Nothing remarkable about the reMarkable Paper Tablet: a disastrous reading experience
Review of the reMarkable Paper Tablet from a reader’s perspective
The punny ‘remarkably unremarkable reMarkable’ line at first was getting on my nerves and hinted at malicious and dishonest competition which was supposedly set on sinking the emergent Norwegian paper tablet ship, but after more than a month of using the device for reading and occasional annotating, I subscribe to the pun and do not recommend buying this device for reading. I’ll try to elaborate on the reasons in what follows below. I apologise for the substandard quality of the photos and hope they’ll help illustrate my points.
Preliminaries
I stumbled upon a YouTube advertisement in the midst of searching for a more or less versatile device for reading true PDF files and annotating them where necessary. Besides, it seemed like a good idea to make use of reMarkable’s epub functionality to release my faithful Sony PRS-950 Daily Edition—a not too new (2010–2011) but still robust and reliable reading device—from its daily burdens and give it a well-deserved rest. Here is that fateful advert, embellished with British English accent and otherwise flawlessly done to attract ‘paper people’:
‘Reading shows reMarkable at its best’, says the ad. I beg to differ. The product slogan further assures potential buyers that the gadget is intended for _reading_, writing, and sketching, with the reading experience put to the forefront. This, I think, is plain misinformation.
I pre-ordered reMarkable in mid-April at USD 425 and was expecting it to be delivered to my door in late September, as were all other buyers from the second pre-order line. The company, however, announced that it was having some production issues and postponed the delivery. No big business, I thought, I don’t mind waiting if product quality is at stake. Eventually, a DHL guy delivered the package on November 11th (even though the notification claimed that the delivery is planned on November 9th, but this is obviously not reMarkable’s fault).
The shipment set me back another hundred, so the total price of getting my hands at this wonder of modern technology was USD 525.
For your information: I am aware of the pricing in this product category and did my homework before deciding on the purchase by studying this useful table, among other sources. I used the gadget as my only reading device for close to a month. Since I work in the academia, I mostly needed to cope with text-layered PDFs, sometimes with heavy formatting, with the ability to make notes / bookmarks and quickly transfer the files between the device and PC (in essence, I have nothing against reMarkable’s proprietary cloud per se). I reserved reading books in epub for the hours of academic inactivity.
My findings are detailed below.
File transfer obstacles that shouldn’t be there in the first place
The first thing you want to do with your new device is to send some files through and check them out. My routine when using Sony Daily Edition is this: I download a book from the internet to my Downloads folder, connect my Sony via a USB cable and use either a file manager (Total Commander in my case) or Calibre for the file to reach its destination in the reader’s internal memory. Simple enough.
Interaction with PC: misadventures begin
With reMarkable, however, the default way to transfer the files is by using the company’s own intermediary application, whose quality is best described with this screenshot taken on my Windows 7 machine:
Truth be told: I immediately contacted the reMarkable support team with this nuisance. The reply came in a couple of days. Says Paul:
Nov 14, 12:52 CET
Dear Dmytro,
To solve this, you can try to delete the reMarkable folder from your registry.
To enter registry settings:
Press Windows button + R.
Type “regedit”.
Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\remarkable
and delete the remarkable folder.
Then download the installation file and reinstall the Desktop app. Please make sure that your antivirus is disabled.
Thank you for your suggestions for new features. Unfortunately I cannot say if such features will be implemented soon, at this point.
Hopefully this will be of use. Have a nice day.Your reMarkable Team
As thankful as I am for this standardised reply, it never solved the issue and, for the time being, I had to use my partner’s Windows 10 machine to transfer my files. None too user-friendly, especially given that restrictions on Windows 7 weren’t formally announced. It was only mentioned that users might have problems, and a recipe was given (the standard one, as above), but that was all.
There exists, however, another, more direct way to send your files, which is still in beta (which is strange given that it was bound to be popular with many users who are ill at ease with cloud solutions). Notice how the letters of the toggle cover part of the address so it becomes difficult to decipher:
There’s still another way to get at the address, even though it’s hard to find as it’s placed in the About section of the settings:
Time for another catch: as soon as you input 10.11.99.1 into the browser, you’re likely to get nowhere. I struggled with it for a couple of days, trying different browsers and machines, all to no avail. The problem vanished as soon as I had the idea to ditch the reMarkable cable and use another one instead. It worked!
