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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

#161

Post by pjerem »

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…

When I had a Remarkable, I installed KOReader on it. It transforms the e-book experience from "really poor" to "really power user".

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

#162

Post by unethical_ban »

bipson wrote: post #71
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…

E-Mail and Python notebooks? I don't think they these are the primary use cases for a "digital paper" device. What you consider an "overengineered piece" of paper might be intentional. Maybe you don't need paper - some people do.

I think that as e-ink gets better and better refresh rates, that having it as a grayscale monitor for things like textbooks/markup and browsing the web will make sense. Having an e-ink tablet to browse HN, check email and read the morning paper sounds pretty nice. I used to get the NYTimes delivered to my Kindle each morning.

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

#163

Post by vinni2 »

nosianu wrote: post #131
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.

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…

For me main use case is reading research articles annotate on it and sync it with my desktop and share it with my colleagues. Ideally I wanted a bibliography library tool like mendeley or zotero and keep all my annotations and notes synced. But that is far from possible on any e-ink tablet so far I have tried.

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

#164

Post by zaphar »

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 have a remarkable 2 as well and It's a fantastic notetaker and pdf annotation device. One benefit I didn't think about beforehand but use somewhat frequently is signing documents while working from home. Just print to pdf, copy to remarkable, sign, email back to sender. Way easier than printing, signing, scanning, and then emailing back.

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

#165

Post by abawany »

aerique wrote: post #126
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…

I use rMAPI to push and pull stuff from the machine. Not sure if it works for the rm2 as well. Also, it requires storing your stuff on reMarkable's servers ('cloud'). https://github.com/juruen/rmapi

I love rmapi and use it often with my rM2.

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

#166

Post by FlyingSnake »

I bought the Onyx Boox Note air after much deliberation. Apart from the GPL violations, I don't see any major problems in the Note air, and it's a perfect device for my needs. I can recommend it to someone who wants a all-round eInk tablet.

* Taking notes is really great, the notes app is highly customisable to personal needs. Handwriting to text is quite powerful as well.

* Searching for text in your handwritten notes is a quite cool and useful.

* You can use the Kindle Android app and it's just perfect.

* The browser is quite powerful and offers a great reading experience.

* Keyboard is surprisingly good, I like the write-to-text feature very much.

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

#167

Post by pjerem »

I loved my Remarkable but I returned it.

I was pretty ok with the "it's just note taking" paradigm. But the problem for me is that it should be "just a note taking" device but with advanced note taking features, not just "nothing more than a sheet of paper".

The number one issue for me was the poor navigation experience. Going from one page to another was a pain if they were not contiguous. This could have been solved by allowing to create "links" between pages for example. But I the end, I found myself writing everything on the current page because getting to a new page in the right place was too long.

Let apart my issue, which maybe is really personal, Remarkable is a remarkably (!) engineered experience. Particularly , the writing experience is impressive.

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

#168

Post by Jedd »

I bought a Pocketbook 912 [0] soon after it came out, around 2012. It wasn't cheap - I think around £400. It had a 9.7" screen with a resolution of 1200×825. But the CPU & memory were what you'd expect a decade ago, so the experience was quite laggy. OTOH the display was superb for reading most text books - almost native size, PDF rendering & page turning was fast enough, and zero eye-strain. It came with a pen for doing highlights and basic drawing. I still use it occasionally for distraction-free textbook reading.

In 2014 I picked up a Galaxy Note Pro 12.2" - an android(ish) device, good pen support. Slightly laggy, but the ability to sync my notes and colour drawings (in SVGs, typically) back to my computer was valuable. Samsung notoriously ceased supporting this flagship product soon after release. (They're now on my list.)

The Remarkable2 looks great, but I'm wary now. I'd want to be extremely confident about inter-op of content between my computers (Debian, mostly) and the device - in both directions - before wanting to make a long-term commitment to yet another platform.

[0] http://www.pocketbook-int.com/au/products/pocketbook-pro-912

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

#169

Post by criddell »

Grumbledour wrote: post #95
bipson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-Mail and Python notebooks? I don't think they these are the primary use cases for a "digital paper" device. What you consider an "overengineered piece" of paper might be intentional. Maybe you don't need paper - some people do.

But should a more modern, digital paper, not enhance the human intellect? Why should I not be able to jot down a math formula that the computer then solves for me? Why cant I draw a triangle and let it compute the sides? Why not write a letter to a friend and send it directly to them and also read their answer on the same device? This would be enhancing paper for me. Combining the at this point pretty natural way of…

> So what does it achieve?

Sustainability. The device isn't for everybody. The constraints are features.

Sounds like you want something more like an iPad.

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

#170

Post by abawany »

Jedd wrote: post #168

I bought a Pocketbook 912 [0] soon after it came out, around 2012. It wasn't cheap - I think around £400. It had a 9.7" screen with a resolution of 1200×825. But the CPU & memory were what you'd expect a decade ago, so the experience was quite laggy. OTOH the display was superb for reading most text books - almost native size, PDF rendering & page turning was fast enough , and zero eye-strain. It came with a pen for…

I used to have a 912 as well but its bugs were tiresome so I stopped using it. I can say that the rM2 is a very different beast from that. I didn't expect to like the rM2 and was anticipating returning it when I preordered it but now it pretty much accompanies me everywhere.
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