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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

#251

Post by szszrk »

gspr wrote: post #112
szszrk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah, I'm on some facebook reMarkable groups and it's stunning how many people bought it without watching a single video from manufacturer. They though browser, video, dropbox/google drive/others will be available, or that it will integrate with their decade worth of notes from various services...

Those tablet e-ink devices does some of that. reMarkable is just a notepad with very simple cloud sync to their cloud.

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

#252

Post by abawany »

Jedd wrote: post #237
abawany wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest dislike is the storage: my ebook collection is closer to 20GB and I'd love to be able to put it all in the device but it's not to be. The sync story is itunes like (transfer+metadata), which I somewhat dislike, but the use of rmapi plus other mechanisms to transfer data to it (e.g. plug in via usb and then post/curl a file vs. using their somewhat silly front end directly) has made it work for me. I use th…

This is great, thank you. WRT 20GB - I'd just assumed it had a microSD slot. Your comment led me down a spiral, to find a guy who pulled the v1 device apart and soldered in socket for one. That's extra frustrating then that the electronics are already there, but the socket + hole is not. [1] WRT pen - yes, I splashed out for the 'extra good' pen for the Samsung, and was glad I did. The bundled pen was serviceable, bu…

The rM1 I think has the capability to solder in a socket but it is not clear to me that the rM2 is similarly modifiable. The low storage and the lack of support for external storage via the usb-c port really make things unnecessarily complicated. There is a rm2-pogo project that hopes to use the built-in pogo pins to add support for external accessories such as keyboard and storage but it is still in progress

I haven't checked out the remarkable-syncthing solution you mentioned in a different comment but it seems like a good idea.

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

#253

Post by LeanderK »

My girlfriend got a remarkable 2 and is really, really happy with it. We are both computer-science master students and beside the remarkable she uses an older laptop. Of course it's expensive, but if you are doing a lot of handwriting or annotating pdfs it's might be worth it. She spends most of her day using the remarkable, not her laptop. She also started using it to organise her day, it just works as good as any physical planner. There's something pleasant about writing per hand and they really nailed writing.

It probably is important that we both don't really code that much, it's only a smaller part of our studies.

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

#254

Post by paultopia »

I have a remarkable 1, and, honestly, I'm deeply disappointed in it. It'd pretty slow just in terms of hardware responsiveness, which maybe the RM2 corrects, but it also just... gets most of the little things wrong in a way that makes it feel so much worse on a day to day basis than most consumer-grade tech projects.

For example: it comes with its own cloud sync. Which is extremely slow and unreliable: if you upload a pdf from a laptop, it might show up right away, or it might show up tomorrow, there's no way to tell and no reliable way to force synchronization.

Or this: the software is super clunky. For example, there's no direct switching between documents. If you're reading a PDF and trying to take notes in a separate file (a good idea because it is also really hard to just get annotations out of a PDF), it takes a looong time to close the pdf, open the other notebook, take the note, close the notebook, and reopen the PDF again.

Honestly, the remarkable experience has soured me on the entire class of products. I really want to get that color onyx book thing, but I'm too skeptical.

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

#255

Post by selectodude »

est wrote: post #194
PaulRobinson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US (and EU, and indeed everywhere else), companies do not have as long and detailed a recent track record of IP theft.

And that's relevant with customer choice because?

Because people create IP on their tablets.

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

#256

Post by auggierose »

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.

I bought it as well and returned it. It is just too small for reading PDFs comfortably.

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

#257

Post by bm1362 »

neves wrote: post #190
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…

Is it good to read PDFs?

Frankly no, it doesn’t re-flow them so the text will often be too small. Quite a massive oversight and no one really talks about it.

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

#258

Post by eloisant »

est wrote: post #194
PaulRobinson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US (and EU, and indeed everywhere else), companies do not have as long and detailed a recent track record of IP theft.

And that's relevant with customer choice because?

Because you might be taking work-related notes on your device that you don't want to be stolen as industrial spying.

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

#259

Post by sydd »

paultopia wrote: post #254

I have a remarkable 1, and, honestly, I'm deeply disappointed in it. It'd pretty slow just in terms of hardware responsiveness, which maybe the RM2 corrects, but it also just... gets most of the little things wrong in a way that makes it feel so much worse on a day to day basis than most consumer-grade tech projects. For example: it comes with its own cloud sync. Which is extremely slow and unreliable: if you upload…

do not get a boox. First they do not publish their kernel source violating GPL, second the device constantly phones home to China and third the color display is really clunky: low contrast, washed out colors and very low DPI (around 160).

Wait a few generations until color eink tech is fleshed out.

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

#260

Post by CosmicShadow »

I'm always super intrigued by the reMarkable 2, but I think it's because it paints an image of the type of person I think it'd be cool to be, someone who can just write down notes and draw stuff with a really cool, slim device. Someone who carries around moleskines and uses them, instead of just buying so many of them in different shapes and leaving them in a drawer packed to the brim with notebooks.

The problem keeps coming back to the fact that I'm absolutely not the type of person who wants to carry that thing around everywhere and who likes or is good at hand writing or drawing. I realize I won't base all my life and processes around this one device that is also supposedly hard to get info off of easily into things like OneNote. If I was somewhere without a computer, then I wouldn't be carrying this big tablet on me. I've bought enough tablets and laptops with writable screens and MS surfaces over the years to know that I still never drew or took notes with the pen, but I still keep buying them hoping I will.

The thing is still so cool and I want it, but maybe I'll wait for version 3 or 4 and extra disposable income that will go to waste on it!

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