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The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

gizmodo.com

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Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#141

Post by freehunter »

jsiepkes wrote: post #109
reacweb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, these are important features. It seems it does not have Bluetooth (for a keyboard and/or headset to listen to mp3 while reading) and the battery can not be easily replaced.

Because its meant as an pen and paper replacement. Nothing more, nothing less. Besides why would you want to listen to MP3s on such a device? Your smartphone with bluetooth and microphone jack is way better equiped for such a thing.

I miss the hell out of the Asus Eee Note. Black and white screen with a Wacom digitizer built in. Did basically nothing but allow you to read ebooks and write notes.

I used mine for years after having it shipped from China (the only place I found to buy one, which meant I had to learn enough Chinese to order and to navigate the menus to change the language) until the cloud sync shut down and I couldn't be bothered to sync it manually with very outdated sync software.

There's a market for a B+W ereader with a pen. Not a big market, but there is.

-edit: however, that price puts me out of the market for this... the Eee Note cost me $200 which was perfect. $600 puts it just out of iPad Pro territory, which is where I'd personally go for that money. Shame. Hopefully it sells well enough that they can recoup development costs and bring the price down for later adopters.

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#143

Post by JasonFruit »

RepressedEmu wrote: post #135
JasonFruit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually been working on something of this sort with a battery-powered Raspberry PI running Debian and a Pervasive 7-inch e-Paper display. I whipped up a pretty decent prototype that had a terminal (so, Emacs, w3m, newsbeuter, etc.), PDF reader, and rough support for keyboard-driven X apps, but then my little girl got to the wiring with scissors, and my momentum died. (It also had a small character LED display t…

This sounds really cool! Does this project have a name?

The Papertop. (It's a working title.)

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#144

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

reacweb wrote: post #100
lima wrote: post #98

Some cool facts about the device from a hacker point of view: - Main developer/CTO is a KDE dev and very open source-friendly. - You get root access to the device out of the box. - The device is running a mainline kernel with minimal patches, which have a good chance at being upstreamed[1]. - The toolchain is open[2]. They use vanilla QT/QML and people have already built simple example apps. - There's an unofficial L…

IMHO, these are important features. It seems it does not have Bluetooth (for a keyboard and/or headset to listen to mp3 while reading) and the battery can not be easily replaced.

https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#146

Post by cptskippy »

userbinator wrote: post #75
igorkraw wrote: post #30

I have this device, and for hackers, this review misses some stuff: * the company behind it is based in norway, so you can be pretty sure the techies got treated well * they abide by the GPL very well * by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi…

by connecting via USB and flicking a switch in the options menu, you get SSH access, as well as a REST endpoint where you can upload your files via curl. So if you don't like their cloud offering, you can turn of wifi and be sure your data is local Maybe it's just me, but why do the defaults for devices like this seem to now always require either a special app or reach out into the Internet? Whatever happened to simp…

> Whatever happened to simple USB mass storage where you can just plug it in and copy files back and forth?

I agree that it should definitely be an option because there are plenty of situations when using this device where you might not even have connectivity.

> the default behaviour of requiring one to send files from a computer out far away to some server on the Internet, and then back to the tablet sitting only a few metres away seems rather silly and wasteful.

It is definitely silly and wasteful but it's oh so simple when it works correctly. Instead of dealing with SMB shares, email, FTP, rsync, cables, mass storage devices, properly ejecting things, or any other technology; you instead just put a file in a designated folder and it's available on all of your devices in a matter of moments.

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#147

Post by reacweb »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #136
Jedd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still wish it was slightly more than that. You are describing a combination of 'perfect is the enemy of good' and feature creep. Assess the qualities of the product as shipped, assume good faith on behalf of the people doing the build & ship, and determine if the price & features are appropriate for you.

Also you can make an email app with the Qt toolkit they released! It doesn't require super fast refreshes like the drawing app, so you should be able to make it work. Email can be distracting from studying a document though.

We already have a phone with a decent email app. If "pages" and pdf files can easily be exchanged or synchronized with your phone, you do not need email app.

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#148

Post by masukomi »

splitbrain wrote: post #138
vanderZwan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That gives me a lot of hope. At some pint the article mentions a "proprietary cloud service" which immediately made me worry that this would be a locked-up device. If the underlying software is open source, that would also suggest that it if there is a large enough community, it will keep working for much longer than the company supports it. And it gives hope for better software fixes. For example, the writing-lag me…

The API used for the cloud service is quite simple. There are already two projects on github implementing it (one by me) - search for remarkable-tablet to find them. The tablet also works fine without using the cloud service, it has a built-in webserver to upload documents to it that you can just access via WiFi or USB-LAN. Really this device is a hacker's dream in terms of openness. The only last thing I'd wish for…

is there any way to tell it to use your cloud service instead of theirs ?

In other words, what good is a custom reimplementation of it if you can't make it point at them without dns hacking?

Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet

#150

Post by thaumaturgy »

m-p-3 wrote: post #123
jsiepkes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because its meant as an pen and paper replacement. Nothing more, nothing less. Besides why would you want to listen to MP3s on such a device? Your smartphone with bluetooth and microphone jack is way better equiped for such a thing.

I still wish it was slightly more than that. If I could read my emails on that thing instead of my violet screen, I'd consider it for work.

No.

I own one. I've had mine since last November. I love it. I love it in large part because when I'm working on it, I -can't- read email, browse HN, read blogs, check on a server. The only thing I can do is put thoughts to words and diagrams.

What you want is a tablet, maybe something from Amazon. The ReMarkable is intended for a different audience, people who remember what it's like to be undistracted and want that again.

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