Looks neat, but not being able to do something as simple as backup and sync without a monthly subscription makes this whole ecosystem a no go for me. Especially for a device that already costs $600-800.
Did they announce they're locking this new device? I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.
This feels like something some Chinese company can put out at much cheaper price, just a barebones large e-ink tablet, for hackers and tinkerers, with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription, where they just supply the HW and the community on GitHub builds the SW for it, a-la RPi.
The hardware is easy for China, but there is a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, or it exists but is too slow to be usable. If you want to work on that software, then the pinenote is a great deal, order one and get busing writing/optimizing code. If you want a tablet that works the ReMarkable has been around for years.
For those curious, the PineNote is currently $399 + shipping, but out of stock (and has been for some time, not even mentioned on the store home page that includes just about everything else).
As someone who's been following #pinenote for the last ~3 years this isn't true, it's "not dead yet" but Pine64 refuses to ship a second batch until they have a stable community distro to ship pre-flashed. Currently the hardware support itself is sorted, and the desktop integration just needs to be sorted out.
To be honest (and as a reMarkable 2 owner), the software side of reMarkable isn't a "out of this world" experience, it's basically "just enough" to do it's job but not more than that.
For me, it’s not even enough. My remarkable is sleeping in a drawer.
I totally understand the "it’s just a notebook and nothing else" limitation. Like : ok, you can’t do anything else than using it as a notebook. Why not. It’s how it’s marketed and I bought it for that. My issues comes from the fact that it’s actually a really dumb notebook where it could have been a "better" notebook.
I mean, it’s 2024 and they still don’t allow you to create links between pages.
And the global ergonomics are pretty barebones too. Navigation is slow. Ok, it’s e-ink, e-ink is slow at rendering full pages. So maybe at least don’t make your UX be a succession of screens ? It’s like designers forgot that you can create interfaces that don’t require to redraw the entire screen between each action.
This thing is both a really beautiful and enjoyable object (the writing feeling is truly incredible) and a daily frustration of intentional limitations and laziness.
It comes from the fact that I'm tired of subscriptions, and some SW being "tailored made" is not always synonymous with very high quality. Community developed FOSS SW can sometimes be better quality and more functional than commercial SW.
For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.
Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.
I do really like Plato for its superior performance and design, but it's lacking in features and documentation at this stage. KOReader feels like a flimsy hack written in lua, mainly because it is, but it does support SSH, two columns, grid view, more flexible gestures and extensions.
Why is it fascinating they suck at it? That's what every monopoly does, rentseek. It's not that they can't do better, it's that's there's no incentive for them to do before. Kind of like Google and their search getting worse and worse.
First of all, you are comparing two desktop environments that have been around for almost the same amount of time. KDE is extremely mature, both because of its age and its popularity. This is not the case with some niche e-ink products.
Secondly, you cannot even remotely compare the software needed for document rendering with the one for hand writing. The former is a very mature ecosystem and you can just write a UI on top of muPDF and port it to your platform to have a feature complete solution. The latter instead requires a wealth of expertise in how humans write and draw to develop both the drivers and the user land applications. Take the Librem phone or the PinePhone as exampleS. it took nothing to port Firefox or GIMP or DOOM to them, and yet the feel of their UI is terrible. Writing your PIN to unlock them lags, inputs are laggy, moving across the UI is slow and buggy. They are worse than the first iphone from almost 20 years ago, even though plenty of good developers have worked on them
> with some linux distro with touch support, unlocked bootloader and ssh, powered by a microcontroller with mainline linux support, no fancy apps, no cloud service and no subscription
I am also not a fan of the subscription model & pricing scheme but I guess that is how they want to pay back their investors. However, besides this they are (relatively speaking) also a pretty open company with a sizable community on github maitaning a lot of custom tools / applications. They do not provide official support for these modifications, but these tablets are definitely not locked-in like an ipad or impossible to tinker with because of obscure undocumented chinese hardware
The reMarkable company has been super adversarial to a lot of these tools, and the file standards and API have been moving goalposts for years. MOST of the tools on that Awesome list are defunct because the primary open source tools for getting data to the reMarkable cloud (rmapi and rmapy) are no longer maintained — the primary maintainers both cite reMarkable's moving target API as the final dealbreaker. SUPER sad.
I've been hoping to write my own now that the dust has settled, but it's definitely a MAJOR project yet to be done by the FOSS community.
