A Norwegian hardware start-up company has unveiled plans to launch a new digital paper tablet called reMarkable that attempts to bring the look and feel of paper to a tablet-like device.
The reMarkable tablet combines a 10.3-inch E Ink Carta screen with a new type of screen technology called Canvas that claims to be the most paper-like and fastest digital paper around.
After watching the video it does indeed look like a very promising product.
But it’s not the first device of its kind. Others have failed with similar concepts. In some ways it’s a lot like the Sony DPT-S1, which was recently discontinued.
The success of the reMarkable tablet is all going to come down to the execution of the software and hardware.
The biggest advantage it has over similar products is how easy and natural writing appears to be in the video. It can be used for handwritten notes and accurate sketches.
The device also doubles as a giant ereader and can load PDFs and ePub ebooks wirelessly.
As far as specs, it has a 10.3-inch 1872 x 1404 resolution screen, which equates to 226 dpi. The screen is partially powered by E Ink Carta technology and it is “virtually unbreakable”.
It has a capacitive touchscreen and the stylus pen supports 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity.
The device has 8GB of internal storage space, with no mention of expandable storage. It has WiFi and the usual 1GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM.
The dimensions are 177 x 256 x 6.7mm ( 6.9 x 10.1 x .26 inches) and it weighs only 350 grams.
It has a custom Linux-based OS optimized for low-latency epaper.
Pre-orders are currently available for $379, but the product isn’t expected to start shipping until August 2017, and when’s the last time you heard of a brand new product actually launching on time…
The regular price of the reMarkable tablet is listed at $529; the pre-order price includes a bundle package with a pen and folio cover, which cost $79 each.
Great looking device, great introductory price. Though 10.3″… I found the 9.7″ Kindle DX to be a tad small for most technical PDFs unless I used Librerator or kindlepdfviewer software to remove margins.
Also, in the latter part of the video, some of the people were handwriting suspiciously slowly, so maybe inking is not quite so instantaneous.
I was curious about the responsiveness of the screen, so I spent a couple minutes writing out some sentences (lyrics to the Door’s Light my Fire), and figured out how my writing speed jibed with the 50-60 ms latency that reMarkable claims (that’s a screen update about 17 times per second). For my normal writing speed, the reMarkable screen will supposedly update about 7-8 times per written character. That seems sufficient to me. Full disclosure – I’ve pre-ordered a reMarkable.
I also feel the screen may be a little bit smaller to read A4 size scientific publications. Other than that, it will be the thing I have been looking for years.
Another 10.3″ 1872 x 1404 device along with the Boyue T103.
I wonder if we’ll see Onyx or other manufacturers come out with products with the same screen as well.
I like the idea!
Unlike the boyue T103, it seems to work…
Too steep. Almost want to buy two small ones and figure out how to synchronize pages so that (in landscape mode) one shows the top half of the page and the other shows the bottom.
Perfect for PDF, and foldable too!
Their CTO seems like a linux guru and has much published work on git hub. He also said in his blog that the will use Qt for pretty much everything and that he will most probably release a toolchain () along with the device.
You can read his post on his blog:
https://martinsandsmark.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/long-time-no-write/
How can i order this paper tablet?
The link is at the bottom of the article. Personally I’d wait until it actually gets released because there’s no guarantee that it will.
May I know that the device support Chinese and Japanese or not? Can I install Android App?
It runs Linux, not Android, and the device doesn’t even exist yet so who knows what languages it will support.
Tim, at the bottom of the article that I read, it said, “English Language Only.” Hopefully that will change if it catches on.
Backlight? Frontlight?
No light is a showstopper for me.
exactly the same issue made me stop thinking about pre-ordering
It needs a browser. Most sources of text you reed are online.
That’s totally wrong in my opinion. E-ink screens are not capable of providing a decent web experience (not at the moment), you need a good ecosystem that can transfer the web content that you need to read at the device easily. Apart from that the whole idea is that you can take it in a quiet place and read like a book, with no distractions. With a web browser, this will be destroyed.
Web browsers are a huge killer of battery especially on e-ink devices. I just want something with wireless syncing, that’s good enough for me.
When is it going to launch in India?
N i need it by septmber or october!!!
When it going to launch in India?
Expandable memory? Colors?
Can we get it in India
You’ll have to ask the company that sells them. Only they know what countries they plan to sell them to.
Please notify me when it is delivered in India
My question is: can font be augmented? One important advantage of e-readers over books is that the reader is free to enlarge the font, so it is a more comfortable read. In the video, there are old people reading what seemed tiny font. Can font be enlarged at will? if it can’t, that would be a deal breaker for me…
does it have audio? Didn’t see anything concerning audio or did I miss it.
No, most ereaders don’t support audio these days.
so, if i buy a book from Amazon, can i read it on this device? can it access my kindle library?
No, it doesn’t support Kindle books, only PDF and ePub.
Can it handle large PDF files (20G files)?
If so I think this would be great!
From the article:
****The device has 8GB of internal storage space, with no mention of expandable storage.****
Could be a problem.
Does this tablet require internet to function, and can I save my notes as seperate notebooks?
Hi – so when you write onit does it recognise the letters and produced a character based text or is it only an image?
I don’t remember seeing that kind of feature in the early demos (although it was shown in this video of an Onyx device) but it starts shipping next week so we’ll find out soon enough.
So it’s a bigger,improved Sharp e-note. Is the screen as dark though?
I never had a Sharp e-note. What kind of screen did it have?
Yes, it’s dark as hell, dark grey. If I knew it was this dark i wouldn’t had bought it.