Would a digital notepad help your workflow? We put the reMarkable 2 to the test
We’ve always been intrigued with the whole e-ink technology, especially as we’ve not had our own e-readers like the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc. The reason is simple: it operates on a really different plane of technology to the tables that we are used to. E-ink is commonly referred to as "bistable". The bistablility refers to the fact that an image on an e-ink screen will be retained even when all power sources are removed. This means that the display is consuming power only when something is changing. For example, when reading on an e-reader, power is only needed when turning to a new page but no power is consumed by the display while reading the page. Bistability significantly reduces the power consumption and is a key reason devices using E Ink have such long battery life. In the e-ink technology website, it compares to the energy consumption of a 12” LCD-equipped device on 20 hours of operation (around 1,200 page turns) which requires the energy equivalent to 36 AA batteries — whilst same size devices using e-paper for the same time period only needs 1 AA battery!
The way content is displayed on the screen also differs. E-ink displays are typically referred as “reflective displays” where an LCD screen, for example, are “emissive display” where backlight is projected through the display. The e-ink display uses no backlight; rather, ambient light from the environment is reflected from the surface of the display back to your eyes. As with any reflective surface, the more ambient light, the brighter the display looks. This attribute mimics traditional ink and paper. Eliminating the need to power the backlight significantly decreases battery usage and thus a longer lasting use.
From what we understand, the more common form of e-ink displays are geared to e-readers. This made sense as it allowed people to have a digital form of their book, its really light (involves a lot less machinery?) and it has the batteries that lasts a long time! We never really got into it as across the two of us we have 3 iPad tables and it was hard to justify another tablet just for reading. But it changed when there was an opportunity to get our hands on the reMarkable 2 which is essentially a form factor that is an e-reader at its base but has proprietary features for you to scribble on it! As a company, reMarkable was founded by a guy called Magnus Wanberg — and he was a self-proclaimed “paper person”: always carrying notebooks and printouts wherever he went. Great, that sounded like us too. Their website says “…so, in 2013 Magnus, together with the reMarkable team, set out to create a device that would offer a pure, paper-like experience, but be connected and limitless. The first real digital paper tablet. Designed for reading, writing and sketching. And to be an elegant tool for thinking in the digital age, for those who love the inspiration and clarity they get when working on paper”. Not sure how long it took for them to refine the Mark I model but what we got now is the Mark II model — which seems like dimensionally different with some different accessories too. If we’re correct, the company itself is Norwegian but the shipment seems to be delivered out of Hong Kong. It took ours around 3 business days to arrive here in Singapore.
So now we have a device that was mainly created for note-taking/sketching/etc. but is also versatile enough to be an e-reader. We were very intrigued by this. Read on!
Form Factor
Let’s start with the packaging. Its very sleek. Minimalistic, monotone colour schemes, no frills — just the basics (which is their entire value proposition here: if you want the bells and whistles at the same price point you’re probably better off with the iPads of the world which we’ll compare later). The slightly protruding shape of the tablet on the box is sleek and a nice touch — same goes for the Marker box. Notice that we got the “Marker Plus” version but you can also get the normal Marker. The difference mainly being that the Marker Plus is matte black and you can use the other tip to erase stuff on the screen just like you would a pencil. Pretty cool. The fact that its a sleek matte black matters more to us — to the point we question why there isn’t a matte black version of the tablet. Seemed like a missed opportunity.
In the box is also no frills — you get the tablet and a charger cable (USB-C). In the marker, you get the marker and a set of spare tips. No charger as the marker itself needs no power whatsoever (a win against others table forms!). We’re not sure yet how far the tips go until they need to get changed (seems like we got around 5 spares and to get the spares on the reMarkable website is not super cheap — SGD 20 for 9x tips, and SGD 50 for 25x tips!).
You can also get folios/sleeves from the website ranging from SGD 120 to SGD 250 — also not cheap but the higher end is quite good quality leather. We did not get any of these items.
While there is very little third party support for accessories for the reMarkable, you can probably get away with most sleeves for tables in the 10-11” size, but if you are set on a perfect snap folio (which also looks mega sleek in black leather) then prepare to shell out that SGD 250.
Out of the box — its super pretty! As you can see; not the entire physical form is a screen. Only around 80% of it is actual screen — the other real estate is probably to accommodate everything else under the hood but it does give a nice space to be single-hand usage when reading on the commute. Would have liked to see a matte black version (still). But the physical form is generally very nice — it feels very well built and not cheap (which makes sense as it isn’t cheap at all). The screen is crisp, they were also smart to put on rubber dots on the back part which not only protects the sleek minimalistic back but also keeps the tablet from moving about when you are writing (furiously!) on the desk. We’re not sure if this feature is at all hampered when you use the folio accessory (which does cover the back part entirely) but do keep that in mind.
