Stylus is magnetic • Slimmer • Better design than its predecessor • Writing appears faster
Handwriting to text can not be edited • Folio cover is not ideal • Limited usability for artists
The world’s first e-ink tablet has lost its flaws and is ready for prime time.
I’m writing this review – now, the first concept of it – by hand, on one of the coolest writing devices it’s ever been fun to use. How much fun? Let’s just say that so far, in one day, I have scraped through 21 pages, just for the sake of it. If this productive sensation is not hypergraphy, an interesting condition where you can not stop writing, then it is at least somewhere in the same neurological district.
The device in question is the $ 399 Remarkable 2, a long-awaited sequel to the world’s first e-ink tablet. If you’ve encountered an e-ink screen before, it was probably on the Amazon Kindle. They are monochrome and much easier on the eye than a bright LED screen. You can use them in direct sunlight. E-ink is the closest thing the tech world has given us to ordinary pen on paper.
The first ReMarkable tablet, launched in 2017 for $ 599, was widely praised for this paper quality. However, it also came with a handful of shortcomings. The stylus (known as a “marker”) was a bit on the slow side, with an observed delay of 40 milliseconds between the marker touching the screen and the E-ink appearing. The border contained buttons for back and forth pages, which were unfortunately placed at the bottom of the screen. Your wrist would have a hard time resting without accidentally squeezing her.
On the ReMarkable 2, both defects have been removed. There is now only a 20-millisecond wait until the ink appears, a crucial threshold; to the human eye it is immediate. The processor is twice as fast. Drawing on the tablet can be much more accurate. Writing is more of a pleasure. (You can also do it longer, given that the battery now reports lasts two weeks instead of three days – I did not come close to exhausting – and charging via USB-C instead of the slower Mini USB.)
As for the buttons on the edge, they are gone. Now move between pages by swiping left or right. A single on-off button sits on top of a thin silver strip on the left side of the tablet, a cool design that beats the cheaper, more plastic feel of the original. Combined with the tent of the world record of the ReMarkable 2, which is only 0.19 inches deep (against 0.27 inches for its predecessor), is the general impression of a magical legal path from the 23rd century .
In fact, although the Remarkable 2 is a shade heavier than its predecessor (405 grams vs. 350 grams), its thinner, shorter design somehow helps it to feel lighter. I loved writing on my lap while pushing the top of the device with one finger. I could never do that with my iPad.
The original ReMarkable, left, is longer and thicker than its successor, with nasty buttons.
Image: chris taylor / mashable
Speaking of the iPad, the ReMarkable 2 has taken a page from Apple’s book and filled it with magnets. The remarkable stylus now clicks satisfactorily to the side of the tablet – well, not quite as satisfyingly as the Apple Pencil clings to the iPad Pro, but close. There is an important difference between the two markers that ReMarkable sells. The free one felt much more magnetic and reassuringly sturdier than the Marker Plus, which has an end that acts like a gum.
The silver strip, meanwhile, magnetically attaches to a $ 69 folio case. However, I found the case only useful for storage; at the time of writing, the cover was too stiff to bend all the way back, while the back added unnecessary bulk. Something like Apple’s iPad smart cover, which returns in a very understandable triangular shape, would work wonders here.
ReMarkable’s software, meanwhile, improves with leaps and bounds. It now offers a variety of templates for each page, including storyboards, strip panels, and day planners. You can still upload, mark and save PDF and EPUB files in the ReMarkable cloud, which is accessible via app on smartphones and computers. Document synchronization (via WiFi) was a bit on the slow side in my experience, but never completely failed.
The handwriting recognition of the device is quick and quite impressive, and I was surprised that it could read my italic script itself – I grew up learning a finer style known as copper plate, and it’s still in my muscle memory – with relatively a few mistakes. I had to make a dozen or so corrections to this article after converting, and the mistakes were at least amusing: “text” became “tense”, “feel” became “feet”. This I can work with.
Annoyingly, there is only one thing you can do with your words once they are converted, and that is to email them. Sure, it’s pretty cool to save emails in a magical legal way, but it would be nice to save the text, or at least edit it before sending it. Given that everything else you write is automatically uploaded to the cloud, the lack of converted text storage is a strange omission.
I had a few other small gripes. There is not as much adjustment of the pen stroke as you would expect. You only get the option of thin, medium or thick lines, and it’s Goldilocks’ choice: thin is too fine for readability, while thick is too large. Only medium is almost accurate. There is a larger selection of pen style, from mechanical pencil to ballpoint pen and brush. Sometimes the brushstrokes came out a little too rough. Artists may like the ReMarkable 2 for its fast sketching program, but get frustrated when they try to use it as a finding tool in the lines of an iPad.
But in the end, comparing this device to its much more expensive Apple brothers is a bit like, well, apples and oranges. The ReMarkable 2 is the small tablet for e-ink that would, from a small Norwegian company with big ambitions. The pandemic may delay its arrival – originally due to midsummer, pre-orders have been delayed several times and are now expected to ship in September. However, it is truly remarkable that this device exists entirely. If you rediscover the joys of distraction writing by hand in a notebook that is virtually infinite, there is nothing else on the market.
Hypergraphy, here we come.
