ReMarkable Hands-On: This E Ink Tablet Gives Paper a Run for Its Money
If you want a screen that looks like honest-to-god pencil or pen on paper, a traditional backlit touchscreen isn't going to cut it. E Ink is pretty much the only way to go. So why is it that we haven't a tablet-and-stylus device go down this road before? Why haven't we gotten a Kindle with a pen? Because it's been impossible, until now. And boy, to see it in action is really a wonderful thing.
The reMarkable tablet, a 10.3-inch E Ink slab, first poked out its head in a crowdfunding campaign in late 2016. At that point it was only right to be skeptical. Crowdfunding campaigns for gadgets are notoriously iffy, and this one especially. E Ink is reknown for its high-contrast paperlike look, but also for its extremely high latency. You know that awkward flash when you flip pages on an old Kindle? That is because E Ink is very slow to update by its very nature, and this seemingly insurmountable impediment is why we've never seen a tablet like the reMarkable before, and why its pitch was frankly a little suspicious. But now the team behind the tablet has trotted out a prototype and after playing with it at the first press demos I can tell you that it is real and also wonderful.
The device itself is sturdy, clean, and minimal but also still a prototype, so the details may change. But it's designed to feel solid but also not draw attention to itself, both of which it does well. Honestly I hardly noticed the device itself because I was so mesmerized by what it was like to write on the thing.
The reMarkable team doesn't like to talk about the handful of technologies that make their instant drawing tricks possible, preferring to stay mum on the details until patents are in place, but it's reasonable to assume the trick is involves some sort of predictive wizardry. Whatever it is, it results in a drawing experience with imperceptible lag.
And that's just one of the aspects of the delightful experience. The feeling of the stylus against the screen isn't exactly like pencil on paper but it is pleasant and similar. You'd never confuse one for the other if you were blindfolded, but writing on the tablet is not worse-just subtly different. That's thanks in part to the fact that the stylus's nib actually grinds against the screen and wears away over time in order to give (or as a byproduct of) real, glorious friction. Fortunately, the tab will come with 10 spare nibs, though the reMarkable team admits they don't really know how long each one lasts yet. Also, just like a pencil, the stylus is mercifully unpowered, so there's no reason to ever worry about charging your pen. The tablet meanwhile, being E Ink, offers days of battery time.
Of course this is all just a party trick without software, and the reMarkable comes with a suite of tools that will be familiar to anyone who's used a service like Evernote. Your notes (or drawings or sketches) are stored as pages in notebooks, with each notebook being effectively limitless. The reMarkable tablet also has apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows, all of which provide entryways into you cloud notebook, so you can pull up reMarkable doodles on your iPhone, or load a PDF onto the tablet from your Windows computer and mark it up with the stylus.
The reMarkable supports PDFs, Epubs, and other document files for your marking up needs. When you scribble on one, the changes are saved in a separate "layer" as well, so even after serious highlight/redaction/whathaveyou you can still flip back to the pristine version. The reMarkable app can even stream your drawing to another device in real time, so you could make up a PDF live on a desktop screen at a meeting.
If there is one thing to knock the reMarkable on, it's also the thing worth praising it for: this is a gadget with one very specific purpose. It's not a tablet-it's a smart notebook. It has a very limited feature set, by design, which makes it kind of like sitting down with a typewriter in the age of the computer. Not that there isn't an appeal to that. But at a final price of $530 for the tablet and $80 for the pen (or $480 in a bundle if you preorder now), the reMarkable is pretty pricey for a tablet that can't do most things a tablet can.
On the low end, there are tablets like the Galaxy Tab A, which is roughly the same size, supports a stylus, and is about half the price. Writing on it won't feel nearly as good, but it'll work for basic markup. Tablets with a more serious take on stylus-drawing include the new Surface Pro and its fancy new stylus and the iPad Pro and its Pencil. These get into the $800 range and above, but they are also stellar tablets that can probably replace your entire computer.
With the reMarkable, you will be paying a real premium for a pretty small feature set and a certain, fine-tuned friction feeling. But if you are a notebook junkie who hates having notebooks around and is not especially attached to a particular favorite pen, it might just be worth it. Until then though, there's still plenty of paper around.
The reMarkable is available for preorder now with a October 2017 ship date.
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