Transcription
This is the Remarkable 2, and last year, every time I pulled it out, either in the office or with people, they asked me what it's like because it's supposed to replace your e-reader, your annotations, and also your note-taking. But does it really? That's a tough question to answer, and something we're going to try to explore in this long-term review.
You order your Remarkable 2 online, and the basic device is €399. However, you also need your pen and a case, so you end up spending way more to get a total package. You get a sleekly designed package that could make Apple jealous, and by the time you have the device running, you basically have an empty slate.
There are two pens you can choose from. The first one is the black pen with the eraser tip, which will set you back €130. However, this eraser tip is made out of plastic, and the shaft is very fragile; I actually broke mine. The other option is the white pen without the eraser tip, which costs €60. What I would advise is to buy the one with the eraser tip, even though it's more expensive, but protect it well and put it in some sort of sleeve.
There are basically four options to get stuff onto the device. The first one is to install an app on your computer, which sends documents from your computer to the Remarkable. The second option is to install an app on your smartphone, which does the same thing. The third option, which I use most, is a browser extension that changes the page you're currently reading onto the Remarkable. The final option is to use Dropbox or Google Drive integration.
There's one thing to keep in mind, though: you can't install or send any eBook to the Remarkable. Most eBooks you buy are protected by digital rights management (DRM), and the Remarkable doesn't support that. So, most eBooks you've downloaded or bought in the past won't be supported by the Remarkable, which is a significant disadvantage.
The second big disadvantage is that those sync services we talked about are rather expensive. You pay €8 a month to have Dropbox or Google Drive support. Now that we have documents on the device, you really start to see where the Remarkable shines, and that's in reading, taking annotations, and making highlights. No digital device I've used comes close to this experience.
But this is also where the greatness of the experience ends because after you've made these annotations or highlights, you want to get them off the device, and the Remarkable doesn't help you out there at all. They've made a layer on top of the document that contains the extra information, but they are unable to pull the information out and help you create a summary of the story you've just read.
The second thing the Remarkable should be really good at is taking notes, like in a notebook. I've tried it extensively, and it's nice to take notes on. You can't write really small, but that's okay. The problem again resides in the fact that I want to take those digital notes off and save them somewhere else so they're scannable and readable later. For that, they use optical character recognition (OCR), but the quality of the OCR isn't that good. So, if you take notes and want to have them digitalized, that doesn't really work. The way they do it is by sending you an email, which feels very outdated in the age of the cloud.
The third thing the Remarkable should be really good at is drawing, at least according to the adverts. I've given it to two drawing experts, and both said it's a nice experience, but it doesn't come close to anything you can do with a Wacom or Procreate on an iPad, so that's not really a use case either.
You might conclude that the Remarkable 2 sucks, and part of that is absolutely true. But after 12 months, it isn't collecting dust on my tech pile; I'm still using it every day. The funny thing is that the fact that it is a single-purpose device that doesn't do anything else and doesn't distract you in any way makes it very useful for in-depth reading and taking annotations. The fact that you have to then manually create those summaries takes some time but actually creates a moment of pause as well.
The fact that it's a distraction-free and single-purpose device is actually a selling point. I do think that the one field where the Remarkable could improve is getting those annotations and summaries off the device easily. They do face a lot of competition, though. The Onyx Book, for example, is a way better device at the same price point, which integrates much better with the modern cloud tools we have.
So, the main question might be: would I buy the Remarkable again? The answer to that is no. There are actually better competitors on the market right now, and the Onyx Book is the best example. It has the same size as the Remarkable, offers a very solid writing experience, and integrates much better with the cloud experience we're very used to in our offices nowadays. A device like this is very valuable and creates some really deep reading experiences, but this Remarkable, while very well marketed, might not be the best option out there right now.