ReMarkable Paper Pro Move

Remarkable itself does not promote the devices as hackable. That's the community that has evolved around it taking advantage of the company leaving the device open in this way. Furthermore, there is quite a thriving ecosystem[1] of custom software for the devices, so your assessment of it not working in practice is empirically untrue.

> the very restrictive underlying software

This is by design, based on publicly espoused principles, and everything about the product branding makes it very explicit and obvious. No one should buy a Remarkable device and be surprised about how restrictive it is.

> the user-hostile changes to the subscription

The "user-hostile" changes to the subscription is that they are charging for it.

It is worth emphasizing that nothing is restricted with device usage if you do not have a subscription. They expect you to pay if you want to use anything which runs through their cloud services, which is undeniably reasonable.

You can sync to other cloud providers without an active subscription.[2]

[1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable [2] https://support.remarkable.com/s/article/Using-reMarkable-wi...

Nice to know. I was considering it but that is a deal breaker for me. I'm tired of companies trying to steal back what the sold me.

FWIW I didn’t like the Boox experience: For writing you’re limited to the stock notes app, which I didn’t find usable: You can’t even zoom in it (something I thought would obviously be possible when choosing the smaller Nova 2). It also has a full Android system, which comes with advantages for sure but invites distractions and leads to very disappointing battery life.

Yes, same. I have one that was grandfathered into the "no subscription" system, which means I can't buy another one (not sure if I will keep the ability not to have a subscription), and can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

I do have a Boox Note Air4, which I bought with the intention of replacing the ReMarkable. On the plus side, it runs Android apps, but on the minus side, the UI is much less polished than the ReMarkable. Having said that, if I had the choice between the two, and weren't grandfathered into the no-subscription option, I would pick the Boox.

The boox indeed is nice.

These days I do quite a bit of field work outdoors (taking measurements, ssh'ing into mobile equipment) and a laptop is a chore to use in broad daylight. With the boox I can connect a bluetooth keyboard and install termux. It's not a perfect setup, but sure beats squinting at a dim screen.

Out of curiosity, what were the user hostile changes you mention?

> One of the promises that lead me to buy one was the hackability - "It's Linux!" "You can SSH into it!", which, on paper (heh) is still true, but in practice very much isn't.

Can you expand on this a bit? Can't you still run third party software on the newer iterations?

Which Boox in particular would you recommend?

The enshittification is everywhere ...

I have two of these devices (RM2 and the Paper Pro) and haven’t experienced anything of what you’re describing despite using them extensively for a few years. I would recommend getting in touch with support about that, or trying a factory reset to see if that improves anything.

The pen writing without touching is usually a misalignment and fixed by removing and re-inserting (or replacing) the tip ime.

Not sure if you already did, but I would reach out to support. I’ve had many firmware updates on my rM2 and never experienced the issues you’re describing.

I have been on the fence, and this pushed me off it. Thanks.

The pen issue you are describing is most frequently caused by a worn out nub. Have you tried replacing it?

I only began to love my RM2 when I stopped trying to use it as a PDF reader and writer and instead only a scratch paper replacement. But it’s not as economical if limited to this.

I do wish they’d improve the PDF usability or embrace open sourcing the UI. There’s a lot of features that should be easy to implement, like split screen or floating sticky notes, but they seem almost wholly focused on the hardware. I thought it’d be the ultimate tool for studying math and saving money on books, thus paying for itself, but it’s just not there yet and I’m not sure they plan to get it there.

I found the lack of backlight and built-in dictionary to mostly cripple the e-reading experience on rM2.

Format support wasn't great either, only PDF and EPUB. Which does cover most bases, to be fair. AZW3 and MOBI aren't dealbreakers, but... really, no TXT?

tbh the write path on just paper is so good, and at least for me it's very rare that I need to actually digitize anything.

I just invested in a printer that works and print out a lot of stuff I want to deeply annotate. Otherwise I have the ipad for some other stuff.

I really enjoy eink for reading but it's really a super specific market. Competing against the ipad is tough! The generalist devices tend to get so good that the specialized devices stop being worth it.

