My Remarkable tablet, displaying my 2025 planner.
During my PhD, on a sunny summer’s day, I copied some papers to read onto an iPad and cycled down to an outdoor cafe next to the beach. armed with a coffee and an ice cream, I sat and enjoyed the warmth. The only problem was that due to the bright sunlight, I couldn’t see a damn thing.
In 2021 I decided to take the plunge and buy the Remarkable 2 that has been heavily advertised at the time. Over the next four or so years, I made good use of it to read papers; read drafts of my own papers and chapters; read a small number of technical books; use as a daily planner; take meeting notes for work, PhD and later, personal matters.
I didn’t buy the remark…
My Remarkable tablet, displaying my 2025 planner.
During my PhD, on a sunny summer’s day, I copied some papers to read onto an iPad and cycled down to an outdoor cafe next to the beach. armed with a coffee and an ice cream, I sat and enjoyed the warmth. The only problem was that due to the bright sunlight, I couldn’t see a damn thing.
In 2021 I decided to take the plunge and buy the Remarkable 2 that has been heavily advertised at the time. Over the next four or so years, I made good use of it to read papers; read drafts of my own papers and chapters; read a small number of technical books; use as a daily planner; take meeting notes for work, PhD and later, personal matters.
I didn’t buy the remarkable stylus or folio cover instead opting for a (at the time, slightly cheaper) LAMY AL-star EMR. And a fantastic fabric sleeve cover from Emmerson Gray.
I installed a hack which let me use the Lamy’s button to activate an eraser and also added a bunch of other tweaks. I wouldn’t recommend that specific hack anymore as there are safer alternatives (personally untested, but e.g. https://github.com/isaacwisdom/RemarkableLamyEraser)
Pros: the writing experience is unparalleled. Excellent. I enjoy writing with fountain pens on good paper but that experience comes with inky fingers, dried up nibs, and a growing pile of paper notebooks. The remarkable is very nearly as good without those drawbacks.
Cons: lower contrast than black on white paper and no built in illumination. It needs good light to read. Almost the opposite problem to the iPad! I’ve tried a limited number of external clip on lights but nothing is frictionless to use.
The traditional two-column, wide margin formatting for academic papers is a bad fit for the remarkable’s size (just as it is for computer display sizes. Really is it good for anything people use anymore?). You can pinch to zoom which is OK, or pre-process papers (with e.g. Briss) to reframe them to be more suitable but that’s laborious.
The newer model, the Remarkable Paper Pro, might address both those issues: its bigger; has illumination and has also added colour which would be a nice to have. It’s also a lot more expensive.
I had considered selling on the tablet after I finished my PhD. My current plan, inspired to some extent by my former colleague Aleksey Shipilëv, who makes great use of his, is to have a go at using it more often, to see if it continues to provide value for me: more noodling out thoughts for work tasks, more drawings (e.g. plans for 3D models) and more reading of tech books.