Remarkable 2 review
Linux, sort of
The Remarkable 2 is a Linux system, you can even ssh into it.
But there’s a big pile of closed source on top of the Linux OS.
I was convinced to get the three USD per month sync plan, but I never got it working. You can run software that fakes the cloud endpoints so you can do local sync, but I haven’t tried it.
The hardware is great !
The Remarkable 2 has the lowest latency drawing I’ve seen on any e-ink tablet.
Battery life, great!
The battery life is excellent, I think I charge mine once every two weeks?
The 8 gigabytes of onboard storage means I can copy over all my research papers, PhD theses, and fiction books.
The interface is pretty much folders of PDFs, and that’s fine for drawing, making notes on PDFs, and reading books and papers.
The only way I could find to do a custom-ish interface was to generate a PDF calendar for each year.
Want to make your own Remarkable 2 software?
There’s a whole homebrew style scene, but it feels discouraged by the company who makes the Remarkable 2.
There’s the awesome-reMarkable repository that lists a bunch of nifty projects, last I checked it was mostly for the Remarkable 1, maybe there’s more now?
There are still lots of new active nifty projects like this streaming tool.
On the one hand it’s a low power Linux system so you get minimal busybox style tools when you ssh into the hardware.
There are also toolchains available to let you build software for the Remarkable 2, but I haven’t tried them.
No distractions!
On the other hand, it’s not a real Linux system, it doesn’t have a browser or any sort of chat app, so my focus isn’t stolen while I’m reading a book or paper.
Accessories are pricey
As for purchasing, I bought the folio and the pen that does erasing on the other end, and those were expensive. I wish I’d gotten just the hardware and an alternative pen.
This review was transcribed from a chat conversation, so not much structure, oh well.
I’d like to do more with my Remarkable 2, if you know of cool things I’m missing tell me about it on mastodon!