Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I am really enjoying the ReMarkable 2. I wish the display were more "actual" paper size of course (it's 10.3" diagonal (no margins) rather than US Letter's more typical 13.8" diagonal (no margins), or even a moleskin's 11" diagonal (no margins))

That said, sketching/writing are just as good as they are on the iPad Pro or Surface Pro. The pen/glass "feel" is no worse than those other two solutions either (but no better either). Very low latency, easy page switching. The iPad's rapid zoom in / zoom out is helpful in sketchpad for drawing details which epaper clearly has challenges with. But In terms of taking notes or writing down things as I'm coding and need to get back to? It's super awesome.

I've also put PDFs of data sheets on it which are easy to read (if a bit shrunk). The PDF reader is functional, same with the EPub viewer, would like to have the click the page to turn pages that the kindle and other apps on touch screens do.

Syncing with the computer is pretty seamless.

I don't like that it clears the screen and puts "reMarkable is sleeping" on the screen when I've had it sitting open with a PDF. There may be an option to change that but I haven't found it yet.

All in all I'm glad I got it and I've been using it pretty much every other day or so.

I'm surprised that you say the pen/glass fell is no better than IPad Pro or Surface Pro, in my opinion this is a difference like day and night. I also own the Sony epaper DPT-1 and while that one has a good feel it's not close to the remarkable (mind you it also has a different aim, i.e. only note-taking no drawing). But in my opinion the writing feel blows anything with a regular LCD or OLED display completely out of the water. The texture gives it the closest to real paper anywhere. That said it is a very limited device, so if you don't need something for note-taking and reading I would not get it.

I also agree with one of the previous posters, I wish this would be A4/Letter size like the Sony. I read mainly pdf articles and the size is just sufficient.

That Sony you mentioned is 1k USD. Is it locked down and unhackable for that price? I like my free software and Linux environments.

It is completely locked down and really can only take notes and read PDFs. However there is a community who managed to unlock it and it's mainly an android system underneath if I recall correctly. For me it's largely a device where I do my reading for work so I haven't really bothered trying to unlock it.

You can disable auto-sleep.

And you can modify the png for sleeping. Any transparent pixels will show the screen contents. I changed mine to completely cover the entire screen when sleeping. (I use a passcode and don’t want people seeing the screen contents)

To follow up on the other comments about changing the suspend image: https://remarkablewiki.com/tips/splashscreens

Just replace suspended.png with a small image and the rest of the screen is not covered on sleep :)

Does this work with transparency? Would be nice with a watermark indicating sleep state, but still being able to see the content.

From the wiki (posted by Eeems): "transparency, if present, is taken into account by the tablet (meaning that the former content remains visible where the PNG is transparent; this is used e.g. by sleeping.png in the 'light sleep' mode)."

Just tested it, yes, transparency works. The transparent pixels on the lock screen show the screen as it was before locking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com