The device is open. It's just an embedded linux device. You can ssh into it, and run arbitrary code. The SDK is based on Qt. You can also connect a keyboard to it over a USB-on-the-go port.
I have been imagining porting a lightweight Qt-based virtual terminal to the device and using it as an e-ink unix terminal. Alas, I have not yet had the cycles to complete this project.
It's funny how your comment immediately makes me want to buy it, because the description on the site with all these silly photos and such for some reason got me thinking like "looks kinda nice, but since it's obviously something very Apple-like, it will be as restrictive as it gets, I won't be able to use it without some obligatory shitty web-account and I probably even won't be able to read *.cbz comics on it, so... nah, no way I'm paying €400 for it, and it's not really worth to spend more time looking into it".
Now I'm not sure what effect this site has on the average customer, and if making it more selling for me would make it less selling for them, but they actually lost me, and after reading your comment I'm seriously likely to pre-order. And it's not about your positive evaluation, of course. So I've got a feeling all these marketing people do advertising wrong somehow.
I contacted their support about the openness of their device. This is their response in case others are interested:
Aug 28, 2020, 3:44 PM GMT+2
Hello there.
Users can gain root access to the device by using SSH, so the device is open for developing your own software.
The GPL and LGPL version 3 requires us to give users access to their own devices. It's part of the anti-tivoization clauses in the licenses.
A lot of our software is open-source. You'll find a lot of our open source code here: https://github.com/reMarkable/. If you're interested in developing for the reMarkable, a good place to start would be on here https://remarkable.engineering/deploy/.
Note that we do not currently provide any support for SSH related issues. Accessing the device and making changes through SSH is at the customers own risk.
I bought the ReMarkable 1 because I thought it was just a Linux device. It turned out to be not exactly true. Their whole interface is closed source and they use a (IIRC) closed but reverse-engineered format to store PDF metadata. I installed Syncthing to synchronize papers and sheet music but because of their metadata format it didn't work for me at all, I got annoyed, eventually stopped bothering and sent it back.
Also, their GUI/DE is closed so there's no (easy) way to extend it with nice functionality. In my opinion the software was the bad part about that device that lead to a really bad experience with that device.
The hardware was great though. Wasn't super fast but it was light, felt good. I was very excited when I first took it out of the box.
They did a lot of great stuff with the ReMarkable but unfortunately it felt a lot closer to the semi-open Android than the Linux on my desktop.
Boox devices are also very accessible as the run Android and you can install anything on them either from the Play store (requires manual setup at first) or F-droid, along with the usual adb access. I have the Nova Pro which I absolutely love. It has configurable screen refresh rates so it's possible to use a web browser with scrolling. You can install your favourite file sync app. Lately I've been using KDE connect to send/receive files. Writing on it is good and the notes app supports OCR that I found can make reasonable sense of my chicken scratches.
- What is the latest word (as of 2020) on reading Kindle books on the ReMarkable? Is there a tool that makes it easy to buy Kindle books and strip them of their DRM?
- Is the ReMarkable capable of running an open source OS behind the hood? Is it a hacker-friendly piece of hardware in case ReMarkable runs out of business in the future?
I was thinking about getting the ReMarkable 2 if only because my Kindle's display is too small. For ebooks it's okay but I do would like to be able to use an eink reader for sheet music as well.
The device is open -- does that extend to the notes and filesystem itself? I'm very interested in the ReMarkable 2, but I want to be able to write scripts to handle stuff like syncing.
If this is something where I know I can get good integration with Emacs/Org-mode on my desktop (letting me insert diagrams on the fly into org-mode files, making one searchable interface between handwritten notes and typed notes, etc), I'd be very tempted to preorder right now. Especially if the handwriting recognition stuff they have is something I could hook around.
This reminds me that what I'd really like in an ebook reader is something that will sync a local library down from 'the cloud' in some automated way over wifi, without having to manually go in and update or import or whatever with books like everything else I've seen. ReMarkable seems like it wouldn't be practical for that for lack of enough storage for my Calibre library, though.
If it had an SD/microSD reader, the openness would make me what to pre-order one. I can just imagine the 8GB internal storage quickly running out with all the extra stuff I'd want to do to it.
Look at u/rmhack on reddit. They managed to get a normal arm Linux image to boot on it.
My main complaints are that it's not encrypted at rest, and the only way to use cloud features are to go through reMarkable's cloud (and you can't host a private instance). Makes it really hard to get approved in an enterprise environment.