I started tinkering with their cloud API and it's not a major work at all to create a client to it, I managed to create a POC uploading and managing files on their cloud in a weekend. I still need to polish it a little bit and make sure I cover all the possible operations but definitely doable.
Could consider a Kobo Elipsa. (I have a different Kobo device.) It runs some sort of Linux and you can install Koreader and a couple of other things. You can tweak a config file and set up the device without an account. Not sure how the writing experience compares to reMarkable, though (probably not favorably).
> I have a remarkable 2 and it's basically a stripped down version of Linux that you can SSH in and install whatever you want on it.
Could you for example mount a NFS or CIFS directory on the LAN, then access .PDFs and documents in other formats without signing to any external service? I was looking for something like that and have been waiting for years for the PineNote to become ready, usable and available, but have given up. Unfortunately all readers out there are tied to this or that cloud service subscription, and I would use them only locally.
(I call them readers because I don't need the note taking feature; being able to place bookmarks would be more than enough)
Probably. One bit of jank is that the rm2 api names pdfs with descriptor ids, and has a custom directory setup to track inking. I’m not sure if it will load ‘named’ pdfs easily or not, but an alt e reader should.
It’s open enough that I ran a Tailscale client node on it for a while. You do get root of a limited but not nerfed Linux machine when you buy one. What you don’t get is any support for maintaining your changes: they wipe most of the os on each update.
If you don’t mind a little bash scripting, I think it would be fairly easy to keep modifications synced up. Upshot : expect friction, not locks.
You can easily sync your handwritten notes to your computer and phone for free using the app. Once synced, you can back them up with your preferred method. The cloud service is designed to be a convenient, set-it-and-forget-it option.
Asking for a perpetual cloud synchronization at no cost is bold.
Why is there need for their cloud in the first place? I mean if I already own a Google Drive account, why should I need a pair of hands in the midpoint to drag my data around?
The Google drive integration is completely different to the connect one.
It’s not automatic, it’s manual.
It works essentially in the same way that the ‘send to email’ feature works. Which means if you make a change to a file, you have to delete the file on gdrive and reupload it.
Of course it's different. reMarkable are trying to leverage their own solution. It pays for them to make the user journey a little more awkward. But 3rd party integrations still exist and they do still work.
Bingo, Boox support WebDAV or FTP file sync and it's a breeze to use. It pains me how much of modern tech doesn't support the very standards half of it's built on. All to moat users into their domain.
You do know that Apple provides 5GB free cloud synchronization right? And Google also has 15GB free. For those who value convenience this is now table stakes to provide free cloud sync for small amount of data. And frankly 5GB is enough for handwritten notes.
i tried to use it a few months ago for the real time share of the screen. it didn’t work and also the files were not syncing with the service i am paying for. it wanted an update, but the update failed each time.
after digging (which is something i shouldn’t have wasted my time on), it seems that it lost the correct time because i didn’t power it for a while and there was no way to set the time manually. because of that, the signature for validating the firmware update was failing (it uses the time).
there was nothing i could do. it fixed itself few days later, after i gave up.
this is still unpolished so many years after the first release. i’m not sure i would recommend it to anyone. i’m sure i will trust it to work next time i will give it another chance.
This is my stance. I'm increasingly just not buying anything that isn't have FOSS. Artificial constraints that try to force a subscription are a hard no.
Good news for you! The ReMarkable is build on Linux and you can direct access to the whole system via SSH!! They even give you the su password so you can do _anything_ you want with it!
You can break the custom integrations that they created or even brick the whole device.
But nothing is stopping you from logging into the system and modifying anything you want. There's actually a whole ecosystem of 3rd party mods and software for the ReMarkable!
Yeah, the subscription and the fact that it can’t handle simple tasks pushed me away from buying the reMarkable 2. I opted for a more convenient tablet instead. Without those features, it’s just a fancy toy that can easily be replaced by a sheet of paper. Plus, it’s heavier and needs more care. Why spend almost a grand on a device when paper does the same job for free?
It’s amazing for reading technical papers, and I can store reams of them on there. Useful to be able to mark them up as I go. Also textbooks. So for me, it ends up being much lighter than what it replaces.
This makes perfect sense. I remember working with a pile of datasheets years ago, but my use cases have changed a lot since then. Now, I can’t find any other purpose for the device besides writing. Even if I cloned myself ten times, I still wouldn’t be able to justify the price tag.
