I have a ReMarkable and really love it, mainly for taking it to meetings where I felt it was inapropriate to be stuck on a laptop infront of other people, it just feels more natural making notes on it as if I had paper and with the low latency it's great to write on.
I haven't had issues with the internal storage not being enough - but if I do, this is really interesting and I hope the hacker community around ReMarkable stays vibrant as it's such an interesting device.
Yeh the ReMarkable is one of my all time favourite purchases. I've been there since the beginning and watched as they really refine their software. I do wish however the new version had a bigger hard drive option.
There is a one-star review on Amazon [1] from 2018 talking about losing data, has that been addressed?
Another two-star review also from 2018 [2] talking about exported notes only being raster pictures instead of PDF (even more ideal is time-series encoded vector data inside the PDF as a side-channel that can be read back out so other software can perform their own post-capture analysis upon the user's interaction via the pen/eraser with raw pressure, tilt, coordinate, tip type, etc. data). But it looks like PDF now is possible, and the exporting problems can be worked around [3]?
How stable have you and others found the software in 2020 for sharing back out PDF annotations and raw "use it as a notepad"?
A one star review from 2018 is an anecdote that seems well out of the norm. I wouldn't draw too much from a single 2.5 year old review with very few similar experiences; especially when everyone else says the product is solid.
I find it to be completely reliable. It handles transient loss of wifi and loss of connectivity to their cloud, doing retries and so forth.
I have had 1 issue in my 2+ years of use where the device rebooted while I was in the middle of writing something, and when it came back, only my last couple of seconds of writing gesture were lost. I don't think about it from a reliability perspective.
I have been pushing data to mine as well, with a local amalgam that de-drms kindle books, convert to pdf, push to remarkable cloud, which is then retrieved by my device. Have done > 100 books, all good.
Really great device. Would contribute equity to them were such an option available.
In my experience, I am an academic and supervise numerous PhD/MSc students and interact with many different projects. With paper notes I always found it challenging to maintain a single line of notes for a specific topic (multiple notebooks? I would need 20 of them…). For the reMarkable I just have a virtual notebook for each project/student with a date at the top of each page as to when the meeting took place and it becomes trivial to keep track of. Not to mention that I can carry a whole library of research paper PDFs with annotations…
Not that it'd scale to your rather impressive needs - but I've found numbering pages in my books, and maintaining an index, to work well for keeping track of multiple subject threads in a single series of notebooks.
It can get a little complicated with references across multiple volumes, since unless you copy the entire index into each later volume, you have to check each book - but what I frequently find myself doing is referencing other volumes by page number in the actual content of notes, to simplify later lookups. That and knowing which volume contains which page numbers (I use a single type of notebook and they're 160 pages each, so e.g. page 210 is easily identified as being in volume 2) makes it pretty easy to keep track of the whole thread and retrieve whatever context I need at any given time.
Granted, this gets a little more complicated when you work sometimes from home and sometimes at the office; unless you carry all your notebooks from place to place, you can find yourself unable to follow a reference. But it's pretty rare in my experience to need to look back more than one volume, and in any case I intend to be strongly remote-first for the rest of my career, with all the money and effort I've put into setting up a maximally productive workspace in my home office during COVID.
It's an entirely reasonable question! The answer is, because I started this numbering scheme with the diary I began back at the start of 2018, and I'm more pleased that that's just about to reach page 1000 than I would be if it were about to reach page 100 of volume 5. Since I was already in the habit, it made sense to employ the same system in my work notebooks when I likewise standardized those.
In both cases, it also makes for a more compact scheme of reference, since I only need to write "pp. 380-382", rather than "vol. 3 pp 20-22" or "pp. 3/20-22" or some other such notation that requires an explicit volume number - not that that's not a somewhat post hoc reason, but I have found it to be convenient, and there's nothing wrong in any case with deriving some enjoyment from the fact that the very page numbers themselves reflect the extent to which I've developed journaling and notetaking into deliberate and durable practices in their own right. (Especially when I number the pages of a fresh volume, as part of the process of preparing it when I approach the end of the one I've been filling. Numbering from 1 to 180 over and over again seems like it'd get dull! Numbering from 999 to eleven hundred and whatever, as I did yesterday, is much more enjoyable.)
All that aside, I definitely don't have any argument for why the scheme I use is the scheme everyone should use. It's just what works best for me, and in the context of any running document someone maintains for their own use, what works best for them is what matters.
This is a complicated question because it really depends on your paper workflow.
I have been, for 30+ years, a heavy paper notebook writer, with a whole workflow- a superset of the bullet workflow for todos, but also supporting creative writing/brainstorming, and other workflows. I have spent untold...thousands...on pens, levenger paper, storage of square meters of old notebooks, the whole 9.
It took me a long time- calendar-wise- to transition to the remarkable, because the ergonomics are completely different. In some ways better, in some ways not as good, in many ways not as good from an all-digital perspective as it could be. But I have faith in the org in their choices going forward to build on the base that exists now.
It's not an ipad. It's not a consumption-first device. It's a production-first device.
It's very different from paper, and far from perfect for what it is, but I would not go back to paper. And I see it as an improvement to laptop for some uses cases. Depending on how the remarkable 2 feels I may get some for my kids.
I have a ReMarkable and really love it, mainly for taking it to meetings where I felt it was inapropriate to be stuck on a laptop infront of other people, it just feels more natural making notes on it as if I had paper and with the low latency it's great to write on.
I haven't had issues with the internal storage not being enough - but if I do, this is really interesting and I hope the hacker community around ReMarkable stays vibrant as it's such an interesting device.