An appalingly bad Android app
As if this mess wasn’t bad enough, reMarkable’s Android application adds to disappointment in that it just doesn’t work. Every time I try to get a standard PDF file located in the phone’s memory to the cloud I see the following screen:
The issue is not limited to my user case. With a 2.3 rating on Google Play and a barrage of negative reviews, the developers must have a lot of food for thought:
Enough with this! Let’s get down to reading…
Reading PDFs: nothing to write home about
It could well be that I totally miss the idea of a device for ‘paper people’. What if an ideal device for this target group should be as basic and dumb as paper itself—with no advanced navigation except page thumbnails (to give paper its due, you can easily leaf through a book, which is not the case with a PDF book you’re reading with reMarkable), no in-text search, and no bookmarks? Then, I must say, the reMarkable team have done a spectacular job: the device is in many respects indistinguishable from your ordinary sheet of paper.
Interlude: the Canvas display—the ace of aces?
I remember that it has a sharp and crispy Canvas display. No doubt about it, the technology has gone a long way forward since I last upgraded my e-reading experience to Sony Daily Edition. Now see this:
The photos for comparison were taken with an 18 MP Blackberry Priv camera, and they show what I can see with a naked eye: the Sony Daily Edition screen is less grey. Anyway, I would have a hard time picking up the winner between these two screens. I now move back to the reading experience.
Finding your book
A hard nut to crack, especially if you have hundreds of them on your device. I’ve downloaded about twenty so far, and this is the default grid view I see when I want to open one of the books:
If you carefully look at the photo, you’ll see that these are not book covers that are displayed on these thumbnails but rather the last pages that I opened. I doubt if this is a good solution as it is of almost no help in finding the exact book—particularly so if the book contains nothing but text.
You can switch into list view, in which case you’ll see a screen like this:
Here you can at least read the whole file name, but the fact remains:
reMarkable does not read or display metadata
—unlike Sony Daily Edition (or, I strongly suspect, any other modern ereader), which shows Halliday’s book (others as well) in the following way, with the official book title and author below:
If you have hundreds of titles in your device, it is often useful to search for what interests you.
With reMarkable you’ll have to search manually, as no search functionality has been implemented so far.
In-book search (which doesn’t exist)
Working with books on a large-screen device is unlike reading a novel for pleasure. A typical PDF, with its rich formatting, abundance of graphs and multi-layered table of contents is primarily a source of information you need to retrieve—for your work, studies or whatever purpose you have in mind. Let’s have a look at how reMarkable handles the main task of academic reading by re-creating my reading experience. Halliday’s textbook will serve well for our purposes.
When you open a new book from the menu, what you see is the first page. So far so good:
Indeed, you can find nothing to complain, but let’s remember we’re still at page one and this is a textbook, not an Arts Illustrated issue, and we have to work with it. Say I’m familiar with Halliday’s theory and only need to refresh my memory on one of the topics, namely grammatical metaphor. To find this word combination in Sony Daily Edition, you need to press Options, choose Search, type your query and click Enter. The result appears almost immediately and you can move back and forth between the instances:
Let’s try out the same function in reMarkable… if you chance to find it. Because it’s not there. In other words,
this expensive device for _reading_, writing, and sketching doesn’t provide you with any way to search through a book and doesn’t recognise text layers at all!
No table of contents
This part is fairly short for I have nothing much to say: the creators of the device for _reading_ couldn’t be bothered to introduce the table of contents, and the only way for you to get the idea of a book structure is to turn pages forward until you stumble upon this:
If you think that you can find at least one hyperlink to conveniently move to the part of the book that interests you, you’re sadly mistaken. It’s just a page.
The slab was hailed as ‘the closest thing to paper since paper’. Given the lack of most reading features, the slogan sounds like a travesty of itself.
Moving around in Thumbnail / List View and by page number
The lack of basic ebook functionality is a major turn-off for me—serious enough to consider parting with the ‘paper tablet’. Still, there are some aspects to the device which the unsuspecting customer needs to know about.
Suppose you know which page you need exactly (which is far less likely than knowing what word or phrase you’re looking for, but still). Click on the Thumbnail View icon in the top left corner:
and you move to the list of thumbnails:
By swiping up and down, you can find your way inside the book. On several occasions, however, the device froze while I was, perhaps too vigorously, swiping to my destination. Maybe thumbnails will do when you have a fairly short manual (especially if it features lots of illustrations), but for my particular purpose it was useless. By clicking on Display in the top right corner you move to the List View:
By tapping on dots on the right, you can select pages and email (‘share’) them where you see fit:
After playing with view modes for a while, you might want to go to a particular page number you have in mind. You look at the top right corner of the screen and see Go to page. Tap on it, and Page (A — Z) will appear against the black background just above. Tap on it, and the letter (!) keyboard will pop up below:
You tap on 123 and finally, a couple of unnecessary clicks on, can input the number. To compare it to Sony Daily Edition:
Let’s crop it!
