ReMarkable Paper Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#101

Post by diggan » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #54

What does the ReMarkable really excel at? You can make notes, but the software is not that great from what I've seen. It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important. You can read PDFs but typing notes is much faster on a desktop/laptop, and for nontechnical books a kindle is much better form factor. You can use it to draw, but e-ink is inferior to a wacom tablet or iPad pro. e-ink i…

> What does the ReMarkable really excel at?

Writing notes with a pencil. I think they make this pretty clear. Anything outside of that is either a bonus or out of scope for the device.

> It doesn't have end-to-end encryption so I wouldn't use it for anything important

Don't use the cloud sync and instead manually sync things between your own hardware, encrypt at rest if you feel like it.

> e-ink is great in bright environments [...] And who is going to use their ReMarkable at the beach?

Living in a country with lots of sunlight and as a person who sometimes visits the beach, this is exactly what I want.

One of the main variables I look at when I buy laptops is "How well can I read from the display when I'm in sunlight?", I'm sure I cannot be the only one who likes to sit outside with my computer, or have windows that let in sunlight.

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#102

Post by lawlorino » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

I noticed when reading through user reviews for the remarkable 2 that I can find several that are pretty critical of the product, but the rating of the reviewer is apparently 5 stars. https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2#user-reviews

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#103

Post by Rinzler89 » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

Almondsetat wrote: post #81

Rinzler89 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like something some Chinese company can put out at much cheaper price, just a barebones large e-ink tablet, for hackers and tinkerers, with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription, where they just supply the HW and the community on GitHub builds the SW for it, a-la RPi.

The entire point of these devices is the tailored software experience, I don't know where your suggestion comes from

It comes from the fact that I'm tired of subscriptions, and some SW being "tailored made" is not always synonymous with very high quality. Community developed FOSS SW can sometimes be better quality and more functional than commercial SW.

For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.

Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#104

Post by diggan » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

vimsee wrote: post #97

I want to challenge the idea that drawing/writing on what feels like paper is subpar compared to a surface that have the pencil glide a bit more. I always thought writing on paper is something we have to deal with because paper is.. well, the physical medium we always used because it is cheap to manufacture.

I guess it's a bit like putting lemon on fish, in the beginning we did so for a purpose but after a while people just got used to it and now it's a established thing.

Similarly, we're so used to feeling at least a tiny bit of resistance when writing that when it isn't there, things feels "greasy" or unnatural.

I personally agree with that it feels nicer with a bit of contrast compared to sliding around. Drawing on a Wacom tablet gives me a lot better results than drawing on an iPad, even when I get to see the lines where I draw it with an iPad and with the Wacom that drawing appears on the monitor instead at on the tablet.

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#105

Post by danbruc » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

kotaKat wrote: post #88

Loving the dark pattern that it "starts at $579" and then the 'buy now' page tries to default you to adding on additional options that bump that up to over $700...

Two big buttons to choose one of the folios and a small radio button below for no folio. And the Type Folio is + 249 € but also Save up to 49 € with bundle, so it actually "only" costs 200 €. Why would you even do this, make it appear more expensive then it is and on top of that confuse me, is selecting a folio already the bundle or can I somewhere buy a bundle that saves 49 € instead?

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#106

Post by estensen » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #25

ABS wrote: post #2

looks great and, at the same time, it seems they didn't address the single biggest problem I (and many, many, many other people) reported over the years :-( I even wrote about it here on HN in 2021 and nothing has really changed on that front. I have a Remarkable 2 and the device is great, software is improving as well and taking notes is a joy BUT finding those notes later on is next to impossible. OCR is very bad a…

It's funny, I would have thought that OCR on handwriting on a tablet would be great, because they can capture each individual stroke, rather than just the final pixelated product. In other words, because you're witnessing it being written, there's a lot more information. In fact I wouldn't even call it OCR because it's not "optical", but rather "stroke" -- SCR? Is that something that exists? Is that what the tablet t…

In research this is called Online Handwriting Recognition

reMarkable does Online Handwriting Recognition with MyScript running in the cloud, not on the tablet https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#107

Post by jonahbenton » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

kotaKat wrote: post #88

Loving the dark pattern that it "starts at $579" and then the 'buy now' page tries to default you to adding on additional options that bump that up to over $700...

A big issue is that it requires a new pen. The earlier pens are not compatible.

I use a 3rd party pen with the RM2, much better ergonomics, but not clear what now will work.

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#108

Post by _ph_ » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

A highly interesting release. I love my remarkable2 as a note-taking device. I also own a Kindle and an iPad, so reading books or running apps isn't my requirement. I only need something to take notes and that the remarkable does very well. Funny though, that color wasn't the most missing feature. But it is very intriguing that it seems to have the first full-resolution color displays, with the color being part of the eInk pixels. From a practical side, the additional screen space probably is the biggest feature to me. I would hope for some more software improvements, like a few more drawing tools, especially as the colors make that even more appealing. Also, I would like to have an image slide show and of course an official option to customize the sleeping/off display images.

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#109

Post by BadHumans » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

antimoney wrote: post #75

Rinzler89 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like something some Chinese company can put out at much cheaper price, just a barebones large e-ink tablet, for hackers and tinkerers, with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription, where they just supply the HW and the community on GitHub builds the SW for it, a-la RPi.

See https://pine64.com/product/pinenote-developer-edition/

This doesn't exist. It has been out of stock for at least a year at this point.

Re: ReMarkable Paper Pro

#110

Post by elric » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

lidavidm wrote: post #47

I had a reMarkable 2 and gave up it almost solely because it didn't support USB mass storage (like Kobo devices do), making it really annoying to transfer files. Also, their software update made the reader worse, since I went from being able to manually crop the page to fit the viewport to having to carefully pinch-zoom with a bunch of latency and really weird sensitivity. And they seem oddly insistent they're not a…

Similar experiences with the reMarkable 1. The USB interface really bugs me. It's nice for annotating and highlighting PDFs, but pretty bad for reading. Great for taking notes, but awful at extracting them, unless you get an expensive subscription to their "cloud" garbage, which feels extortionate considering how expensive the device is.