Functionality
Before we get into this section, please note that we’ve only had the reMarkable 2 for a couple months which should warrant a pretty thorough initial impressions but not a robust long-term review (which we can update this post, say, a year from now). Anyway, let’s get into it by breaking things down into a few sections.
1) Usability and impact to workflow
The reMarkable 2 is very easy to set up. Right out of the box ours had around 53% battery in it so you can theoretically go straight to it out of the box. It took a quick hour or so to get past and admire the marvel of its form, but then its pretty much straight to business. Essentially you get a blank root storage where you can start creating a filing nomenclature. Within each folder and subfolder you can create “notebooks” so you can thematise it based on your needs (for example: ours has Personal and Work as main folders, then under the Work one has Externals and Internals subfolders, and within each has different notebooks depending on the needs.
The use of the Market was also quite satisfying — it does not require a battery, it does not need to be paired with anything, and its relatively well made and sturdy. This is a no frills approach that allows you to get down and focus with as less distractions. This worked really well in our experience. To be honest, the erasing function at the other tip of the Marker (a feature only on the Plus model) has not been as frequently used as we had initially anticipated — we found that we tended to use the undo button much more but maybe this would be hard once you’ve written a lot and the undo you wanted to do was way back. The Market itself works really well — reacting in the writing area is almost instant. It almost feels like you’re writing on paper. This is important as it felt a lot more second nature than writing on an iPad’s glass which felt off in a lot of times.
For us it was quite natural to move from physical notebooks to the reMarkable 2. We are the type of people that could not do note-taking using laptops and part of our way to process information is to jot things down. The problem with physical notebooks is that we burn through them quite fast and we’re not very good at archiving things in order — we’d spend hours just to find notes from, say, 6 months ago. The hope is that through reMarkable’s features like a structured filing system as well as a tagging system this would allow us to store and access our notes quickly. So far things have gone well — it is very easy to push PDFs through to the device when you’re browsing through your phone. If you use an office laptop that might not allow you to install the reMarkable’s proprietary app, no worry as you can log in to your myremarkable account and simply manage your device from it. Note that the reMarkable 2 for now can only read PDFs and DRM-free EPUBs. For the latter there is a way around this but you have to figure out your self :) mostly when we read its to go through PDF documents anyway so this is sufficient for us. Annotating PDF documents using the reMarkable 2 is truly a game changer — its
2) Operating and maintaining
Nowadays when you get the reMarkable 2 you also get access to its “Connect” service which allows you to perform all the cloud configurations and services that it offers. You can connect the device to your existing accounts in OneNote, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. But for us honestly the most useful feature is simply to be able to put all our PDFs in the account and it will sync to the reMarkable 2 device — no cables and no hassle.
The device’s “operating system” is pretty bare bones but it seems like the idea is to figure out what file flow works for you. For us, we’ve adopted a simple nomenclature of personal vs work files, and create notebooks within the subfolders that allows you to access the notes when you need to. Creating a folder system we think is crucial because if you only rely on a single notebook there is no way to easily locate a certain note (or we haven’t found a way!). Please also consider that because of the e-ink nature everything is not as zippy as an actual tablet with multicore processors — everything still feels an in-between analog and digital.
Maintenance is pretty minimal. Battery gets you around 2 working weeks of active notetaking. It charges with USB-C so you can just use the cables from your other devices (it comes with a nice cable but why have three USB-Cs open?). It takes around 2ish hours to fully charge from around 2-3% but mind you we use a 45W charger head. Other than that just make sure you wipe it once in a while. We also read that it’s best not to place it sticking on a laptop for long durations of time as the magnets in the laptop may cause the screen and response to the pen a bit wonky — but thank God hasn’t happened to us.
Performance
You can choose the various pen styles and thickness to write on!
If you look at the reMarkable as what it is — a no frills digital writing pad that behaves 80% like paper but with the convenience of an electronic form factor: then you will really enjoy this device. We know we have and we won’t be going back.
The device performs remarkably (pun intended!) as direct replacement of the physical notepad. It is not a replacement for an actual tablet and it is definitely not a full “productive” equipment. It never can be.
Between sleep mode and ready to go is quite fast — only takes a second or two to start taking notes. Battery lasts a good 2 weeks on average. The accuracy of the pen/stylus on the screen is amazing, there is no noticable lag, and best of all the pen does not require charging!
Beware though, that how fast you exhaust your nibs (tip of the pen) depends how heavy your hand is. For our is quite heavy because we can burn a nib every 2-4 weeks. We’ve read people who can last months but that is really hard for us! The nibs are not cheap, at around S$48 for 25 nibs (before postage!) so please take this into consideration.
Conclusion
A really strong contender in the market if you ever need a digital notepad. Note that there are other strong products as well (including Kindle’s Scribe, etc.) which may have other bells and whistles you might like. But for us, the reMarkable 2 is remarkably satisfying. 8/10.
