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E-readers and e-ink · reMarkable

reMarkable 1

9owners with an opinion
62%of verdicts positive
3/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for portability and display; criticized for ease of use and performance.

What owners wrote

Likes it
I mainly use my Remarkable 1 (am I ancient?) for scratch math, with the paper or code I'm reading open on a computer or laptop. So I concur that having both a writing surface and a reading surface is necessary.
Doesn’t like it
I've had a ReMarkable 1 for a few years (including doing a bit of hacking [0]). My advice is don't rely on doing anything it wasn't designed for. It's fun to make it do novel things, but software updates can introduce breaking changes. There are plenty of Android tablets with e-ink that do support running arbitrary code. [0] https://blog.afandian.com/2020/10/pipes-and-paper-remarkable...
Doesn’t like it
The main issue I had with my Remarkable 1 was that I couldn't quickly scroll through pages of e-books. If I was looking for something specific in the pages, an ipad allows me to swipe across rapidly. Remarkable was this tedious repeated button press, waiting each time for the screen to refresh. Had to go back to ipad although I loved the device.
Neutral
Similar experiences with the reMarkable 1. The USB interface really bugs me. It's nice for annotating and highlighting PDFs, but pretty bad for reading. Great for taking notes, but awful at extracting them, unless you get an expensive subscription to their "cloud" garbage, which feels extortionate considering how expensive the device is.
Likes it
Question for the crowd that likes handwriting: did you transition to a writing tablet? The day I bought a Remarkable 1 instead of lugging around notebooks has been a revelation for me. Now moved on to a boox 3c (with colors!) after a few years on a remarkable 2 in between.
Doesn’t like it
I had a remarkable 1 that I used primarily to read epub/pdf and my enduring memory was how slow it was to wsitch pages. Realise this is mostly a hardware limitation of the screen, but I found it frustrating. With some sadness I went to an iPad pro 12.9 which was very fast to switch pages, and I don't have that same sense of frustration.
Likes it
I used the Remarkable 1 for many years, until recently I got bored of hum converting hum my kindle library to epub to read on the remarkable. I switched to an Onyx Boox Tab X (effectively an android tablet with eink screen) and wouldn't go back. I have the Kindle reader app and can read very comfortably all my books, with the same comfort as with a Kindle device. But I can also take meeting notes, brainstorm, etc thanks to the writing capabilities similar to the Remarkable. As a bonus, I can also use it as a whiteboard in video calls.
Doesn’t like it
I hate hate hate hate hate my remarkable 1. Discussed why here a while back [1] but the TLDR is that it’s incredibly slow and the software is garbage. Would love to try a remarkable 2 but only for free after wasting money on the last one. Considering trying the impending Amazon thing, scribe or scribble or whatever they call it [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517285
Recommends it
Let me just say that the Remarkable also runs linux. Not only that, but I've been blown away by the ongoing results from the team at Remarkable. I only have the Remarkable 1 but they continue to ship updates for it, and these updates are often really substantive with sometimes profound new features. Their cloud service is free, no aggravating subscription stuff and even though they have the remarkable 2 now, they continue to kill it with the updates to improve my experience with the remarkable 1. They, as of right now, have my undying loyalty and appear to be a truly customer focused company. I'd love to buy their entire team a couple beers. Don't get me wrong, I love pine64 too, but they're way more oriented to us hacker types than ordinary people and I don't want to have to hack together a functioning device with everything I own, though I think they're doong good work none-the-less.