Your comment just made me buy it. I didn't realize it was an open device running linux. That sold me. There are probably some marketing lessons to be learned from these comments.
For anyone interested in this type of setup, I highly recommend considering the onyx book note 2, (or max 3, or nova 2) it runs android 9.1 with a relatively fast 8-core processor, have bluetooth and wifi, and I have found that the experience in termux is very good.
I currently use one with a brydge ipad keyboard which fits quite well.
> The device is open. It's just an embedded linux
> device. You can ssh into it, and run arbitrary code.
> The SDK is based on Qt.
I use a Barnes & Noble e-ink Nook (Kindle competitor) to run AnkiDroid [1][2]. I have tried to use some note-taking Android apps on the device, but they all had horrible feedback due to the very slow CPU and very limited memory of the device.
Is it possible to run either an Android app (AnkiDroid) or a Qt/Python Linux application (Anki) on the ReMarkable 2? If so, I would happily buy such a device.
You are say that the ReMarkable is open, but where is the GPLv2 code for the underlying Linux OS? As far as I can see there is nothing on the site that makes mention to it. That includes the Legal section which makes no mention of the GPL licensing.
Is there any open source (DIY) hardware that goes with these APIs? Since $400 seems a little steep for a white screen I suspect it is possible to DIY similar hardware too. Any ideas?
> I have been imagining porting a lightweight Qt-based virtual terminal to the device and using it as an e-ink unix terminal. Alas, I have not yet had the cycles to complete this project.
That would be really cool! I pre-ordered a RM2 (my 1st such device) and am in the November cohort... if you make time for said terminal, I'd love to know about it.
Fantastic. I didn’t see anything about this on their site (admittedly a small percent of users would know/care what this means.)
Do you know of any RSS or saved articles sync? I use Feedly right now. Would love to save Reader Mode versions of long form to read/annotate. Right now I print them but…a lot of paper.
I thought I would like using an ereader to read PDFs but the touch screen (on this kobo) actually really bothered me; I always felt like I had to be very careful where I put my fingers and was always accidentally turning pages.
Do you find that bothers you, or can you just hold it like a notebook?
That would be awesome. I have ordered the Remarkable and would like to use it as a dashboard connected to my computer. Just to display time, the calendar and other information which needs to be updated only very infrequently.
I sent mine back when I first got it (for a number of reasons) but this makes me want to re-buy one, I figured it would become hackable as I seem to remember the team saying they wanted to encourage it!
I almost impulse per-ordered the RM2 when I first read about the SD card mod here on HN. I decided to wait after hearing about the limitations as a reader and the slow software development. If you're considering the RM2 for anything other than a sketch/note pad, I highly encourage you to watch this fantastic review from My Deep Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iIAYMsugzM
I ultimately passed on the device for a few reasons:
1. The RM1 and 2 both don't allow file transfers as a mass storage device. If you want local, non cloud based transfer, you need to use a flaky local web UI that hasn't been improved in years
2. The internal storage still hasn't been updated from 8 (6 usable) GB. This is an obvious attempt to sell cloud storage in the future
3. While the hardware is amazing the software moves at a snail's pace. This is either management holding development back by trying to simplify the device out of existence or the team simply lacks the resources or ability to improve it
4. There has been almost no attempt to improve reader functionality in years. Things as simple as font resizing are 30x slower than on a Kindle
5. It seems obvious to me that management doesn't understand the target audience for the device
I recently bought the ReMarkable 1 (wasn't willing to wait for preorder on the 2, and the differences don't look that significant). I kinda love it: I'm a professor, and 99% of my use is in reading article PDFs---it's a vastly better experience than reading on an eyestrain-inducing glossy screens or printing off.
One major annoyance, though, is that it's clunky to switch between documents---I like to take notes in a separate document from the articles (mainly so I don't have to deal with the hassle of trying to export marked-up PDFs, which is a very suboptimal experience---the ios/mac apps are, uh, not good.). There's a pretty big lag there.
But the reading experience qua reading is so much nicer that I keep it anyway.
Well I just got absolutely pipelined by this website. Went from never hearing about it "hmm, what's this link on the top of HN?" to spending $700 on it in about 3 minutes. Good product, great marketing, excellent website, I guess.
I love my reMarkable — got the 1.0 once the price dropped due to 2.0.
e-Ink is a blessing after so much time on screens, and the rudiments make it quite hackable. So I get a device that pretty much CAN'T try to grab my attention, a calm device, and I can modify it to do more if I want.