Every now and then you read a book with large margins which is in need of cropping to enhance reading experience. To do that, tap on the three dots in the top left corner:
which takes you to this menu:
Tap on Crop — and you’ll move to a neat cropping zone with nothing but a frame which you can adjust by dragging at any of the four corners:
The cropping remains in place when you turn pages and even after you’ve opened another book. However, I’ve detected two troubles so far.
Trouble 1: the cropping function is good when it works. Oftentimes, however, it throws a tantrum and randomly moves the page sideways or downward, so that part of the text becomes hidden. I don’t have an illustration of this behaviour at hand, but I’ve witnessed that systematically with virtually every book I cropped.
Trouble 2: the consequence of #1. Suppose you read a text and make notes in it (after all, the device is for writing as much as reading). This is how you might annotate it:
And the following photo shows what happens when cropping resets at its own will:
Most of your notes become a mess. To top it all off, the text becomes hard to read as well. It can only be cured by erasing your notes one page at a time. This persistent glitch completely ruins an otherwise pleasurable experience.
Reading PDFs. Verdict
Lots of glitches and absence of basic features for working with text make reading PDF documents a disastrous experience to the extent that I found myself using my Sony Daily Edition in landscape view more and more often to read books I originally thought I would work with on reMarkable.
Want to read epub books on reMarkable? Better don’t
While I find more and more scientific books offered in epub (including works such as The Language Files 12, with intricate formatting), the format, as I see it, is still primarily reserved for fiction and non-fiction, where what you might expect is a certain aesthetic feel to the font and careful approach to styling. Primarily, I want to be sure that a device displays a file exactly as intended by its creator. We’ll now see how reMarkable handles the job, using the meticulously prepared Complete Works of Joseph Conrad as a test file:
It is immediately apparent that
reMarkable does not ‘see’ the epub formatting and only delivers the basic text.
It’s even more clear from the comparison of how the table of contents is displayed on the two devices (NOTE: by this I mean the third page in the test file; while Sony Daily Edition is able to display a table of contents whenever you need it, reMarkable sadly lacks this functionality, exactly as it does with PDFs):
The items in the table of contents on the left are not clickable:
since reMarkable doesn’t recognise links in epub documents, it’s impossible to read footnotes that are often there.
That was enough for me to delete the epub book from reMarkable and give up the attempts to come to terms with this device as far as reading goes.
A final note about reading epubs:
reMarkable doesn’t recognise textual layer in epub (nor does it in PDF, as detailed above) and searching is impossible.
A few scattered notes
Stylus
The stylus looks and feels good. The rubberized plastic is comfortable to hold. However, the thing is extremely fragile: it accidentally fell to the wooden floor from the height of 0.75 m and a small piece of plastic chipped off at the tip:
Landscape view is not what you think it is
Before using reMarkable, I took it for granted that you switch into Landscape view to change the orientation of the book. This device, however, doesn’t work that way and after tapping on the three dots and choosing Landscape you get this:
The page stays intact; the location of the tools changes instead. I can imagine this being convenient for drawing, but those who designed the function to be used inside a book clearly didn’t have readers in mind.
Sloppy interface: continued
When the juice is running out of your reMarkable battery while you’re reading, there’s no way you can forget to charge the device the sooner the better because of this black square, conveniently placed to hinder your reading:
Verdict
reMarkable, you’re obviously good at marketing a half-baked product like the device I’ve reviewed above. You’re good at persuading ‘paper people’ that they need a gadget that is not yet ready for them. Your software is mostly dysfunctional, and the device firmware (Codex version 0.0.4.81) hasn’t been updated since I got the device, not even once. With a barrage of complaints on your official Facebook page and (I suspect) an equal amount of emails you receive, you still seem to favour the only response:
Unfortunately <we> cannot say if such features will be implemented soon, at this point.
This is NOT a device for comfortable, undistracted reading: its myriad glitches and shortcomings kill all the pleasure that reading is supposed to bring.
As things stand, I don’t recommend reMarkable for ‘paper people’.
