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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

#111

Post by wastholm »

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect.

The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.

I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me, are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).

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

#112

Post by gspr »

szszrk wrote: post #109
gspr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely. I just added the comment because I've had some friends who are unfamiliar with e-ink screens expecting tablet behavior.

I just refereed a research paper with complex (color!) graphics on the thing. It was an absolute breeze!

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

#113

Post by ACS_Solver »

varispeed wrote: post #65

I have reMarkable 2 and I think it is brilliant, however it has one deal breaker that is there is no encryption on the device. If you lose it, you risk your documents landing in a bad actor hands. One may say it's the same with actual paper - sure, but reMarkable 2 can store much more data than a suitcase of documents. Then I have no idea whether documents on their cloud are encrypted and who has access to it beside…

Their cloud is fully optional - you don't have to use the rM cloud, or even create an account. To me that is itself one of the killer features of the rM, it works as an offline device with local storage.

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

#115

Post by gspr »

teorema wrote: post #60

I love eink devices but got turned off by the first couple of generations because they always underdelivered with PDF display, which seemed like a central use case to me. I should be able to open a random graphics-heavy PDF and have it display perfectly (ignoring color) and in a reasonable amount of time for an eink device to be worth it to me. This has made me want to revisit them but I don't think I'd want to purch…

I understand that. I gotta say I was blown away with how well the RM2 handles complex PDFs.

Edit: As a stress test, I just opened the most complex PDF I had on my computer – http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf . I think it works really well on the RM2. The gradients in some of the fancier features look ugly, but other than that everything is quite readable, and flipping pages is quite spiffy (I know some ordinary computer PDF readers sometimes have noticable loading times for certain pages in this document).

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

#116

Post by boudin »

michaelmior wrote: post #100
codethief wrote: post #9

> Later this month I'll take a look at Supernote which already has a enthusiastic community and promises to have a rich API for 3rd parties to explore and expand. I tried the Remarkable 2 for a month but ended up returning it and ordering the Supernote A5X instead – I couldn't be happier! Its main advantages (IMO): - The Supernote acts as a regular USB mass storage device, so syncing files (w/o resorting to the cloud…

Thanks for sharing. I got the reMarkable 1 pretty early and I've been debating ordering the reMarkable 2. I've heard almost exclusively good things about it, but right now I'm happy enough with the original device. I hadn't heard of Supernote until seeing this comment, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on when I think about upgrading. I'm not sure what you mean when you say the RM2 has "pretty much none" w…

I don't use those features but currently you can sync it using Ratta's own cloud (which is optional by the way, no obligation to create an account), dropbox or email. Otherwise you can copy files via USB. There's no APIs that i know off and currently the device is not hackable so there's no alternative software.

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

#117

Post by dominotw »

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…

I bought this last year during pandemic. My reading time has grown exponentially, i couldn't update sure . I like that i can use play store apps so i use kindle, libby, pocket and oreilly.

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

#118

Post by jessmartin »

vinni2 wrote: post #83
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 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.

That's interesting, because I read PDFs (and annotate) every single day. Pinch-to-zoom works great, and it's the best PDF reader I've experienced. Can't recommend highly enough.

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

#119

Post by lovelyviking »

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…

>By the way, does the hardware allow connecting an external keyboard?

I know for sure that RM1 hardware does allow you to connect external keyboard becase I have done it.

I can't tell about RM2 as I do not have it.

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

#120

Post by gspr »

wastholm wrote: post #111

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect. The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once…

> the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).

Are you aware of the web interface? It's only available over USB, and requires flipping a switch in the settings. That interface is so simple that I imagine that an scp replacement is just an novice-level curl invocation away.

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