(For example, since it can OCR and send notes, I've prototyped a little "message queue" on the other end to receive my notes, parse them ["TEXT Jake this is a text"], and do actions.)
I've even produced some custom e-ink maps which look great for no-phone navigation. (Feel free to let me know if that's interesting to you, happy to share an example and how.)
I've been interested in eink displays and eink readers for a long time. Kindle owner since version 1. But...
Is the ReMarkable really worth $500 ($400 + the $100 pencil which seems like a requirement)? For that amount you're getting a low end iPad which has greatly wider use cases. I understand that for the "paper on pencil" feel an iPad is no where near... but then again you can also just write using real paper and pencil.
Clearly I'm not the target demo, so what are the real target markets?
But no mention and video evidence of the pen input lag and precision, which is what's supposed to set this apart from other eink display solutions. The 1 has some lag, just enough to still be a nuisance: did the 2 fix that?
Would anyone here be interested in a eink phone running something like WebOS optimized for eink displays? I really feel WebOS was too early and PWAs make the barrier to entry much lower for a WebOS-like device.
How good is a ReMarkable as an ebook reader? I don't care that much about the writing, but having a large size ebook reader that can display A4 pdfs in acceptable quality would be a game changer for me...
I have the current version, and between my Kindle and iPad Pro and spending 10 hours per day in front of my laptop I don't use it as much.
However, there is no better device on this planet for reading long-form PDF documents, research papers, or scans of textbooks. It wins. I wish the annotations were more useful (they're sort of kept a separate layer) but the reading experience is great.
Andy Matuschak has some good notes on the current version here too:
Regarding the claim that it feels more like paper than the first version, the Engadget reviewer felt otherwise:
>The company says it used a new textured resin layer on top of the glass to make writing on the reMarkable 2 feel more like writing on paper, which I don't buy. If anything, the original reMarkable's screen had a more pronounced, paper-like grittiness that doesn't come through here. That's hardly a dealbreaker, though, because writing on the r2 still feels absolutely fantastic, I think this one strikes a better balance of tactility and flow. [0]
This looks so nice, and I've been desperate for years for a great, fast-refreshing e-ink device and/or monitor, but the closed ecosystem is so disappointing. Their 'avoid distractions' marketing is fine and good, but locking down the device makes it a non-starter for me. At the very least I'd need a feed reader I can use (without some workaround where I send stuff through the "remarkable cloud").
Am I reading things correctly that the only external interface to the device is through their cloud tool?
I showed this to my friends at work and one of them replied that she used a Rocketbook throughout grad school, suggested I check that out as a way of upgrading my note taking. Their products look very different from this but they’re also a fraction of the price with similar value proposition where basic note-taking is concerned. Anyone have any experience with them? This is a field I know nothing about.
Beyond the obvious differences to a tablet like the iPad, an interesting fact about the reMarkable is, that you can just ssh into the device to do your data exchange. Syncing documents should be as easy as writing some scripts on your PC. Which should appeal especially to Linux users.
I like my ReMarkable 1. I want to love it...but I'm not quite there yet. The company keeps focusing on improving the note-taking and drawing aspect of the device (which is awesome now!) but they haven't improved the reading experience to nearly the same degree. Reading eBooks, PDFs, etc is an acceptable experience, but there are many UX improvements they could make.
That said, they have been releasing updates for years and improving the experience. The writing experience is by far the best of any tablet I've ever personally used. It does feel like writing on paper. The 2.0 looks really slick.
Finally, the hackability of the device is awesome. You can SSH to it without having to enable any special settings, and start messing around with stuff right away.
I'm glad is in the front page. I own the first version and I'm quite happy and use it massively. I use it to read and annotate papers and technical books. This is for me what keeps it from perfection:
- Bigger screen would be great for my use case
- Software. As have been said repeatedly here the tablet is open. This is true in the sense that in order to comply with the GPL3 it's very easy to SSH to the tablet which runs Linux. This is awesome. However I think a little more support to developers would be great in the form of documentation instead of reverse engineering. Lot's of people think of ways of improving the software and this would make it much easier and better for end users (for example better file transfer, more file formats... in a reliable way)
Remarkable haven't yet delivered the 2.0 device. Let's first see when it appears on the market. I has been delayed twice so far. So far it's in "pre-order" mode.