I'm actually in the market for something this size, but it's too expensive for me given what I know about reMarkable's inconvenience. I'd pick it over a kindle scribe, but not sure I'd pick it over a boox or supernote. I haven't decided if I actually care about color yet. MyDeepGuide's review of reMarkables color tech has me pretty interestes in it... but I don't know I actually need color personally. I have a colleague who has a reMarkable and it seems pretty annoying software wise. Especially at this size I want ebooks easily loaded.

I mostly have a very aged Kindle that needs replaced and I would like a small digital notepad. Boox fits the bill generally. I have a larger boox, it's a little quirky and a bit too heavy to hold comfortably but works fine after some configuration.

>I am happy to be proven wrong but I’m shocked they believe there is a market for this size at all, let alone at $450

I was literally about to order one until I read the comments

I hear you but would bet heavy you haven't tried using a navigable PDF like hyperpaper.me, which solves most of this frustration.

I had a remarkable 2. I loved it until I got a pocketbook inkpad lite. Big enought, but with a backlight.

and I loved that until amazon killed "download" for kindle books.

The idea is kind of cool, but just doesn't seem useful enough to justify a very expensive dedicated device. For the same price you could buy both an ipad, a matte screen protector, and a real notepad and pen. The ipad does all of the tech significantly better, and the physical notepad is a more enjoyable physical writing experience.

The product seemed to be mostly aimed at tech bros with more money than they know what to do with.

I was interested until I saw the price. For a lower price I’d probably risk it and see if/how it might integrate into my life. However, I think it has a high chance of failing to integrate, so $450 is too much to risk.

I say this as someone who bought a Daylight tablet for $700 and is now looking to sell it, since I didn’t fit anywhere and it just sits.

I have a Mobiscribe, which is about this same size. I would like something closer to Letter size, but the smaller size is really handy for handheld use. I can easily hold the Mobiscribe in the palm of my hand and do work (typing on a keyboard, working a screwdriver, pounding my head against a wall) and not have to worry about fumbling my Mobiscribe. Do I think the price point on this Remarkable device is correct? Nope. I wouldn't buy it at this price.

If you think $450 is a lot, they seriously think they're getting $729 CAD in Canada. On straight conversion is should be $621, not to mention they're almost certainly getting a tariff hit in the US that they don't get in Canada.

It’s just that $449 can buy me so many paper tablets and I really like paper. There’s no subscription for paper, it is tangible, it lasts thousands of years as long as it isn’t burned. I can flip through and see my ideas all in one place that digital files never seem to replicate.

I think the sweet spot is 10 inches. I have a Boox Tab Mini C and a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra. Both feel unweildy for different reasons. For my next tablet I'll get something in 10 inches. I wish Samsung made better options for that size.

So sad when something that could be fixed with a few lines of code/a pref toggle if the software were open entirely kills an otherwise great product experience for someone.

Mine goes somewhat unused because of this (although definitely less than 10 swipes per try). If I was to buy another ereader I'd want at a minimum physical buttons for forward/back.

I don’t experience the same level of recognition issues, but I do find flipping through pages quite tiresome. After reading other comments here, it seems clear that the navigation of the e-reader needs significant improvement. I submitted some feedback about this in one of their previous feedback surveys.

Perhaps this Hacker News discussion will lead to some user experience improvements.

Could it be caused by dry skin?

I have this problem but it’s mostly when I try to flick quickly. If I deliberately drag my finger over the page it generally works.

Do you know if you are on a grandfathered plan (I am too) and you get an additional device, does the new device need another subscription? Or is the plan tied to the account/login?

I have a Supernote Nomad and love the size of it, which is A6 sized. I struggle to see how making one more narrow than an A6 pad is useful. This Remarkable kind of looks more like a long post it note or grocery list instead of a notebook.

Is it the case that these devices are converging on 16:9? I don't know about the supply chain, but there seems to be no lack of e-ink tablets at A5/A6 sizes and/or with better ratios than 16:9.

