Un-reMarkable

Unremarkable.

Note: I THOUGHT my son found the un-ReMarkable pen. And I wrote the following. Sadly, before sending it to you, I tested the pen ... and it just LOOKS like the un-ReMarkable pen. It's actually some HP pen I had no idea I even had. So ... keep the following for when/if I find the un-remarkable pen, I'll ask for you to give it to me so I can edit it appropriately at that time.

Update: 6 weeks later ... my son finally found the pen. It, a black pen, had fallen into a dark shadow corner against a black object.

So do I now think remarkable is remarkable?

No. Maybe I'll change my mind as I try to use it again.

I'm still very disappointed that the folio is designed almost like they want you to lose the pen (presumably to buy a new one.) But I'll give them credit and say that is me being frustrated, and they likely just didn't think about the UX that the pen is so easy to accidentally knock off and lose,

And this was lost, as I thought, between my kitchen and my office. And while yes I have house bigger than the average person, and since COVID-19 I don't have someone physically here cleaning up after me so maybe my office area is messier than the average person's house ... still, if I lost it in such a short distance and it was lost for 6 weeks that I several times actively looked for it and even moved furniture ... clearly the folio and ideally the device itself, should be designed to make it hard to lose the pen, not make to make it sickeningly easy to brush off by accident.

My personal solution? I'm going to do a redneck fix. Put a velcro wrapper around the pen from the folio case back to front. But I shouldn't have had to. If they had just made the folio 9.3 mm wider - it would be very difficult to knock it off, and wouldn't make it any harder to use.

So my conclusion is still: unremarkable

Original Review:

I have decided for now, due to the problems I ran into, that I can summarize my review with a TL;DR 1 word summary:

Should you buy one? Perhaps. Read on if you want to read a 62 year old's thoughts[^1], a computer user since 1975, computer expert since 1980, computer power user since 1982. If you only want to read nice things about reMarkable … stop reading 2 paragraphs ago.

I recently decided to give 'reMarkable' a try. Remarkable is a E INK based tablet, that acts fundamentally as a pad of paper. It's got a textured surface so that it feels like real paper.

To give it a good test, i bought it with the 'best' pen (reMarkable Marker Plus for reMarkable 2), the 'best' (keyboard built in) case, and the, as of 2023.07 latest model - the reMarkable 2

The only thing I haven't done at this point is to use their cloud. I live in a poor internet zone, and the software my company writes for customers allows them to work ideally all the way from full fast connectivity with almost zero latency, to being out of internet reach for days or weeks at a time, and everything in between.

My plan, if I decide to continue with reMarkable, is to have our software interact with the device, so customers can draw drawings and then attach them to items they have in their database.

Once I feel I've learned all there is to learn offline, I'll try online and see what benefits I care about. But it has to first work for me extremely well offline to have any long term interest in it.

It has a 6x8 writing surface (technically a bit bigger but because of display of pages info etc.., the 6x8 is the practical size. (That's in Canadian/USA inches, for international readers and the very few people in Canada that think in cm, it is about 15x20) It also has a non-drawing, control panel bar along the left side (bottom if you use it with the keyboard)

Issues:

• Pen worked for 2 days, then started ghost writing. Changing the tip fixed it, but I have early concerns about reliability. It stopped working when I was 2 hours from my office and I didn't have one of the spare tips with me, so it was a 'catastrophic' failure, I couldn't edit any of my drawings. Fortunately I had the keyboard case so I could at least type in notes.

• Size, too big to fit in a pocket, so despite the marketing, it doesn't replace paper for me, I still carry by 3"x5" notebook and pen - which was the only paper I carried, so the reMarkable didn't REPLACE paper, it added one more device to all the devices I carry with me almost everywhere (laptop, 2 cell phones, iPad, Android and pen and paper.)

• The UI is absolutely weird, completely different than anything I've seen before, and I've worked on Multic's mainframes, IBM mainframes and mini computers, Pre DOS computer os's including pcode OS, CP/M, DOS 1.0, Windows starting with 0.9, Unix (many, but all text driven), Linux (many, both text only and GUI,) iOS, Android, Mac and at least 20 other mostly text based OS's in the 'good old' days of computing.