I love my remarkable 1 but don’t use it very much because I don’t want to be tethered to yet another company’s cloud, and I want document syncing not to require another app or website. I won’t buy a R2 until they add support for one of the big cloud storage providers like Dropbox or OneDrive or gDrive or something.
The device itself is great; the OS is a little slow and takes a little getting used to navigate; recent updates made it better. The tactile feel is great.
Note that they're a bit behind on order processing due to covid-19. I bought one a few months ago and it's scheduled to be delivered in October. If you buy one today, it's scheduled for November delivery.
[+] [-] jbeard4|5 years ago|reply
Hacker News might be interested in the active development community around the device: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
The device is open. It's just an embedded linux device. You can ssh into it, and run arbitrary code. The SDK is based on Qt. You can also connect a keyboard to it over a USB-on-the-go port.
I have been imagining porting a lightweight Qt-based virtual terminal to the device and using it as an e-ink unix terminal. Alas, I have not yet had the cycles to complete this project.
[+] [-] krick|5 years ago|reply
Now I'm not sure what effect this site has on the average customer, and if making it more selling for me would make it less selling for them, but they actually lost me, and after reading your comment I'm seriously likely to pre-order. And it's not about your positive evaluation, of course. So I've got a feeling all these marketing people do advertising wrong somehow.
[+] [-] jrib|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranaexmachina|5 years ago|reply
Also, their GUI/DE is closed so there's no (easy) way to extend it with nice functionality. In my opinion the software was the bad part about that device that lead to a really bad experience with that device.
The hardware was great though. Wasn't super fast but it was light, felt good. I was very excited when I first took it out of the box.
They did a lot of great stuff with the ReMarkable but unfortunately it felt a lot closer to the semi-open Android than the Linux on my desktop.
[+] [-] davisr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jinnko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_827|5 years ago|reply
Feel free to tell them here: https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Continually impressed with this company.
[+] [-] kevinmgranger|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
- Is the ReMarkable capable of running an open source OS behind the hood? Is it a hacker-friendly piece of hardware in case ReMarkable runs out of business in the future?
I was thinking about getting the ReMarkable 2 if only because my Kindle's display is too small. For ebooks it's okay but I do would like to be able to use an eink reader for sheet music as well.
[+] [-] danShumway|5 years ago|reply
If this is something where I know I can get good integration with Emacs/Org-mode on my desktop (letting me insert diagrams on the fly into org-mode files, making one searchable interface between handwritten notes and typed notes, etc), I'd be very tempted to preorder right now. Especially if the handwriting recognition stuff they have is something I could hook around.
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorentis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teknoman117|5 years ago|reply
My main complaints are that it's not encrypted at rest, and the only way to use cloud features are to go through reMarkable's cloud (and you can't host a private instance). Makes it really hard to get approved in an enterprise environment.
[+] [-] astrojams|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MobiusHorizons|5 years ago|reply
I currently use one with a brydge ipad keyboard which fits quite well.
[+] [-] wyoh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|5 years ago|reply
I use a Barnes & Noble e-ink Nook (Kindle competitor) to run AnkiDroid [1][2]. I have tried to use some note-taking Android apps on the device, but they all had horrible feedback due to the very slow CPU and very limited memory of the device.
Is it possible to run either an Android app (AnkiDroid) or a Qt/Python Linux application (Anki) on the ReMarkable 2? If so, I would happily buy such a device.
[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
[+] [-] h0l0gr4ph1c|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cominous|5 years ago|reply
The problem with this project was the lack of a affordable e-ink display with a decent refresh rate.
Would love to see a real terminal on the ReMarkable. A terminal + vim + usb keyboard would be the perfect distaction-free writing tool.
[+] [-] soperj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobias2014|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahastore|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|5 years ago|reply
> I have been imagining porting a lightweight Qt-based virtual terminal to the device and using it as an e-ink unix terminal. Alas, I have not yet had the cycles to complete this project.
That would be really cool! I pre-ordered a RM2 (my 1st such device) and am in the November cohort... if you make time for said terminal, I'd love to know about it.
[+] [-] tyre|5 years ago|reply
Do you know of any RSS or saved articles sync? I use Feedly right now. Would love to save Reader Mode versions of long form to read/annotate. Right now I print them but…a lot of paper.
[+] [-] jberryman|5 years ago|reply
Do you find that bothers you, or can you just hold it like a notebook?
[+] [-] snarfy|5 years ago|reply
That's all I needed to hear. Preordered.