Remarkable has the roughly A6-sized Paper Pro, Kobo has three e-ink devices with styli and good screen ratios, and Supernote has models named A5 (and A5 x2) and A6 after the paper sizes. I think the options are quite good.

eInk devices are very much not converging to 16:9 or wider aspect ratios. This device is intentionally the size and shape of a reporter's notebook, but there are virtually no other eInk tablets which diverge significantly from more common paper aspect ratios – they all (ReMarkable, Supernote, Boox, Kindle, etc.) are and continue to be exactly what you say you want.

I also got enthusiastic about them, but I ended up embracing the Kindle Scribe. I just completed my 12th monthly notebook, so I’ve been at it for over a year now.

I was using regular notebooks but I was collecting too many and I was worried about storage and loss.

I wrote about the experience a few months into it.

https://notes.joeldare.com/handwritten-notes-on-the-kindle-s...

I do not read on mine, it’s exclusively for writing. Possibly because switching is too slow.

I embraced an iPad w/ paper-like surface during my grad degree, simply because I needed the organisation (annotating papers, multiple subjects, project notes, etc.). It worked really well for that.

Funnily though, professional life is a lot simpler. I just need a single paper notebook with my running todo list. Everything else is stored in google docs or obsidian. Having an eink or tablet for taking notes would feel like friction without much benefit.

I've come to the same conclusion. It's just easier, especially for things that involve diagrams. $10 worth of notebooks and pens is a much better value than something that is more fragile, has to be charged, etc and orders of magnitude more expensive.

Also, I tend to only write things down as a note-taking and memorization exercise, or to think out a certain idea. I usually don't have to read the notes again. So the archiving functionality of having digital paper-like notes is not nessisarially more useful, and it is often more difficult to search through than physical notebooks. Anything I really need to read later, I can write succinctly in a text file or something.

I also don't like getting locked into a certain ecosystem. Xournal++ is the only open-source cross-platform app I can find, and it's not that good.

Even for reading physical books, you can find a lot of used paperbacks for less than $10, which is very little when you consider the value of the time you spend reading them, the ease of flipping through pages and being able to dog-ear them, and the collectible aspect of the book covers covers. An eink tablet be nice for reading textbooks and papers that are more expensive and require pirating, however. But for now I just use a regular screen in portrait.

I’m in the same boat. My Boox Go 10.3 is collecting dust. I used it for a while, but I just find it easier to flip back through paper notes as opposed to tapping or swiping through files. I don’t want to connect to work WiFi either on it. So now I’ve found pens I enjoy writing with and decent notebooks with paper I like and it’s great. I actually spend time journaling on paper. But I do have both a Boox Palma for reading and also a Kobo Clara.

OCR has also been getting incrementally better and has been surprisingly good if you have the handwriting for it.

I like the remarkable paper pro -- been using it for 8 months consistently.

not exactly what you asked for but there's a community project you can selfhost[1] that emulates the cloud on your own server

[1]https://github.com/ddvk/rmfakecloud

It's fine. You really don't need to pay for the connect service.

rm2 owner since it was released over 5y ago. connect service works well but is wholly optional.

I'm curious too, because there is a help page[1] linked in the FAQ that appears to be completely blank!

[1] https://support.remarkable.com/s/article/Using-reMarkable-wi...

That Zotero sync seems nice! I wrote a daemon that does a (one-way) sync from a Zotero folder to my reMarkable that works pretty well, but it's rather hacky.

What do you mean by creation.

I'm a mathematician and my "creations" are small notes, comments, and very simple figures.

I've never (besides flipping pages) experienced any noticable lag or delay.

> I install nothing in it except Apple Freeform. (No distractions)

How do you uninstall Safari? That's the most distracting app of all.

Why do you need a windows vm for calibre? It’s java, it works on windows linux and mac (and likely bsd too)?

What are your primary use cases of the Daylight DC-1? I am curious as a reluctant iPad Pro M4 user who thought he'd use it for reading and annotating PDFs but finds himself sucked into streaming apps and YouTube instead a bit too often.

I wish Remarkable had better software compatibility though. Importing books from Kindle is a multi-step process, a bunch of formats aren't supported, and their first party app doesn't even work on linux.

Haven't tried OCR on it, but I've heard other e-Readers have them beat on that end too.

