The reMarkable Paper Pure is, without a doubt, one of the nicest e-paper writing slates I’ve spent a lot of time with. The writing experience is more or less identical to the one found on the Paper Pros, and it’s an enormously well-crafted experience. I’m a big fan of the display and I’m fairly sure it’s more responsive to page swipes and refreshes than its siblings. Given what people will use this device for, I’m not even sure they’re going to miss the color display. I certainly didn’t, which even I was surprised about, but then color isn’t a necessity for a slate of this type. If you’re just handwriting long notes and editing, you’re probably not stopping every few scrawls to change ink color or highlight something anyway.
I’ll go further and say the Paper Pure is a far better device than the Paper Pro Move, which I found too small to be useful. In hindsight, the Move was likely a distraction if it held up engineering resources that could have gone to this. I’ve found it very easy to lean back in an armchair and scratch out my thoughts about this device in my time with the Pure. Plus, it’s an excellent e-reader that doesn’t burn out your eyes, and it’s great for journaling and sketching out the earliest design plans for projects.
reMarkable’s intentionality encompasses AI: The company won’t put any gen-AI crap on its gear for obvious reasons. But it does use machine learning to analyze your handwriting and, when you upload your documents to reMarkable’s sharing page, it’ll create AI summaries and extract action items. Plus, if you upload a file to, for instance, design website Miro, the AI will try and extract your writing and diagrams, digitizing them for the platform in question. These are all sensible and perfectly valid uses for the technology in my opinion, greasing the wheels of your workday rather than allowing you to outsource your thinking.
The basic stuff hasn’t changed. You create notebooks, using a variety of paper styles and templates. You can import .PDF and .EPUB files to read and amend, and can edit text directly if you can brave the on-screen keyboard. If your handwriting is clear enough (and mine rarely is) you can convert your scrawl to text, and the system will even let you search through your handwritten notes. Once done, you can share a .PDF of your work via email, Google Drive, Slack or various other third-party clients.
reMarkable supports native import of .DOCX files, which you’re able to edit with the stylus. When you want to export that file back to your computer, you’ll get an AI summary of the recommended changes. But, much like the exports of .PDF and .EPUB files, you’ll still have to manually copy-paste those amendments in your original document. Which, if I’m honest, doesn’t seem like a particularly efficient way of doing things, especially given who the company is pitching itself to now.
One of the new enterprise-friendly features is calendar integration, which will let you create and file meeting notes specific to each event. If it’s, say, a recurring meeting, the system will tie all of those together in the same workbook so you aren’t hunting for notes. Sadly, what you can’t do with this feature is automate some of the busywork that comes with using the slate as a day planner. There’s a small ecosystem of creators who sell custom .PDFs for use as planners or journals tailored to people’s specific use cases. This prompted reMarkable to launch Methods, a more dynamic system to do the same thing, but it lacks the joined up thinking that such a feature could benefit from. After all, I’d love it if my reMarkable planner automatically filled in the information from my integrated calendar.
For a while you’ve been able to share the screen of your reMarkable to a computer but that’s gotten a lot more useful. You can share it via a USB-C cable or wirelessly to the company’s web client to conduct presentations. Even better, and another sign of reMarkable’s elegant design choices, is that if you hover the stylus a few millimetres over the display, it’ll turn into a laser pointer with a slowly-diappearing light trail. So, if you need to highlight something in your presentation or brainstorming session, you can do so without affecting what’s on your workbook.
Unfortunately, all of these innovations are targeted so squarely at companies that regular folks might feel a bit elbowed out. It doesn’t help that while the device itself is a joy to use, it’s increasingly obvious the ecosystem that surrounds it is not. The friction inherent in moving a document on and off the slate, the extra steps in the workflow that it creates, are charming only in isolation.
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