[brennen]

The reMarkable is a very impressive piece of hardware with unfortunately bad software and a business model that looks to be deteriorating (see recent moves to subscription services, etc.).

In physical/tactile terms, it's a really impressive writing experience, but I've found the utility of that so constrained by the absence of indexing and navigation features that I don't use it for much besides occasional drawings. It turns out that navigating a physical notebook works in ways that flipping through electronic pages can't keep up with without a lot of work on the interface.

As an e-reader, recent updates to the rendering have made it usable, though there are still sometimes hassles with display and getting documents onto the device. It's theoretically great to be able to annotate PDFs, but in practice not being able to easily navigate the annotations later makes it substantially worse than writing notes in the margins of a paper book.

I'm sure a lot of this can be improved with 3rd-party hacks, but it isn't designed as a platform and it feels only grudgingly open to modification, which seems like a huge missed opportunity. (Not to mention being yet another product built on open code that doesn't return the favor.) Being able to SSH to the device and poke around the filesystem is cool, but it mostly feels like a glimpse into how much more utility the whole thing could offer.

I'll use mine as long as it works, but I'm unlikely to buy another one and I can't in good faith recommend it for most users. I do know several folks who are happy with the narrow range of things it's good at, which is why I bought it in the first place. Personally, I'm placing my hopes for a more useful-to-me e-ink future on devices like the PineNote.