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

The effects of pulling out a notepad and jotting notes are markedly different than pulling out a phone or tablet- especially in a conversation or meeting. IME a phone signals disengagement, while a notepad signals the opposite. When I pulled out my pad, I could see body language and word choices change almost immediately. If it was a positive or neutral conversation, people tended to show appreciation for my interest in what was being said. If it was a negative interaction, people started to be much more careful about what they were saying.

Now I carry an attaché case and use larger, more professional looking, notebooks. Even in the age of Zoom, I angle my camera to ensure it’s obvious I’m taking notes. Sure, it’s an extra step to digitize the important stuff, but I think it’s worth it.

I got my reMarkable2 6 months ago to sketch some infrastructure stuff and keep a TODO list. It did help a bit in organizing! U lose the papers u take notes on, but this stays longer and can be helpful

Prior to the latest updates I actively regretted my reMarkable 2 purchase. Now it's back to "a decent device that I would never recommend anyone pay full price for"

Let's start with eReading: Hyperlinks in ePub and PDF didn't work. As such, your table of contents and index are worthless, you don't have quick access to footnotes, and so on. They only very recently finally added this in the 2.6 update.

If links don't work they must have some way to jump between pages easily, right? No, wrong again. Jumping to a page number is 3 clicks deep (pretty sure it was 4 prior to 1.17): Upper left corner, page overview, "Go to page". You then have to move from the top of the screen to the bottom to enter the page number and then back to the top since they couldn't be bothered to put an enter/OK button with the other buttons.

Then there's the controls in general. To switch between writing utensils, you need the left menu. This covers your document content and there's no way to just scale the content into the remaining space. This means that to work on an entire document you need to be constantly opening and closing that menu. There's not even a way to have the button backgrounds be transparent so you can read what's behind them without interacting.

Search is very slow. It takes FOREVER to index a book, and you're given no indication of if it's done. Instead, if I open a large PDF and search, I will be told that there are no results rather than that it hasn't finished looking yet. If I wait 15 seconds, things may magically appear on my screen unexpectedly.

eBooks are slow to load, and changing text size requires you to wait while the entire book is rerendered (losing your notes in the process since they're image-based rather than proper annotations)

This is primarily a drawing/creation device. A basic tool that would help here is stroke-based erasing. They have stroke knowledge since Undo supports that, but the eraser is a clumsy mess that reminds me of the worst cheap elementary school supplies.

While we're on basic UX, why is the entire device in "light mode" except for the settings app which is inverted into dark mode with no way to change it to a normal UX?

Those are all off the top of my head. I have a much longer list of thoughts in a document somewhere. My overall point is that my expectations a full Android device with fancy editors. My expectations were an optimized focus/creation device, but the software lets the hardware down in a bad way even for their core scenarios of reading, annotating, and drawing.

For my part, all my best ideas are incredibly simple, abstract, and writing it down is both incredibly difficult and also worthless. Sometimes I doodle to work through an issue, but that takes little more than a napkin and a crayon.

All that said I really, really love eink. I could almost buy an RM2 just to support eink development.