I would really like to get a PineNote but by the time I came to that conclusion, tariffs made it very unappealing :(

The hang up for me is the second hand market for the supernote is rough, even the old a4 and a5. People really do seem to love them. Are you willing to part with yours haha

I’m pretty shocked to hear that someone like you exists already. Lots of questions. First, now that you spend so much time in VR, why does that kill your need to take notes? Are you somehow taking notes in VR? Do you find that these notes are as effective and personal as real writing? Do you put everything you write into an LLM now and trust that it’ll be searchable forever and the AI won’t lose its context?

> The one feature I miss is the ability to split the screen and have two items open at the same time. Like a PDF journal in one and taking notes on it in the other.

Can you do that on the RPP? I've not really kept up with features other than to check for AI integrations (which they still don't have to my knowledge)

I was sceptical at first too then gave their 100-day test a try with the bigger Pro and have the Move on order.

I see the benefits over paper as:

- Search. Still in beta, but you can now search handwritten notes. Seems to work well even with my scrawl.

- Integrations. Just "send to Slack" for now but rumours from YouTuber Kit Betts that more are coming.

- Working at night. The backlight, whilst lacking in temperature control, is handy at night or when ambient lighting is poor.

- Backups. Annoying it's a paid subscription, but I consider it more like insurance against data loss at $3 per month.

Does-it have a lockscreen and is it reasonnably good in term of security? That would be the only incentive for someone who want to keep handwritten notes without having to lock the notebook in a safe every time it is left unattended.

I am not thinking security against state actor, rather people within same household/office who might have too much curiosity.

I travel a lot and bring it on the plane. It has thousands of pages of handwritten notes, and hundreds of text books and papers.

In the airport or on the plane, I download papers I want to read or have to review.

On touchdown, my reviews are synced and I can send the annotated paper by email.

It does a bit more than a literal notepad.

I bought a Remarkable and ended up returning it. It was a cool device, but you're exactly right, I had a hard time justifying the cost over a $10 notebook.

I used to have terrible handwriting to the point of not being able to read it myself, but it got better. It is a matter of practice and being more intentional with it, taking that little extra effort to make the letters readable. If something is worth writing down, it's probably worth the extra effort

Have you tried RCU — reMarkable Connection Utility (sync files over USB or WiFi) https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

Regardless, expected better support response for a product in this price range.

I had a similar problem with mine where the clock was out and preventing it from syncing or updating.

The solution i was told (and which worked for me) was to plug it into a computer for a while - I assume that some time syncing must happen in the background when it’s connected via usb.

Had the very same issue, couldn't even update the firmware - after some tinkering turns out the solution is fairly simple - ssh into it, disable ntp, set the correct time, enable ntp, reboot.

RM/RM2 run linux and you can SSH in and copy files to/fro. It is not hard

The idea always has been that it's writing on paper with all the convenience of a tablet like syncing your notes. A notebook will feel like paper, but won't sync, an iPad will not feel even close to paper.

I was considering reMarkable when upgrading my ebook reader with note taking capabilities, but it's mostly a notepad with an option for ebooks (and not the other way around) and the subscription model on top of $500 hardware was ridiculous.

I have a RPP and it’s an almost device, it’s so close to good in many ways and falls flat in others.

My biggest gripe with it originally was that the next and previous page gestures worked perhaps one in three attempts, which has been fixed in the most recent software that reduced the perceived latency of everything dramatically. Beyond that it’s a weird experience, it’s sort of usable with open source tools but requires a lot of hacks to not have it sync with their cloud offering if you want privacy. Even if you use their cloud services it often feels a bit clunky and half considered where buttons and controls end up being.

I love the hardware, it’s an amazing looking screen, it feels ultra premium, the folio cases people have made for it fit perfectly in my bag.

Partner had remarkable. I bought a scribe. Tried both side by side for a month.

Scribe lets you read your kindle books, draw on them, and write notes. Hard to get the notes off the device.

RM lets you sync automatically. The rest of their software is total junk (see App Store ratings). It was more glitchy. Marginally better writing. Monthly fee.

Both make exporting notes more difficult than it should be.

My current go to - paper and pen with chatgpt app on phone - snap a photo to extract my writing.

