gemini://ur.gs/blog/remarkable/

I've had my eye on the ReMarkable e-ink tablets for a while now, but could never quite justify getting one - at over £300 for the ReMarkable 2, plus another £100 for the pen, they're really quite pricey.

Some internal calculus or another finally shifted at the end of last week, and I now own a shiny refurb model. It seems indistinguishable from new, and pushed the price down by ~10%, to £299. I think that, coupled with my 10-year-old Kobo eReader getting worse and worse at establishing a USB connection, combined to make the purchase seem almost reasonable. So, one more Linux-running gadget in the house.

Initial impression: it's ab so lu te ly gorgeous. Writing on it feels amazing, especially in "fineliner" or "calligraphy pen" modes. With real pens on real paper, my handwriting is atrocious. Somehow, on the ReMarkable, it's actually quite readable. I'm left-handed, so having the ink be virtual is its own special treat.

I did a couple of little test drawings as well, although my skills there are even worse than my handwriting. The pencil mode is good for this, and with the pen that has the eraser on the back end, the constant tweaking I have to do for proportion and scale felt very natural. I'm sure it would have been a frustrating experience without that, so it's a good choice of upgrade.

I'm currently reading Sue Harrison's Ivory Carver series, so I popped the epub for the third book on and read a little bit. The Kobo's screen is absolutely tiny by comparison, so reading on this, with maybe 3x the physical screen area, felt mindblowingly comfortable. Not having to jiggle the wire to get it to charge or upload books was wonderful too, of course.

The UI feels really zippy and responsive, which is quite the feat on an eInk display. I'm not sure how they managed it, but I never feel like I'm waiting for something to load, it's just... there.

Some of this will be the "ooh shiny new" factor, but we immediately started doing collaborative things on it - noughts and crosses is the obvious one, but it also comes with pseudo graph paper that makes playing an old game from childhood - "dots and boxes" - easy. In the evening, jotting down takeaway menu choices for three also felt very natural, just passing it around with its pen.

Since the pen is only useful with this device, it doesn't get lost or taken away or used for other things. I never have a clue where my actual pens are.

I haven't SSH'd into it yet, but it is apparently just a very normal Linux system under the hood, with the UI written using Qt. It looks eminently hackable, and I'm looking forward to digging into that a bit more.

There's no web browser on it. I ummed and aaaahed over whether this belonged here or in the next section, but in the end, I decided I really like the lack of distraction when I'm on it. There's a project to add a Gemini browser, which might be a reasonable fit - I need to look into it more.

ReMarkable are trying to sell cloudy services alongside the device, but - unlike the Kobo - creating an account is optional, so I skipped it and have nothing to say about the attendant services. There is a project to fake out the API and allow you to have your own self-hosted services (except for the handwriting recognition, which is palmed off to another third party), but I've not set it up yet. Seems promising, though.

I'm still salty about the pricing, and particularly of the pen. Naïvely, I'd expect such a thing to cost £10-£15. What witchcraft does it contain that justifies 10x that? Is it just because they can? Why does it have a nib that gets worn down over time? Is that a requirement of the technology, or are they just creating recurring revenue for themselves? Genuine questions, because I don't know the design constraints here. Maybe it's actually reasonable.

The cover is definitely overpriced, and I decided to do without. Apparently, lots of other covers fit perfectly well. There are also other options for the pens, but I only discovered that after placing the order!

The base system could do with another £100 or so off the price as well, to make it value for money in my eyes - and recall that I absolutely love reading, writing, and drawing on it, to the point where I immediately prefer it to real paper. Ah well.

Even though it's a regular Linux system under the hood, the kernel changes haven't been mainlined. Again, I only found out about this after it had arrived, and it does make me uncomfortable - it's the main reason I avoided buying a Gemini PDA, for instance, even though it's exactly the form factor I love.

It sounds like the required changes aren't extensive, so perhaps I'll try to put some effort into it, but it's just... disappointing. If they're not supported by a mainline kernel, computers are generally e-waste on arrival, due to the security holes. Fortunately, the ReMarkable is primarily an offline device - it does have a wifi module, but without the cloud sync, all it's good for is OTA firmware updates. I've taken it off the network for now, and will leave it off until the security sitution is resolved.

It feels sturdy, but I can't help but think it's going to end up split into two halves at some point. Maybe it'll feel more secure once it's got a cover around it!

The screen doesn't completely refresh after you've erased something, so there's a faint ghost image left behind. This can be a bit distracting, especially when your first doodles are a bit rude! Hopefully I'll get used to this in time, it's just a limitation of the technology.

I think some of the preloaded software is proprietary. It looks like it can be swapped out, it's just... effort. The device is so open in so many other ways, it feels like an misstep. What do they gain by keeping it closed? The hardware is the novel bit, not a simple drawing application and a basic document viewer.

I can already tell exactly how the ReMarkable is going to fit into my life - when I'm on a call, or working on a problem, I have a pad of paper next to me, where I scribble down what's happening or being talked about. It's a habit I picked up in 2006, working at a BT call centre - it's going to make an awesome scratchpad.

I'm hopeful that having it will let me progress with drawing. The ease of reworking bits, compared to paper, is a big plus here.

The main place people take notes is in classes, which for me, means Español. It will definitely be useful if I go back to live classes, and I've done a few revision exercises on it already - conjugation tables, mostly. It'd be interesting to see if Anki could run sensibly on it. In theory, i'm starting a masters course in September, where it would also be really useful.

It will absolutely completely replace my Kobo for reading eBooks. That will go on the bookshelf for others, unless I brick it by experimenting with KOReader and open firmware (perhaps postmarketOS, perhaps Debian). Given the issues with the USB port, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have another decade in it.

All that said, however, it's just too expensive for what it does. I'm going to keep it anyway, but if I'd tried it out in person before buying it, I probably wouldn't have put the order in.

If you've got money to burn, you might like one - it feels like the kind of thing your average geminaut might like. A regular student would hugely benefit from having one, but I can't help but feel their money would be better spent elsewhere.

The PineNote might end up being a better option in general, though - on paper, it's a similar kind of device, but it's still at the preorder stage:

Hopefully, the two communities will be able to cross-pollinate on software, in the same way that phosh is getting love from both pinephone and librem people. Time will tell!

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs

ReMarkable

The good

The Bad

The ugly (truth)