Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 530 posts

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

#151

Post by karpour »

Grumbledour wrote: post #43

I always think of the remarkable as a really odd device. Hardware wise, it looks great, but I seldom hear good things about the software, only that it is "improving" for years now. Also, while I think the form factor would be great for a text and graphics based computing device, they seem to invest as much energy as possible in playing down the computing angle, so that instead of having something great to do technica…

I have a reMarkable 2 for a while now, and I'm super happy with it. I specifically didn't want an Android device because of the obsolescence. The reMarkable doesn't run much in the background and does its job well.

I bought it to read my IT books, works perfectly. I'm also an artist, and even though I didn't expect much from the pen, sketching on it is very fun and I find myself filling a page of sketches almost every day.

Having full access to the underlying OS is also a big plus, even though I didn't do anything with that yet.

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

#152

Post by Jedd »

wastholm wrote: post #111

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect. The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once…

Have you looked at:

https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_syncthing

I don't have a remarkable, and have therefore not experimented with this software. But it's the approach I'd prefer if / when I get a device like this.

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

#153

Post by CandyFace »

rvz wrote: post #37

I was interested in purchasing a ReMarkable tablet last year then realised the ReMarkable 2 just released months ago and was very surprised that to see that they still don't have a color e-ink version. Until then, I am skipping it since I don't think it is worth the price. Downvoters: So I disagreed with the HN hivemind with a point I made about saving money for a better version and now I get downvoted for wrongthink…

Why you would be surprised baffles me. There are only a few e-ink tablets with color and they're all small and expensive. Setting that aside, they're not focusing (that much) on e-book comic reading, their focus is note taking, drawing and pdf reading. I use mine to do all three things and it works excellent, couldn't be happier. The remarkable is expensive no doubt but it's a much better device at what it does than an ipad or any other tablet for that matter if you ask me.

I can't comment on the other tablets mentioned her as I haven't used anything else but ipad previously and now the remarkable 1. gen.

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

#155

Post by wastholm »

Jedd wrote: post #152
wastholm wrote: post #111

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect. The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once…

Have you looked at: https://github.com/Evidlo/remarkable_syncthing I don't have a remarkable, and have therefore not experimented with this software. But it's the approach I'd prefer if / when I get a device like this.

I have not but it looks interesting so I will. Thanks!

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

#156

Post by cainxinth »

JeremyNT wrote: post #138

I have a similar but older device, the Likebook Mars. These no-name Chinese Android e-ink tablets are actually really great devices, when it comes to hardware. Where they fail of course is the questionable software. I find the Likebook actually works well enough, but I'm sure it's got untold security issues that prevent it from being useful for anything serious. I don't really understand why there really aren't any r…

> I don't really understand why there really aren't any reputable companies in the Android e-ink tablet space, and I also don't understand why Google themselves seem to have absolutely no interest in Android for this use case.

Just guessing, but maybe they did the market research and the audience isn’t big enough. After all, e-ink devices are primarily for consuming large amounts of text, and most peoples’ reading these days is short form, multimedia content (articles, blogs, lists, slideshows, social media posts, explainer videos, etc.) which is better suited to existing phones and tablets.

I’m still among those who read book-length content, but far less than I did in years past. I’d say the actual number of words I read every year has gone up, but the number of 300+ page books I read has gone down.

The upside is, I’m much more selective about the books I do read and mostly only read excellent ones.

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

#157

Post by sanderjd »

wastholm wrote: post #111

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect. The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once…

Man, I got the thing because I wanted to use it as an ebook and document reader, but it's totally failed at that for me. I spent hours working on a decent system for getting books on the thing and came up empty. I think it would be good for reading and taking notes on academic papers, but I mostly read books, and I couldn't figure out how to get most books on there. A lot of this is Amazon's fault for kindle being a proprietary format, but a lot of it is also the non-Amazon e-book community for failing to provide solutions that are as user friendly as Amazon is.

Edit: But yeah, I love the hardware. It just isn't functional enough for me to use it regularly, which is a bummer.

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

#158

Post by jcelerier »

growt wrote: post #64
mrfusion wrote: post #39

I want one but I don’t know what I’d use it for. Weird problem to have I guess.

You're not alone. I really like ePaper and I like working outside, but my handwriting is terrible and I'm faster typing anyway.

my handwriting is also terrible yet this is so incredibly better than notetaking on computer as soon as you have graphs, e.g. here's my current page: https://imgur.com/a/D0m4okF

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

#159

Post by CandyFace »

varispeed wrote: post #65

I have reMarkable 2 and I think it is brilliant, however it has one deal breaker that is there is no encryption on the device. If you lose it, you risk your documents landing in a bad actor hands. One may say it's the same with actual paper - sure, but reMarkable 2 can store much more data than a suitcase of documents. Then I have no idea whether documents on their cloud are encrypted and who has access to it beside…

The latest update includes the ability to open password protected PDF's https://blog.remarkable.com/software-update-2-7-small-steps-...

Might be worth taking a look again

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

#160

Post by vinni2 »

gspr wrote: post #97
vinni2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Remarkable 2 and returned it sadly. It does one thing very well which is writing. But not a great tool for reading PDFs. When I figured pinch to zoom was not possible that was it for me. It’s a really polished tool for wiring but they have a lot of room to improve for reading experience.

Pinch zoom is available in PDFs now. I'm on 2.7, but I believe it was added in 2.6. It works really well. Of course it's far slower than on a normal tablet due to the e-ink screen, but it's definitely fine for me.

Ok I gave up too early then. Ah well I didn’t have patience.
Post reply on HN