I kept the scribe for reading books - rarely use it over the kindle app on my phone.

Hope it works for you though- love the idea.

I have the Remarkable 2 and my only gripe is being unable to use a mechanical keyboard with it. In every other regard it is truly a delight, perhaps even a perfection of certain modes of thinking.

Kindle scribe has been a disappointment. Unless you're going to go through all the work needed to jailbreak, your subject to whatever software changes Amazon wants to push on you with next to no notice.

I haven't looked much since shortly after a launch of the original scribe but I was infuriated to find out that they didn't have a straightforward or simple API for extracting notes and that wasn't something they had on the road map for immediately after release either.

To the best of my knowledge, there is still no convenient way to extract handwritten scribbles and store them as an SVG alongside OCR inside of an obsidian vault. I would love to be proven wrong on this though.

If you don't plan to do a ton of handwriting, the scribe is a gorgeous and large screen. Reading long form documents on it would be a treat if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to side load and synchronize PDFs.

Now I just do everything through my iPad with a pencil and it's almost as good...

Please do not buy from reMarkable (see sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121821)

I have a boox go 10.3 it's alright- the android app functionality makes it more useful than others

I think live scribe is what you're looking for. I've never used it but at some point they were buying them for people at my first job.

https://us.livescribe.com/

I’d like a device that sticks to my pencil. I like my pencil (that’s why I don’t want an eink tablet that “feels like paper”).

I guess this is getting a bit niche. But it seems like these companies are already trying to play in a niche market segment…

Maybe I just need a camera to scan my notes or something, haha.

The current not-actually-available instance of this is Nuwa Pens

[dead]

The solution to your extreme anguish and relentless suffering in this mortal world: Don't purchase this particular product.

iirc you can insert pages into a PDF or annotate directly on the page.

The value is in the lack of features. This is a hard concept for most people who haven't used one (or a similar device) to grasp.

Running Android or iOS apps is an anti-feature. Having cellular data is an anti-feature. Our world is full of trillion dollar corporations fighting as hard as they can to distract us, drive engagement, and get us staring at their wall for as long as possible.

My reMarkable 2 is the best focus device I have. It's the best writing device by far, the best "draw some woodworking plans" device, the best "work on a crossword puzzle" device, and a very good reading device (page navigation is slower than Kindle, but being able to read PDFs designed for 8.5x11 which are unreadable on Kindle makes it a wash).

On an iPad, at any moment there could be a toast from Signal, or Discord, or Messenger, or whatever. There's a web browser full of infinite content on Reddit and YouTube. I can go on a plane and have a physical book in front of me but it's no match for the allure of the internet if there's Wi-Fi. The reMarkable is one of the only devices out there that fixes the distraction aspect, and THAT is the single biggest thing between me and achieving things.

A lot of people get bitchy if you have a tablet or laptop open in a meeting.

They're completely different categories, so doesn't make much sense in comparing. Like comparing a car to a boat.

If you get both with a stylus the price ends up being more-or-less equal. As someone who isn't in the Apple ecosystem it seems like a bit of a toss-up for me.

Hard to say. I’m not sure who the target segment is for “dozens of superficially descriptive blocks of text that say absolutely nothing paired with dramatic photos of adults with trust funds”, but apparently I’m not in it.

It's supposed to be compared to the Remarkable Paper Pro, which is priced at $629. This is priced at $449.

Unfortunately, that picture doesn't update automatically, so if you add things to that page, you have to retake the picture. Worse, if you don't take a picture of a page, there's no digital copy of it! If you've left your paper notebook at a different location, you can't take pictures of it unless you go to where it physically is! Inconceivable, I know, but it turns out there are benefits to a digital notepad. If you're too poor/cheap to spend money on high quality tools, that's your problem, but no, your paper notebook doesn't let you draw a lasso around a section of the page, copy and paste it onto a new page, and then resize it.

Boox Note Max. a4 size, expensive as hell ($650 I think), but it runs Android, can install stuff from the play store or side load apk. Ships with a very capable document reader can handle ebook formats, pdf and has good support for drawing and annotations.

