ll go for the reMarkable tyvm I can just see me working on a brilliant invention (one can dream , right?) and putting my notes into the note boox, only to realize it gets patented before me by a Chinese company.

please get over yourself

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#105

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Grumbledour wrote: post #43

I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device. Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now. Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technica…

I can tell you my wife absolutely loves her Remarkable 2. I kinda want one myself now, but am not sure I can justify the cost for myself because my technology usage is different.

In her case, the ereader functionality is secondary. She's big on writing in notebooks and the Remarkable's experience there justifies the cost. It's really a device for writing, not reading.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#106

Post by szszrk »

chrisweekly wrote: post #70

I'm really glad I bought my ReMarkable2 (and Marker "Plus"), as it suits my use case extremely well: replacing stacks of 8.5x11" graph notepads, while adding digitization / sync, undo/redo, select/cut/paste/resize/move, (modest) pan/zoom, etc. Battery life and form factor are great. The writing UX is really something: low-latency, ~perfect hand detection, and the "feel" of writing. Yeah, the software's mediocre, but…

I'm using ReMarkable 2 as well and am happy with it, but if I would just wait for other devices to come up I'd consider boox nova or something like that for their completely different (and better) text convertion and so on.

But still - the device is quite awesome and I tough myself some drawing. Use it all the time to prototype diagrams and show architecture. Love it that I can draw some weird system connections on a diagram, copy and paste, and change some parts. Then I send a PDF and use it as a flip-book on zoom cals :)

Opensource tweaks are pretty good now. Some are actually obsolete as ReMarkable did nice improvements to zoom and document links. But most tweaks support RM2 already.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#107

Post by gspr »

I'm a very happy ReMarkable 2 owner. I only wish it had been available many years ago: maaaan this thing would have saved me lugging around (and losing!) a gazillion duplicates of papers with different sets of notes on them during my PhD. I'm an incredibly disorganized person, and the RM2 has been an absolute godsend for me.

Positives:

* Build quality feels great.

* Screen is super responsive when writing. And responsive enough when flipping pages (although I am not familiar with the state of the art ebook readers).

* Pen feels really good against the surface. After one day of getting used to it, it started feeling as natural as paper for me.

* Hacker friendly: Tick a box under "settings" and it gives you the root password, and you just plug in a USB cable and SSH in as you please. Inside is a pretty standard Busybox-based Linux. All the cloud gizmos are optional. See also https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

* Eternal battery life and perfect viewing angles and everything else you'd expect from this kind of screen.

Negatives:

* I would have like the screen to be just a liiiittle bit bigger. Some papers on A4 paper with smaller fonts cause me to squint a little unless I zoom in to crop out the margins (and if the margins aren't the same on each page, that's annoying).

* The upselling price of the nice carrying cases and the "fancy" pen are a bit ridiculous. Thankfully, the fancy pen isn't really that useful to me, because I prefer the fill-erase mode anyway.

* I often accidentally hit the power on button when carrying the thing.

* I know they're trying to minimize physical buttons, but I would personally have loved a physical button (preferably on the pen!) to flip into (fill-)erase mode.

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#108

Post by newhouseb »

dbingham wrote: post #88
m-p-3 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the reMarkable could integrate well with other productivity tools, I'd probably ask my employer for one. Being able to read my emails, manage my calendar, read my RSS feeds, access my documents from Google Drive and optionally annotate them (a copy of it in PDF form) would be what I'd have in mind to justify buying one.

Personally, I really wish the Remarkable 2 would integrate with O'Reilly's new learning platform. I love having access to just about every tech book ever written, but I hate reading on a screen. The Remarkable is the perfect form factor for displaying tech books and if I could get the O'Reilly app on the Remarkable and read from their library on it... that would be enough to push me over the edge to get one. Hell, if…

You can do this on a Boox android-based e-ink tablet, which I’ve done and generally works well (after initial setup fiddling with the color to grayscale conversion)

Re: The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air

#109

Post by szszrk »

gspr wrote: post #97
vinni2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Remarkable 2 and returned it sadly. It does one thing very well which is writing. But not a great tool for reading PDFs. When I figured pinch to zoom was not possible that was it for me. It’s a really polished tool for wiring but they have a lot of room to improve for reading experience.

Pinch zoom is available in PDFs now. I'm on 2.7, but I believe it was added in 2.6. It works really well. Of course it's far slower than on a normal tablet due to the e-ink screen, but it's definitely fine for me.

I think it's actually impressive speed-wise. Not a real tablet speed but in my case even large, graphics heavy documents work quite well.

I'm surprised they pulled this one off.

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