Using Two ReMarkables

It's different but gives a similarly nice feel. The surface is a little rough which makes it give a feeling not too dissimilar to that of a chalk board albeit without the chalk. Not sure if that makes sense, but is definitely worth trying if you're curious.

My Boox e-ink tablet has a split screen mode that I use regularly, but I wouldn’t use it on full page (A4/US letter) sized pdfs like journal articles as the text would be too small.

Why is it then that this concept only appears in Trek from before 2005 or so? The modern series barely show PADDs at all. No one uses them like this, and most things are holographic.

This is not in any way a commentary on technology or ergonomics. This is 100% an artifact of the show being produced in a time where multiple physical pages on a desk is the only way people knew to operate. It was the only option at the time, so they just used that same concept with a different prop. We didn't have multitasking supercomputers in our pockets when TNG was produced, we had physical books that had to be spread out on a physical surface.

Trek is not a prediction of the future, it's just a TV show.

I find mine close to useless. The pen is sometimes really inconsistent, to the point where the ink gets applied 1mm from the pen tip. Also, no canvas for pdf annotation, no split screen, no search in pdfs and notes, only tags, etc. It's strictly worse than paper for me.

It's definitely a different feel, but not bad. It feels like using a particularly smooth ballpoint on some nice heavyweight stationery. I don't find it particularly noticeable or distracting, but I also don't do much handwriting anymore. It has a pleasant amount of drag and has a very slight squishy feel, like if you're writing on a stack of two or three sheets.

My problem is that I apparently apply quite a lot of pressure when writing and the nib in the stylus wears out after a few dozen hours. Some people talk about using titanium nibs, but I'd rather burn through nibs than tear up the irreplaceable screen.

The handfeel is fantastic. It really is a wonderfully designed object.

However, the writing experience is not great. The digitizer is quite simply bad. RM knows about it and seemingly don't care. The digitizer develops random calibration problems and it becomes impossible to accurately put your pen on any specific spot. You absolutely cannot ever continue a stroke after you've lifted the pen. There is no way to recalibrate. The working theory is stray magnetization inside the digitizer, some people claim that dragging a magnet over the screen helps. It also has some nasty quantization issues. Pen strokes are not vectorised and come out inexplicably jagged and aliased.

If you are the type of person who can write quickly with very few mistakes, and without constantly looking at the page, you'd probably get good use out of the RM2. For me, I am abysmal at writing like this and the RM just gets in my way.

I do use my RM a fair bit, but for my use case, it's far less convenient than a paper notebook. I'm mostly taking research notes and diagramming things. I don't markup PDFs or take longhand meeting notes or anything.

Also, having been involved in the RM modding community, I feel pretty gross about ReMarkable the company. The originally billed this as an open, hackable linux device you can run custom software on. They almost immediately backtracked on this and removed the SDK from their website. Someone in the community has to go and individually email RM developers for a new copy of the SDK after each update. Plus the files that store your notes are in a proprietary format. The only way to get them out is to convert to a PDF on the tablet.

Generally I recommend you pass on the RM unless you know what you're in for. It's a beautiful device with horrible software and support.