Using two ReMarkables

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2024-11-06 01:30:03

I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or research trajectory that won't have any meaningful check-in until next year.

I bought the reMarkable 1 when it first came out in 2017, and was a pre-order customer of the reMarkable 2 when it dropped in 2020. When reMarkable announced and released the new Paper Pro this September, 2024, I had ordered it within an hour. This is partially due to the undeniable fetish that I have for tech, software and hardware alike, being a tinkerer and early adopter by nature. It is also because I resonate deeply with reMarkable's vision and design ethos, which is to recreate the tactile and organizational experience of paper in an electronic tablet. As I often remark to observers when they ask about my tablet(s), the reMarkable will not replace your iPad, and therein lies its beauty. It is at its best when you are jotting down notes as if it is paper, or reading and annotating a PDF or EPUB in place of having a printed copy in front of you.

ReMarkable's exquisite execution of this design imperative, to keep the thing as 'just' or 'better paper', has consequences in a digital workflow. Switching between a PDF being read/annotated and a notebook in which notes/thoughts are being transcribed is not the smoothest experience. One has to swipe down with two fingers from the top of the device (a somewhat error-prone operation given the e-ink's diminished responsiveness when compared to a touch-screen smart phone), select the notebook to switch to, and then wait a second or so for it to open. This is arguably a software deficiency that could be improved, but the fundamental problem can be articulated in terms of the 'better paper' design ethos: a reMarkable tablet is only one piece of paper at any given time. Switching between a notebook and a book therefore naturally has some overhead.