  ○ And despite that - I could not for the life of me figure out the UI for reMarkable. Even after 2 weeks, I don't get it. It seems they wanted to come up with some brand new UI - but all the good ideas were taken, so, since being different was more important than easy to learn, they went with some random different.

  ○ This is likely the #1 reason I won't be recommending it to customers. There aren't enough benefits to justify the weird UI.

  ○ Maybe once I figure it out, I'll try to write up a tutorial or quick explanation. I can tell you for sure that the instructions on their web sites don't work - they assume you FIRST figured out something, but I don't know what yet.

• The keyboard and the pencil/pen are not 'practical' to use on the same page extensively. When holding it, you naturally hold it in portrait mode, when writing, it just feels right in portrait, and the control icons reinforce that view, so the designers agree with me. But the keyboard works in landscape. This means that your 'page' ends up being different shaped and things just don't fit right when switching between kb and pen. Not terrible, and to be fair, this is a lesser issue than their totally weird UI in general, so I guess this one I'm listing as a minor issue that wouldn't really change a buy/no buy decision for me.

Problems I'm trying to resolve understand:

• How do you change a page name? Naming them page 1, page 2 etc.., is as close to useless as I can imagine - How do you move files within a group
• How do you move files outside a group (yes, if you FIRST set up in the awkward way they assume you do, then the convoluted instructions work, but man, there HAS to be an easier way that makes sense given the last 50 years of computers.)
• Isn't there a way to delete a page while it is up? Why do I have to go back to the page list and hope I'm deleting the correct page?
• How do I sync directly with my laptop without having internet connection, it doesn't seem to show up as a device like every other device in the world like a cell phone when I directly connect it to my computer with the USB C port. It also doesn't seem to have any WiFi visibility to other devices.
• What does the 'back' do? It seems to take you FORWARD to the selected page, rather than 'back' somewher.
• How do you get to a 'root' level of the device, like where settings might be accessed from.

Problems I don't see any resolution for with this version:

• The pen is easily knocked off its magnetic holder, I wish when the case was closed it would protect the pen from being disconnected (perhaps by having the spine be where the pen is stored. I have in 2 weeks 4 times gone looking for where the pen was lost, and about 15 times 'noticed' when it was knocked off accidentally - one of which I almost didn't notice, and I would have lost it permanently in the Superstore parking lot where it dropped. I 'thought' I heard something, so I looked around, didn't see anything, then just as I was about to move on, I noticed that the pen wasn't attached to the reMarkable, so I thought "oh, I must have dropped the pen" - and then I found it. I'm thinking I need to buy a spare pen for WHEN I lose this one - because it will make the reMarkable very un-remarkable when I don't have a pen for a week waiting for a new one to arrive - assuming I'm not travelling. One huge benefit of pen/pencil and paper is: You can buy replacement pens and pencils and paper almost anywhere for less than $2.
• Keyboard, unlike every other computer for the last 40 years, doesn't support the DVORAK layout. I switched in the 1980's to DVORAK because of Carpel Tunnel symptoms, and haven't had any symptoms in the 40 years since I switched. I have become so used to every computer in the world easily supporting DVORAK that I didn't even think about this when buying the keyboard. Stupid assumption. I know that DVORAK users are in the minority, but maybe a lawsuit (like was threatened against Microsoft back in the bad old days when they didn't offer a DVORAK option - they quickly added DVORAK) would solve it. And to be fair, if I ever decide to try to use the reMarkable again (see below), I'll probably suggest to the company that they should add an option to switch to DVORAK - they might listen, and it shouldn't be all that difficult for them to do. If they do, I'll erase all reference to this issue ;)

So this is a pretty negative review, and overall negative does match my feelings after 2 weeks of use. But there are some things that are nice:

