reMarkable review

I've had my reMarkable Paper Pro Move for just over 6 weeks now, so how's it going?

It's had a good tryout: taking notes at a science fiction convention, on a couple of plane trips, and on a train journey.

My first serious use was at the science fiction convention.  The note taking went well, but I was surprised at the short battery life (about half a day of full on writing), given it is advertised to last much longer.  However, the convention rooms are typically dimmed to make it easier to see the speakers, and so I needed to use the backlight to see what I was doing, and this does drain the battery quite quickly.  The plane rides and train journey were much brighter, and I could easily take notes without using the backlight, and the battery seeming lasts forever then.  On those journeys I was mainly using it to take notes on a non-fiction book I was reading, and to sketch some diagrams when thinking about some technical ideas.  It's a bit small for sketching, but okay for simple figures.

At the convention, I was taking notes seated without anything to rest the notebook on.  Its small size was helpful here, as it is easily graspable.  After several hours of holding it, however, it does start to bite into my fingers.  On the planes and train, I could use the "table" provided, and it was fine.  The train was a little shaky at times, and so the erase option was put to good use!

There are several pen tools avaialable: ball-point, fineliner, calligraphy, marker, pencil, brush, highlighter, shader, each in different thicknesses, each with a different behaviour.  There are also several page backgrounds: plain, lined, squared.  I played around a bit, and eventually settled on the medium thickness fineliner on narrow lined paper for ordinary writing.  

The writing feel is good, but, despite the advertising, I would not say that it feels just like writing on paper, unless maybe you are writing on a single sheet of thin paper on a hard surface.  It's certainly not like writing in a notebook.  But it's also certainly far superior to writing with a stylus on a tablet.  

One issue for me is that the marker attaches magnetically to the right side of the notebook.  I'm left-handed.  So if I want to take notes intermittently (which I do particularly when reading), I can either lay the marker down and potentially lose it, or keep reaching across the device to attach and detach it.  However, as a lefty I am totally used to the world not being built for me in so many ways that this is a relatively minor inconvenience.

It's easy to add folders, notes, new pages to notes, and to rename and rearrange things.  Having some structure is better than having a bunch of random notes in a heap.

There's a handwriting to text conversion feature.  This is surprisingly good, given I have notoriously bad handwriting.  (I am expecting/hoping that my handwriting might improve after using this for a while, just so that I can exploit the conversion more easily.)  It doesn't always work, but occasionally it works when even I can't easily read what I have written!  But if you use the conversion and it mis-converts things, it can tricky to recover what the reality was.  To get round this, I use the desktop app on my PC.  The notebook syncs with this very smoothly.  On the PC, I go to the handwritten page, convert to text, ctrl-A ctrl-C ctrl-Z, so I have selected and copied all the text then immediately reverted to the handwriting form.  I paste the text into the relevant Evernote or Obsidan note, then lightly edit where needed, referring back to the handwritten version if required. I keep the handwritten form on the notebook.  (If you don't ctrl-Z to undo the conversion immediately, you can't get it back later.)

This desktop app and accompanying cloud storage requires a subscription.  Buying 2 years at a time works out to £2.99/month.  Whether you want this depends on whether you are happy to risk keeping your notes on the notebook without backup.  I, on the other hand, backup my backups.

There are some online tutorials on the product website, ranging from introductory (how to make folders and notes) to more advanced (how to use it in various scenarios, none of which are relevant to me, however).

So, overall, I am definitely happy with this.  It isn't perfect, but then paper isn't perfect either.  It's very light and portable, easy to use, a good feel to the writing process, and the handwriting recognition means the end of transcribing notes.  I will continue to use my laptop for taking notes in seminars and lectures (I can type faster than I can write legibly), and ordinary paper for sketching larger diagrams at home.  But for notes on the go, this is the device for me.