I got a reMarkable 2 as a gift from my team at work after coming back from my paternity leave this year and have been using it for the past few months daily for note taking, sketching, and reading. If you haven’t heard of a reMarkable before, check out their product page for a quick summary. TLDR: It’s a large format e-ink note-taking and reading device.
I’m a sucker for the whole “digitial minimalism” thing and I’ve been trying to get off the social internet as much as possibe lately, especially since having a kid. With that in mind, this device was always something that interested me. I use my kindle all the time but have always wanted something a bit bigger for reading technical books as well.
The good
- Writing on the reMarkable feels like a better version of writing on paper in my opinion. It feels extremely satisfying to use.
- The build quality is fantastic. The device feels almost weirdly light for how solid it is; I also really appreciate the rubber feet on the bottom to keep it in place while writing.
- The battery lasts for literal weeks: I’ve only charged the device twice in the almost 3 weeks of daily use.
- The pen feels great; I got the “Pro” pen that comes with a rubberized grip and a built-in “eraser” and I like it! Feels nice in the hand and is… just a pen! easy.
- I love reading on the Remarkable; because it’s a bigger e-ink display you can very easily read full-sized PDFs which is awesome. EPUB on a kindle or kobo is cool but reading on a smaller screen means diagrams and code usually gets squished or formatted weird; not a problem here.
- Marking up and reviewing PDFs or Word Document’s on the device feels great; I have often wished I could just take what’s on my screen and write on it a bit, this solves that.
- Being able to screenshare while I’m writing is awesome for work from home meetings where I need to brainstorm with people on a shared screen.
The close-to-good
- The cloud sync features feel half finished and are slow to sync.
- The OCR or “Convert handwriting to text” feature is extremely unreliable
- The chome extension to send articles to your remarkable, while a great idea, was not very well executed. It strips all the images out of articles and makes code snippets unreadable in my experience. I wish this was just a little better. As a developer I know how easy this would probably be to fix and it drives me nuts.
The bad
- The subscription cost to host my < 10mb of notes being $5 USD per month is insane. I sync 50gb of Obsidian data for $7 USD a month. Do better, especially considering the service feels half baked and slow to use.
- The actual “text” note taking experience feels like it was slapped together by an intern during a hackathon. You’re only offered 2-3 formatting options “big sans serif header”, “medium header”, “normal text”, and “bullet”. Come on, really? I know that this was probably done in the spirit of “minimalism” but seriously? This has been a solved problem for EVER. Just add more formatting options.
- Selecting and editing text on the device is nearly impossible. It’s SO HARD to select or highlight bits of text when you’re in text editor mode.
- To be honest, I’d rather they just completely remove the text editor mode and do OCR on the letters and let me search there, which brings me to my next point.
- OCR text is not searchable! WTF! this is a digital note taking device that wants you to take handwritten notes, WHY CAN I NOT SEARCH SAID NOTES? I know, I know, just convert them to the text notes… and lose all the nuance and benefit of handwritten notes? nice!
- I didn’t think I would miss having a backlight. I was wrong. I do. Especially now that I have a little kid, reading in a dark room before bed is important and breaking out the book light isn’t a great experience.
- The ecosystem lock-in is very frustrating. There’s no good way to get your data off the device and reMarkable doesn’t support any third party apps or extensions really. If I could hook this thing up to Obsidian via an integration I would be SOLD HARD. Unfortunately, the device is very locked down.
Conclusions
The reMarkable is a pretty solid device that has some very frustrating flaws. I feel like if they put 30% more effort into the software side it would be a near perfect note taking device.
I see myself continuing to use it but mostly for taking notes in meetings and brainstorming; I’ll probably be sticking to obsidian for my journaling and longer-form note taking until they fix either the text system or if they implement a “written text” search system.