ReMarkable e-Ink sketching slate pitched at "paper people"
reMarkable's 10.3" tablet has an e-ink display with a paper-like texture, a digital pencil with 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, and promises to finally replace all that paper in your workspace. The pitch: read, write and sketch, all on one gadget.
Unlike traditional paper, reMarkable connects to the digital world when you need it to. Your thoughts, whether they’re words or sketches, are instantly synced to reMarkable’s cloud service and made available on all your devices. Documents and ebooks are easily transferred for reading and reviewing with pen in hand. reMarkable connects to the internet for easy sharing and collaboration across devices. You can even take notes on one device and have it appear on a second device, in real time.
It's 10.2" by 6.9" and a quarter inch thick. It weighs less than a pound, and the 1872 x 1404 pixel display works out at 225 pixels per inch. It runs Linux (not Android, though) and has an ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 512MB of RAM and WiFi.
It claims a latency of 55ms and the demo video shows performance similar to the iPad Pro, which they say has 60ms latency. Wacom tablet hardware polls at <20ms, and AnandTech measured the Surface Pro's effective latency at 97ms; desktop operating systems and especially Photoshop tend to bloat what the hardware can do.
ReMarkable's slate is $379 and they hope to ship in summer 2017.
They've got the design right—listen to Gaius Baltar explain the cold pressed-style surface texture in the video. Now it just has to live up to the technical expectations and show up in timely fashion.
Competition: the smaller but cheaper $200 Noteslate, which blew its original ship date this summer. Sony's $600+ Digital Paper looks very similar to reMarkable and has been out a few years, but is oriented more to institutional use and there's a general NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMERS vibe about how they're selling it. Has anyone tried the even-pricier Onyx? Or, indeed, the unnervingly cheapo $100 DigitalMemo?
Note: "Your thoughts, whether words or sketches, are instantly synced to reMarkable’s cloud service." What a sentence. Make sure that's optional, guys!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naTxqt1wVxc