> It is marketed as a sketch/note pad and that's about it. The e-reader feature is like the youtube functionality on a Switch. It's there because "lolwhynot" and little more.

I personally disagree with this. I almost bought one because I wanted a good notebook and a lot of notes I write these days is specifically related to ebooks and pdf documentation that I work against. I almost ordered one after seeing this post.

However, from the review it appears like this will be impossible to annotate documents with. I want to be able to highlight text on an epub (like I can on my kindle) and write notes to reference later about that section. I want to draw some diagrams as I'm reading the book to make sure I'm understanding code/workflows properly, etc...

I'm not sure why that's so out of the realm for a notebook style device.

Drawing and marking up PDFs works really well, I do this with math textbooks frequently, but you're correct that the highlighting is nothing more than a "drawing" You can't go to the pages you've highlighted, or even extract text you've highlighted.

It's almost equivalent to being able to write directly on a textbook, however you can export your marked up document as a PDF.

Take a look at Onyx Boox gen. "2" devices, Nova 2 and esp. Max 2, may be interesting to you. (Not affiliated.)

I had never heard of this brand before, interesting. The Note 2 looks almost exactly like what I want.

epub gets converted to pdf internally on the device which can be annotated. I have found it is easier in the long run to do this myself with Calibre on my desktop or laptop.

Whatever the Remarkable is marketed as, it's an e-reader.

Pretty much by definition people buying e-readers are buying them to read with.

Clearly the Surface/iPad are not comparable to e-screens for that specific purpose and the obvious UX (usability) fail in the Remarkable in that regard means there is still a significant market gap for people who want an e-reader which bridges those two worlds, particularly (for me and many others) reading technical manuals.

> it's an e-reader

It isn't though. It's a note taking device and marketed as such. Heck, when it was released, the e-reader functionality was even more deficient than it is today and barely mentioned. It's a note taking device and marketed as such. They improved the e-reader aspect a lot since then, so now it's kind of usuable as one, sortoff, but it's very much not an e-reader first.

To be fair to you, they are pretty keen on stressing that, while marketing within the e-reader segment.

Conceding the point to you though means that there is still clearly a gap for those of us who want to read technical manuals (unless there is a device that somebody can recommend) between the brilliant linear-reading experience of e-readers and the smooth larger screen random-access UX experience of tablets like those you cite.

Absolutely, though the gap is somewhat niche. Even for e-readers, the amount of people who still care about e-ink is getting smaller. In my peer group everyone moved to ipads or whatever (I don't know how they can stand it, but...).