[+] [-] darau1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xs83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jron|5 years ago|reply
Full review: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSI9-gaSSmiXwb7Vjk5V...
I ultimately passed on the device for a few reasons:
1. The RM1 and 2 both don't allow file transfers as a mass storage device. If you want local, non cloud based transfer, you need to use a flaky local web UI that hasn't been improved in years
2. The internal storage still hasn't been updated from 8 (6 usable) GB. This is an obvious attempt to sell cloud storage in the future
3. While the hardware is amazing the software moves at a snail's pace. This is either management holding development back by trying to simplify the device out of existence or the team simply lacks the resources or ability to improve it
4. There has been almost no attempt to improve reader functionality in years. Things as simple as font resizing are 30x slower than on a Kindle
5. It seems obvious to me that management doesn't understand the target audience for the device
[+] [-] paultopia|5 years ago|reply
One major annoyance, though, is that it's clunky to switch between documents---I like to take notes in a separate document from the articles (mainly so I don't have to deal with the hassle of trying to export marked-up PDFs, which is a very suboptimal experience---the ios/mac apps are, uh, not good.). There's a pretty big lag there.
But the reading experience qua reading is so much nicer that I keep it anyway.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daguar|5 years ago|reply
e-Ink is a blessing after so much time on screens, and the rudiments make it quite hackable. So I get a device that pretty much CAN'T try to grab my attention, a calm device, and I can modify it to do more if I want.
(For example, since it can OCR and send notes, I've prototyped a little "message queue" on the other end to receive my notes, parse them ["TEXT Jake this is a text"], and do actions.)
I've even produced some custom e-ink maps which look great for no-phone navigation. (Feel free to let me know if that's interesting to you, happy to share an example and how.)
[+] [-] ShakataGaNai|5 years ago|reply
Is the ReMarkable really worth $500 ($400 + the $100 pencil which seems like a requirement)? For that amount you're getting a low end iPad which has greatly wider use cases. I understand that for the "paper on pencil" feel an iPad is no where near... but then again you can also just write using real paper and pencil.
Clearly I'm not the target demo, so what are the real target markets?
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraj_shah|5 years ago|reply
I know little about it, but it looks great too.
[+] [-] bgorman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roel_v|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jborichevskiy|5 years ago|reply
However, there is no better device on this planet for reading long-form PDF documents, research papers, or scans of textbooks. It wins. I wish the annotations were more useful (they're sort of kept a separate layer) but the reading experience is great.
Andy Matuschak has some good notes on the current version here too:
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/reMarkable
[+] [-] refresher|5 years ago|reply
>The company says it used a new textured resin layer on top of the glass to make writing on the reMarkable 2 feel more like writing on paper, which I don't buy. If anything, the original reMarkable's screen had a more pronounced, paper-like grittiness that doesn't come through here. That's hardly a dealbreaker, though, because writing on the r2 still feels absolutely fantastic, I think this one strikes a better balance of tactility and flow. [0]
[0] https://www.engadget.com/remarkable-2-tablet-e-ink-hands-on-...
[+] [-] nathcd|5 years ago|reply
Am I reading things correctly that the only external interface to the device is through their cloud tool?
[+] [-] sickcodebruh|5 years ago|reply
https://getrocketbook.com/products/rocketbook-core?variant=3...
Regarding the reMarkable, I’d probably be open to it if reviews indicated it was a premium eReader in addition to everything else.
[+] [-] _ph_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcchambers|5 years ago|reply
That said, they have been releasing updates for years and improving the experience. The writing experience is by far the best of any tablet I've ever personally used. It does feel like writing on paper. The 2.0 looks really slick.
Finally, the hackability of the device is awesome. You can SSH to it without having to enable any special settings, and start messing around with stuff right away.
[+] [-] plafl|5 years ago|reply
- Bigger screen would be great for my use case
- Software. As have been said repeatedly here the tablet is open. This is true in the sense that in order to comply with the GPL3 it's very easy to SSH to the tablet which runs Linux. This is awesome. However I think a little more support to developers would be great in the form of documentation instead of reverse engineering. Lot's of people think of ways of improving the software and this would make it much easier and better for end users (for example better file transfer, more file formats... in a reliable way)
Edit: formatting
[+] [-] haddr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efitz|5 years ago|reply
The device itself is great; the OS is a little slow and takes a little getting used to navigate; recent updates made it better. The tactile feel is great.
[+] [-] bla3|5 years ago|reply