Using Two ReMarkables

I found it:

- oddly heavy, the Daylight is made of all plastic (body & screen) - yet it’s heavier than an iPad Air made from metal & glass.

- handwriting lag, the input lags when I use the pen is so much that it distracts me while writing a sentence. I have to concentrate to ensure it’s keeping up with each letter I write. No such lag exists with my iPad Air.

- no setup instructions or tutorial on its unique gestures. You boot it up and have to figure out how it works and getting it on WiFi

- display resolution is much worse than I was expecting.

- when using chrome, webpages render incredibly small. I’m having to constantly zoom in. There’s a setting in chrome about “desktop mode” but it made no difference.

And I also wasn’t expecting to have to sign up for a Google account to even get software updates, even from Daylight. (Maybe I don’t but that’s what the Google App Store made it seem like).

Wish I had read this review before I had bought it.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/20/24201356/daylight-compute...

* Note: I truly love the idea of Daylight, and hope they succeed. But in my mind, a considerable device improvement needs to be made to realize that vision. Until then, I’ll revert back to using my iPad Air (and now with nano-texture coming more broadly across Apple lines, Daylight is going to have that much more to overcome - because Apple is also cheaper product).

Our mileage certainly varies - I would not consider buying an iPad (I already have an iPad mini and don't want more of that), but this device I really like. It's hard to put a finger on it. I read other reviewers claiming that reading e.g. X in greyscale is less addictive, and I didn't really believe it until I tried it myself. Something is certainly different about my workflows on this device.

Reading it late at night is much more enjoyable than reading an iPad, even with the Night Shift on.

In the 13 year hiatus when there was no TV Star Trek, touch phones and tablets became normal. So PADDs were no longer futuristic, and now they're background objects a viewer doesn't even notice. In the case of specific shows, Discovery and Picard are heavily focused on action, so PADDs generally show up less frequently because there are fewer scenes in which it would be natural for them to show up. Contrast to BNW, which is more traditional Star Trek, and the characters are constantly carrying PADDs around. And LD's earlier seasons have several extended gags revolving around PADDs...

I have a Remarkable 2 for notes and working on math problem set homework to hand in as PDFs.

It’s fine. It doesn’t do anything other than record your handwriting. You can try and have it convert it to text, this works for language but fails utterly at math. I got the better pen that you can turn around to use as an eraser as using the UI to change the tool from pen to eraser and back is incredibly annoying.

I recently got an iPad to use instead mostly because I wanted one anyway, and because my handwriting is atrocious and iOS 18 pretties it up. I haven’t quite made up my mind on which one I’ll continue using. The iPad and its pen are more responsive, the fact that it improves my handwriting is a boon for the TAs, and solving some of the simpler math automatically is neat. The built in Notes app is garbage for handing in multi-page PDFs, bafflingly this is impossible, but the Goodnotes app is cheap and rather good. There’s other apps to convert handwritten math into Latex.

The Remarkable produces much smaller file sizes (I’m not sure why I care, the web app I upload homework to sure doesn’t) and the battery lasts much longer. I find replacing the pen tips very annoying and have no idea why that is needed.

I’ll probably end up using the iPad more, but I’ll guess I’ll see.