• So if I was someone that still carried a 8x10" pad of paper or notebook or clipboard with me everywhere, then it would have been a replacement for 'paper' or at least that paper.
• The 'feel' of writing is much better than using a stylus on smooth glass (think cell phone.) Though I note that 'touch' still works on my cell phone, whereas with reMarkable nothing works when the pen is knocked off and lost.
• The battery life doesn't seem to cause me any problems, If I were drawing all day non-stop as a job, I might have a different opinion.
• The pen feels great in my hand. Well, until I lost it and turned the device into a paperweight.
• The pen snaps in place easily without fiddling like I had to do with my old Windows tablet. Sadly, when carrying it you can easily knock it off and lose it (have I made my point yet? No? … read on.)

Well, 1 day after I wrote my nice comments above, I lost the pen.

I decided, no big problem, I'll lose all the drawing capabilities, but I can still use the keyboard for the other stuff, this is my chance to really see how it works with a page that is text and drawings. But no, sadly because of something specific about me, I can't realistically use it, and the advanced thoughts I had (moving around the screen where there is handwriting, turns out to be a pipe dream.) I also found out/realized that the ignoring finger is a choice they made, not a technical limitation. When the screen in is KB mode, the icons rotate and can still be activated by finger, as can the sub menus. So the whole screen COULD react to touch, they COULD have a setting "ignore touch" which would force use of pen, but when you lose the pen you could set to false and then use touch.

Noting that I understand that, when using a pen you want to turn touch off, so your hand brushing the screen while writing can be ignored.

I guess they have just decided that selling pens and more pens is a profit center.

So why is the KB a problem for me specifically? You see, back in 1986 I started having symptoms of Carpel Tunnel syndrome. Every night as I drove home (I used to work in one of those horrible "WFO" places, that was before I switched to WFH) I would massage the backs of my hands, trying to get rid of the pain. I tried in desperation switching to DVORAK keyboard layout and amazingly, within 3 to 4 weeks, all symptoms of Carpel Tunnel disappeared, and I've had no issues in the nearly 40 years I've been using the DVORAK keyboard layout.

But here's the problem. I've gotten used to the fact that every real computer supports DVORAK layout. I set it up on my computers both 'personal' and servers. So today I went to use the reMarkable keyboard and realized to my horror, that in nearly 40 years, this was the 1st keyboard that I can't type on - it has that QWERTY layout and I can't find any way to set it up.

So, between losing the pen (now I can't draw and I can't print/write) and realizing the keyboard is nearly 40 years out of date (every device that has a 'real' keyboard has supported DVORAK) …

I now have a $1000 (the total cost I paid) paperweight. Sigh. Fortunately, my paper and pencil are still working (I lose LOTS of pens/pencils … but they are cheap to replace and I have lots of spares in my office, my entry way, my vehicle.

So, assuming that you type on a QWERTY keyboard - you won't have the utter failure I'm having with reMarkable (which my family has started calling the "unremarkable") but you better buy the keyboard with it because WHEN you lose your special pen - you will have no option other than to use the keyboard. And then … why would you even bother with a remarkable, a laptop or tablet is many times better in so many ways than the reMarkable.

Given I lost it so quick, and given the first point failed after only 2 days, I'm not willing to buy another one. I'm writing this off as a total waste of money. I'm not throwing good money after bad.

Maybe I'm just upset right now. Maybe I'll change my mind if and when I find the pen. But for now, my review is over with the one word summary: Unremarkable.

[^1] At times I keep thinking I've become a 'grumpy old man'. But then I remember that I hated and complained about bad designs going back at least to the 1960's when I was a young lad, complaining that the walk signal buttons had no feedback, instead they used NAK (negative Acknowledgement), so I guess I've been a grumpy old man since I was 6 years old. The good news is … I don't think I've become grumpier (yet?) since I was 6 years old. But I still hate user unfriendly designs, be they a walk light, buttons on a stove, poorly written books (no emoticons - how can I be expected to know the emotions in the writing they made me read in school if they are written in old English, circa 1980, with no emoticons?) or computers, even though I carry lots of computers including 2 cell phones with me almost everywhere.