* See what I did there?
Last year, despite years of being an avid iPad user, I ordered a Remarkable tablet. My eyes were starting to suffer from the long hours on a computer during the day and the massive amount of course reading on the ipad in the evening, so a move to e-ink seemed a good one. I was also intrigued to test Remarkable’s two core claims: the distraction free environment and the feeling of writing on paper.
It arrived, I was excited to try it, I was fairly impressed, and then… for a long while I didn’t use it. Which is never a good sign for a gadget girl like me. Recently I’ve been wondering why that is, so I dug it out again and gave it another go, and here are some thoughts on what I like and what I don’t like.
Note writing
I seriously can write some good notes on this thing! At first I was put off by my handwriting (no iPad-style smoothing so it’s a bit ‘warts and all’) but I got over that. The e-ink device and the friction of the screen surface, which is meant to emulate paper (more on that later), means I feel really engaged with what I’m writing. And the conversion of handwriting to text is pretty darn good, most of the time, although occasionally it blips completely and jumbles up lines – which is not so great. I really like how you can select pages to convert, and then email the resulting text. I have the email address for my DayOne journal stored in the Remarkable, so this is a great way to get my thoughts into my journal. Converting handwriting doesn’t permanently convert it (like Nebo for iPad, which is a one-way street), so you can write, email it off, and continue. All good. However…
Writing feel
This is, after all, one of the main selling points: the ‘this feels like paper’ thing. Well, it does feel like writing on paper. Except what is the ‘writing on paper’ experience, in reality? The Remarkable has got several pen settings, from mechanical pencil to ballpoint to fineliner, and each of these feel very different in real life, so it can’t possibly emulate them all. To me, it feels most like writing on toothy paper with a pencil, which feels great when sketching and making very rough notes. But, and this is a big but in my world, I don’t choose to write on tooth paper with a pencil; I choose to write on fairly smooth paper with a rollerball or gel pen, and therefore I’d prefer something that is just a little smoother that what the Remarkable offers. This is totally a matter of personal preference, of course, and I know that on the Facebook group some people are passionate about the writing feel. But for me, something with a bit more of a ‘glide’ to it would be perfect. And this brings me on to the stylus nib.
For my handwriting, the friction of the screen wears the nibs down quickly. Again, the RM user group on Facebook is divided in opinion on this. Some people claim they can make a nib last for months by adjusting their handwriting, but I find mine starts to wear down after just a couple of weeks. You can rejuvinate it with a nail file but it still feels increasingly like writing with a pencil stub and I find that super distracting. Not great for a device that claims to be distraction free. To address this, I’ve experimented with other pens and am currently settled on the Lamy EMR pen with a Wacom felt nib, which seems to last a lot longer.
Annotating PDFs
This was the core reason I bought the device and the experience on the whole is good. PDFs are easy to get onto the device using the Remarkable iOS app, although I find it an irritation that they always save to the root folder and then have to be moved. However, they display well, and annotations are easy to make. The only annotations that are possible are freehand written ones – there’s no text selection function – but it’s a replacement for paper so that is okay.
However, annotating PDFs usually means writing in the margins, close to the very edge of the document and therefore to the edge of the screen, and the RM doesn’t always perform well here; text can be distorted and appears offset from the tip of the pen. Nothing major, but again a distraction in what is meant to be a distraction-free device.
In addition, although the annotated PDFs sync well to my Mac or iOs devices using the Remarkable app, that’s as far as they go. There’s no underlying folder that you can index in other devices ,so if you want to use your documents for any other purpose you need to share them from the app as a new copy. That just doesn’t work well for my workflow – I like to keep annotated documents and related notes in my Notebooks app so that they can be filed alongside notes that I’ve made in other apps, so it’s just a pain to have to keep on top of the filing. And I find the thought of having to do so to be distracting.
Other gripes
I am constantly irritated by the way you have to select your pen every time you open a new PDF or a new notebook. 95% of the time, I want to use the fineliner, but this is not the default pen and I have to go in and select with every new PDF or notebook. Super irritating, as I always forget and then have undo what I’ve just written, change the pen and start again.
There is no Kindle style frontlight on this device. Again, people are passionate about keeping it this way and will recommend a clip on backlight. For my eyes, though, this creates a glare that is distracting, and I’d love a mild frontlight that just boosts the illumination for when I’m in darker lecture theatres or winding down in the evening.
Conclusion
This was not intended to be a full review but instead a collection of my thoughts on the Remarkable tablet. Do I like it? Yes, I do. But for the reasons I’ve noted above, I don’t find it as distraction free as it makes itself out to be. Perhaps if my way of working meant that I was happy to keep all my notes and annotations on the device, or if it would sync PDFs to selected folders in (say) DropBox, I’d use it more, but I just find myself slightly put off from using it. Most of these things are softawre related, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a future update.