But it does mean that they deliberately exclude bells and whistles that you would expect from a general-purpose software device. Though IMHO with every added feature, they are scope-creeping away from the spartan value prop.
FWIW the USB exposes it over a virtual network which lets you do fun stuff like SSH. But that's for fun, not serious.
Why would anyone spend $300+$80 for a Remarkable 2 when a Kobo Elipsa or Kindle Scribe is less and they are better at book reading, have features like a screen light and don't need a subscription to do things like cloud sync? Marginally better note taking feel?
(warning- jump scare!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcdxW2XF0v8
I just don't understand paying $40 more than a Kindle Scribe to cut out maybe 1 or 2 minor distractions.
But I think a product category has grown up around them and eaten some of the lunch that they decided not to eat. Even if they continue to differentiate themselves from other e-ink tablets, they are still in the same market category. So, competetively, if they differentiate on fewer features, they should probably do so at reduced cost.
Which puts them in a bind, because the hardware isn't simpler so the raw materials don't come cheaper. And even more irony, their software is custom, so it's not even cheaper to build or maintain than the Android based ones.
I have one, and the physical device is excellent, and the experience on it is great if you stay WAY in your lane (note taking on top of PDFs is probably the single strongest use case), but the software just always feels behind.
It's a replacement for my notebook - it's at least as secure as a physical notebook, and several times lighter (I'd need about 5 notebooks for everything I've got on it).
I now have a year's worth on notes in the remarkable, with no need to archive it. I look forward to being able to astound people with my instant recall of meeting notes from years ago ;)
I have actually used mine for sketching, too. It works - and the ability to zoom in for details is cool :)
I ended up getting an iPad Air with the pencil, and one of those matte screen protectors. The OS may be locked down, but I can still choose from a wide variety of note apps/clouds (currently use GoodNotes), and security is obviously top notch.
Except when you want to zoom, pan, not zoom/pan while writing or want an infinite canvas (I do). Or if you don't want your page's content to completely shift away from its background (irreversibly) when rotating the device. Those are just the most prominent bugs I remember, there were more.
I love the writing feel of E-Ink; the software makes it unusable.
You may be thinking "just use another app and hack up the SD to enable scribble mode when using it": Well - With Squid, anyway, pen strokes get lost due to suboptimal palm rejection (what the SDK reports seems to be different from what Android reports). Besides, the SDK only sends the stroke after it has been finished, which would be sub-optimal for potentially collaborative applications like Excalidraw.
Such a letdown. Software updates are great, you can even root it, Syncthing works well. But I mainly use my Nova 2 as a slightly fancier alternative to my Kindle that I'm much more worried about breaking.
I'm still excited about the potential. If anyone reading this is also interested in hacking around on Boox devices, let's talk, maybe: https://gitter.im/boox-users/community
There are still some bugs, but they greatly improved the pen experience.
Agreed. It needs specially designed software.
> If anyone reading this is also interested in hacking around on Boox devices, let's talk, maybe: https://gitter.im/boox-users/community
I am.
I recently got a Nova Air C and I'd like to do a few things with it. I'm mostly interested in getting an optimized terminal to use with the rooting feature, to replace the termux frontend by something that'd be better optimized for eink while reusing termux packaged tools.
There seems to be private APIs to do great software, at least on the Sony DPT, Mooink and Fujitsu Quaderno devices from the Sony spinoff Linfiny.
For example, check how this gets faster rewrites on a more limited zone: https://github.com/DPT-RP1/dpt-canvas
A terminal often writes to a small portion of the screen, so everything else could remain static and without ghosting, while this portion of the screen getting new characters would get fast text rewrites, a bit like how you when you write on the notetaking app, it shows immediately yet a bit fuzzy, then it's redrawn later in high quality.
In would require talking to these APIs (so maybe with different modes for different brands like Linfiny/Boox/Remarkable/Kindle) + maintaining a simple map of the terminal screen to do invalidation/refresh as needed.
Feel free to join - I find there to be no good community for this so far (there was one on Discord, but the owner nuked it).
> There seems to be private APIs to do great software
Boox has an SDK that is a little bit documented here: https://github.com/onyx-intl/OnyxAndroidDemo
It's a bit hard to understand what component to use for what, if my motivation allows and you're interested I can look for my notes about it. I've personally used the third-party PNGNote as a nice reference: https://github.com/karino2/PngNote
> A terminal often writes to a small portion of the screen, so everything else could remain static and without ghosting
The tablet already handles partial updates pretty well for me, including for Termux.
> while this portion of the screen getting new characters would get fast text rewrites, a bit like how you when you write on the notetaking app, it shows immediately yet a bit fuzzy, then it's redrawn later in high quality.
On a technical level you may be looking for something to automatically switch between one of the fast modes and normal mode/manually refresh the screen. However: Even in X mode the response is definitely not instant. I think the SDK allows directly painting pixels which should be a lot faster and very powerful, but I haven't seen anyone doing so in the wild so far. Let's definitely stay in contact if you're interested in that!
I think security is important, but unless you're going up against a state actor with physical access, I think this isn't a credible threat at this time.
There is no reason. It's dumb. Sync over wifi to your computer and phone and use MDNS to discover them.
re2 has been on my radar for at least a year at this point, but given the lack of features, price point, and the not so ideal size for PDF reading I'm still on the lookout. It's a nice looking device, but not quite there yet.
Now I use an android tablet that I locked down + synching and i couldn't be happier. The only thing I'm missing now is a good note taking app that writes my notes to a directory that can be synced with synching. Recent versions of android broke this for all apps except Google's Files app unfortunately.