Kindle scribe if you can get it for cheap. I think it goes for $240 sometimes and it's a steal for 10 inch of eink. Not the best for writing, PDF may have few rough edges but pretty decent overall.

I think most people into these devices always advise getting the largest writing surface possible. This is a "cute" device, but if you are serious enough about note taking (which you'd have to be to get one of these things at these prices), then you are limiting yourself with this size.

I have a Bigme Galy, that uses a Gallery 3 display, as well as a Kobo Libra Colour, which uses a Kaleido 3 display.

I regret buying the Kobo Libra Colour, solely because of the display. You pretty much need the backlight on any time it isn't in direct sunlight, and even then the contrast is worse than a first-generation monochrome E Ink display, and the saturation is pretty low. Monochrome text is also a bit fuzzy.

The Bigme Galy display works in the same lighting as monochrome displays, with nearly as good of contrast. Saturation with primary colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow) is excellent, and with secondary colors it's not as good but still better than the Kaleido display. Magenta is the most vibrant, so green struggles the most.

The Gallery display does take several times longer to refresh in full color mode, but it has a monochrome mode that refreshes at a similar rate to monochrome eink displays on ebook readers, so you get dynamically chose between color or speed.

Both ereaders have laughably bad software, so that didn't have a net affect on my preferences.

I have the ReMarkable 2 so I am biased here but these devices do more than replace paper.

My fav feature so far has been screensharing from the ReMarkable 2 while on online meetings.

So while their whole thing is about replacing paper, it actually does a lot more than just that.

I think it's more like it's like reMarkable Paper Pro but smaller.

The difference being the reMarkable Paper Pro not only has color + reading light on top of reMarkable 2, the writing experience as well as the stylus are different from the reMarkable 2.

Move like mobile phones

Now the "Pro"...

Small company, low volume product, high production premiums. Not everyone can afford Amazon and Apple level volumes.

Another hardware issue they have is the tip of the Marker Plus. It has a thin collar around the nib that (in my experience) is brittle and breaks off, at which point the marker becomes useless because the nib flexes. There are lots of posts on Reddit complaining about the same issue.

They replaced mine the first time this happened. Now my replacement broke and they aren't replacing it :(.

With that being said, I'm still very happy with my RM2. I purchased a "V-Pen" as a replacement and it's working okay. I'm lucky enough to have a free connect subscription for life because I purchased it early enough.

When I bought mine, I appreciated that they seemed to be pricing it to make a profit as a product, not as a loss-leading foothold for future subscription revenue. How naive I was to think they wouldn't do both.

I have a friend that went through 3 remarkables due to failures, I didnt dig into the root cause but I suspect you might be right on the USB-C port since they all "stopped charging".

I use a magnetic charger adapter for mine. I can see how these could break over time but the magnet has never failed me.

Linux with a custom Qt Quick-based UI: https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/qt_epaper

all the information is pretty public: https://developer.remarkable.com/documentation/software-stac...

It is a Linux variant. Has been rootable in the past.

If your primary use case is to read books off of Kindle, I'd say no, because Remarkable doesn't run on Android, and as such has no Kindle app. You can de-DRM Kindle books to read on it, but then you're adding these steps for no real gain.

If you're reading comics, then maybe, because this device is expensive precisely for the colored-e-ink screen. But even then better alternatives for that usecase probably exist, as the e-ink space is filled with Android based devices with better format compatibility.

Check out the Boox Palma 2. It has been an excellent Kindle replacement for me and is in the same smartphone form factor as the Paper Pro Move.

I know what Remarkable is, but without clicking the link, I have no idea what this new product is.

They have mentioned about more enterprise/business options with SSO and MDM, but it's either in beta or coming soon https://remarkable.com/business#:~:text=A%20beta%20program%2...

I noticed in the 3.20 release notes they said they're working on this, and to contact them for early-access. https://remarkable.com/business though you'll have to scroll past the marketing guff for a bit.

It’s standard Linux underneath that you can lock down or modify.

If your enterprise does not have the expertise to handle that, you need chromebooks I guess.

There's a Remarkable Chrome extension to send things over to it, as well as apps for iphone and Android, dunno if you've seen that.