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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

I've had my Remarkable for a little over two years also and it's easily my favorite tech gadget.

Occasionally I'd go from regular work (notes on a project file), to a business or client meeting (pull up notes from past meetings, update with new notes), to a volunteer meeting after work (pull up the previous week's training notes). At each point I had all the information I needed without having to juggle binders or loose-leaf papers.

And I love that I can rework my notes as I write them. So, during a meeting, first draft is just scribbling stuff down, then while people are busy listening to themselves talk, I can drag my scribbles around into priorities and tasks, add a diagram, clean a few things up. This is a completely different workflow from either plain paper or laptop/tablet, and it really works for me.

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What's the time interval from "closed" to "I can write a note" (carefully avoiding the word "off" because that might mean something different on an e-ink device).

I've tried a few things in the last couple of years to take my note taking electronic, and it turns out that delay is important - if there's too much delay I end up not jotting down the couple of quick notes I need to write. Wunderlist opens very quickly on my Android phone and I ended up unconsciously using it to write down quick things. OneNote (an otherwise great tool) take an age to open and get to the right page, so I end up not using it except at my desk.

The Remarkable (the older one that I have; not sure on the newer one) has two "off" modes: an "inactive" kind of mode, where it has just deactivated the screen from lack of use, and a "sleep/power-off" mode, where it's actually either gone to sleep or been powered off by the user or a low battery.

In the first mode, it comes back in about 1 second. It's enough that there's a bit of a lag and I don't like it if it happens right in the middle of something, but I haven't run into this very much.

In the second, it takes a few seconds to spin up, so I got into the habit of doing that before a meeting or whatever started. It takes about as much time to get it started up and navigate to the appropriate file as it would to fish a binder out of my bag and open it up to a blank page.

I appreciate the detailed response.

It's brilliant isn't it? They've managed to really do a good job of updating it.

The only things I would like are slightly longer battery life and more options for syncing with other services like Dropbox etc

The article mentions:

> The company is claiming a 3x boost to battery life, using the same 3,000 mAh battery, based on performance improvements throughout and a more efficient (but more powerful) dual-core ARM processor. That means two weeks of use and 90 days of standby. This is welcome news, because frankly the battery life and power management on the last one were not great.

The only thing that holds me from considering buying the remarkable is its size. If they would offer a 13 inch version, then I would consider doing that. Right now I am super happy with my sunny DPT-RP1.

What file format do the Sony's use? Is it cloud-based like the ReMarkable or can I manage the files myself locally and copy them over USB to my computer?

I'd love to have an e-ink tablet for hand writing and sketching ideas, but I'm not crash hot on it all being locked in to some closed ecosystem.

You can access the filesystem of the DPT-RP1 via wifi, bluetooth or USB. There is a nice python library to do all that [1].

[1] https://github.com/janten/dpt-rp1-py

FWIW, reMarkable device is accessible by ssh, so you can manage the files yourself. I don't think the format is well documented. I saw some articles about reverse engineering it, but it didn't feel well supported by any means. But if I wanted to use say a private GIT repo instead of rM cloud, I think that would not be very hard to set up.

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