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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

#131

Post by nosianu »

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.

As others have said, pinch to zoom works now.

Although that only helps to zoom in to one spot, if I were to try using that to read a page where the font is too small, having to shift the page left and right while zoomed, it would be a nightmare to read a document.

My gripe is I cannot switch the device to show a PDF in landscape mode. Then at least pretty much all documents' fonts would be large enough, if I use the height of the device for the width of the PDF. Then I would only have to scroll down and only after reading half a page. That would work well, scrolling left-right-left-right-.... while zoomed in does not, unless the page has two columns of text so that I don't have to scroll right-left-....

I use my RM2 mostly as epub reader. For the price - I got the preorder discount - it was the same or even lower as other pure readers of a similar size.

The software does have some weaknesses, for example sometimes I have to edit the epubs and remove some CSS background color because it ends up black on dark gray (unreadable of course), or it has set defaults for font, line height and such settings and I cannot set new defaults so I end up setting those for each and every document I sync to it anew. Still, it's acceptable for me, it's just a few (now muscle memory) clicks. To sync I sometimes have to start the Windows app to which I added a document a second time before it uploads it to the cloud server. That too now is a muscle-memory action. I hope they fix it some day but it's not a deal breaker.

I did a bit of writing and that just works and feels very good too. Other than the base use cases the software is very barebone. As others have pointed out, that's a goal. The device does everything I expect from it, which is just some basic writing and the epub reading. I can send webpages to the device (while it's online) by clicking an extension icon in the browser, which I do for RoyalRoad chapters, for example. WebToEpub creates epub files for entire Webnovels, which have to be uploaded using the Windows app though.

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

#132

Post by wastholm »

gspr wrote: post #120
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.

Yes, but the "only over USB" thing is unfortunate so I find myself mostly using the bundled cloud service, which is usually something I try to avoid relying on. Some sort of peer-to-peer sync like Syncthing would be great.

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

#133

Post by gpm »

freeqaz wrote: post #128
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…

You can actually SCP into the device without any modification. It's under the Copyright section of the device. It'll show you the default SSH password for your device and then you can drop files in there. :)

You can, but getting the reader to pick up a new pdf involves

- Setting up a bit of metadata

- Restarting the system service

it's not quite as simple as `scp file remarkable:/folder`

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

#134

Post by wastholm »

freeqaz wrote: post #128
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…

You can actually SCP into the device without any modification. It's under the Copyright section of the device. It'll show you the default SSH password for your device and then you can drop files in there. :)

Sure, you can SCP all the files you want but even if they're PDFs or EPUBs they won't show up in the interface. (I can't remember if I actually tried this or if I just read it somewhere. Maybe it's worth a shot.)

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

#135

Post by Teknoman117 »

With how hackable the remarkables have been (u/rmhacks on Reddit even booted straight Debian on them), I'm somewhat surprised there hasn't been an effort to completely replace the stock firmware with a tailored replacement.

Maybe that should be my side project...

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

#136

Post by michaelmior »

boudin wrote: post #116
michaelmior wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks! Syncing via Dropbox would not be my first choice, but probably sufficient for my use case. I'll definitely have to keep an eye on this :)

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

#137

Post by _ph_ »

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…

Actually you can. The IP address is shown at the bottom of the copyright notice, you can ssh into the device and once your have put your ssh keys onto it, just scp onto it (the ip changes on reboot). Unfortunately, you cannot just copy the documents, but you have to bundle them with some meta data, it is pretty trivial to construct, I made a small script, will try to share it at some time.

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

#138

Post by JeremyNT »

I have a similar but older device, the Likebook Mars.

These no-name Chinese Android e-ink tablets are actually really great devices, when it comes to hardware. Where they fail of course is the questionable software. I find the Likebook actually works well enough, but I'm sure it's got untold security issues that prevent it from being useful for anything serious.

I don't really understand why there really aren't any reputable companies in the Android e-ink tablet space, and I also don't understand why Google themselves seem to have absolutely no interest in Android for this use case. An e-ink Pixel tablet seems like it would be a real win.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by occamschainsaw »

jrimbault wrote: post #74

Musicians, are there any tablet you use, recommend, for partitions (sheet music) ? Someone I know uses a iPad Pro, 13" seems like a good size to get the approximate good size. But it's also very expensive for just diplaying partitions.

There are "specialized" dual screen eink tablets for sheet music, but they are extremely expensive(~$2000)!

https://www.padformusician.com/en/products/19-21-padmu-3-lum...

https://www.gvidomusic.com

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