The reMarkable Paper Pure is, without a doubt, one of the best e-paper writing slates I’ve spent a lot of time with. The writing experience is almost identical to that found in Paper Pros, and it’s very well designed. I’m a big fan of the display and I’m sure it’s more responsive to swipes and page refreshes than its siblings. Given what people will be using this device for, I’m not sure they’ll even miss the color display. Of course I did not, which even I was surprised about, but then the color is not necessary for a slate of this type. If you’re just writing long notes and editing, you probably don’t stop to make a few scratches to change the color of the ink or highlight something anyway.
I’m going to go ahead and say that Paper Pure is a much better tool than Paper Pro Move, which I found too little to help. In retrospect, the Move could have been a distraction if it had retained the engineering resources it could have achieved. I found it very easy to lean back in the chair and get my thoughts out on this device during my time with the Pure. Also, it’s a great e-reader that doesn’t burn your eyes, and it’s great for journaling and sketching out drafts of projects.
ReMarkable’s goal includes AI: The company won’t put any gen-AI crap in its gear for obvious reasons. But it uses machine learning to analyze your handwriting, and, when you upload your documents to ReMarkable’s sharing page, it will create AI summaries and issue action items. Also, if you upload a file, for example, to design a Miro website, the AI will try and extract your writing and drawings, digitizing them for the platform in question. All of these are perfectly reasonable and appropriate uses of technology in my opinion, greasing the wheels of your workday rather than allowing you to unleash your imagination.
The fundamentals have not changed. You create notebooks, using different paper styles and templates. You can import PDF and .EPUB files to read and edit, and you can edit text directly if you dare the on-screen keyboard. If your handwriting is clear enough (and mine rarely is) you can convert your scribbles to text, and the system will let you search through your handwritten notes. When you’re done, you can share a .PDF of your work via email, Google Drive, Slack or other third-party clients.
reMarkable supports native import of DOCX files, which you can edit with a stylus. If you want to send that file back to your computer, you’ll get an AI summary of the recommended changes. But, like exporting .PDF and EPUB files, you’ll still need to copy-paste those amendments into your original document. Which, if I’m being honest, doesn’t seem like the most efficient way to do things, especially given who the company is targeting now.
One of the new business-friendly features is calendar integration, which will allow you to create and enter meeting notes specific to each event. If it’s a meeting, say, a recurring meeting, the system will combine all of these into the same workbook so you don’t have to hunt for notes. Unfortunately, what you can’t do with this feature is automate some of the work associated with using Slate as a day planner. There is a small ecosystem of creators selling custom .PDFs for use as planners or journals designed for specific human use cases. This prompted Markable to introduce Methods, a very powerful system for doing the same thing, but it lacks the integrated thinking that such a feature would benefit from. By the way, I’d love it if my reminder planner automatically filled in information from my integrated calendar.
For a while you were able to share your Notepad screen to a computer but that’s become more useful. You can share it with a USB-C cable or wirelessly in the company’s web client to make presentations. Even better, and another sign of ReMarkable’s good design choices, is that if you move the tile a few millimeters over the display, it will turn into a laser pointer with a light path that appears slowly. So, if you need to highlight something in your presentation or workshop, you can do so without disturbing your workbook.
Unfortunately, all of these innovations are so targeted at corporations that ordinary people may feel elbowed out. It doesn’t help that while the device itself is a joy to use, the ecosystem around it is clearly lacking. The friction inherent in moving and moving a document on a slide, additional steps in the workflow we create, is only attractive in isolation.
