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reMarkable Paper Tablet
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 23, 2017 at 01:47 PM
Bill mentioned the following in the Things 3 thread:
> But then, I am an inveterate CRIMPer - I’ve just managed to (finally) persuade myself out of “investing” in the gorgeous but as yet unproven reMarkable “paper tablet”, a new device that uses eInk not just for reading, but for notes and sketching too (for interested CRIMPers, more details here: https://getremarkable.com). No doubt I’ll have to re-dissuade myself once it’s actually launched…
Being an inveterate CRIMPer myself, I had to follow the link. The reMarkable Paper Tablet does look impressive, but—unless I missed it somewhere—it doesn’t do optical character recognition of your hand-written notes. Without that, it seems to me that it really isn’t any better than actual paper notebooks for managing your notes. The main advantage of keeping your notes digitally is in having indexing and search functions. Maybe it isn’t possible to have accurate OCR on all the possible variations of handwriting, but without that, I can easily resist spending $500-800 on this unit, no matter how impressive it is.
Any other thoughts about this?
Steve Z.
Posted by Paul Korm
May 23, 2017 at 02:19 PM
A couple of statements on reMarkable’s site are interesting
The answer to most of the technical questions in their own FAQ: “Let’s just say the future of the reMarkable is bright and filled with many exciting possibilities. That being said, we never promise anything more than what we feature on our web pages and under product specifications.”
and
“No tablet has fewer functionalities than reMarkable (you can quote us on that). “
I think that pretty much sums it up. What you see is what is you get.
One of their technology partners is eInk—the Amazon Kindle Voyage uses eInk technology for its display. Though, the Voyage as 300 dbi resolution and the reMarkable device has 226 dpi—almost 25% lower resolution. Will that produce jaggies in the handwriting? Hard to tell. Some of the questions they posed themselves and did not answer is how to get info out of the device—into Dropbox, or Evernote, or wherever.
Sounds like for the price of admission you get a nice looking device, less feature rich than anything else in the market, and no commitment on what happens after you use it to take notes.
But it sure is pretty.
Posted by steveylang
May 23, 2017 at 03:58 PM
This looks like the new NoteSlate.
You’d think the OCR could be easily offloaded to a cloud server, even if the tablet itself couldn’t handle it.
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 24, 2017 at 08:17 AM
They talk about OCR in their extensive notes to the product - the reason they’re not offering it (yet) is that they haven’t found a solution that works well enough. But they’re certainly looking at it.
However, the reMarkable does communicate with desktops and mobiles of all kinds, so there’s no reason not to take extensive notes and then OCR them using any one of the many iOS or Android (or indeed macOS or Windows) apps available.
But I agree that built-in indexing and OCR would be even better. As it is, the reMarkable is setting itself up to be a great browsing or input device, but not an independent computing device on its own, as it were. But then, they don’t pretend that it is.
Why does it appeal to me? I suppose because I like to sketch a lot, or mix text with sketches when I’m “thinking”; the battery life is (probably) very good; it uses a super-sensitive stylus (developed with Wacom); it uses highly readable eInk—and because I’m a sucker for highly refined, limited-function devices that only do a few things, but do them extremely well…
>sigh<
Bill
Posted by Paul Korm
May 24, 2017 at 10:05 AM
Bill—save your pennies for a “real” computer that isn’t an island, and get that iPad Pro + Pencil you know is what you really want.