Jonathan Dowland: Remarkable
My Remarkable tablet, displaying my 2025 planner.
During my PhD, on a sunny summer’s day, I copied some papers to read onto an iPad
and cycled down to an outdoor cafe next to the beach. armed with a coffee and
an ice cream, I sat and enjoyed the warmth. The only problem was that due to the
bright sunlight, I couldn’t see a damn thing.
In 2021
I decided to take the plunge and buy the Remarkable 2 that has been heavily
advertised at the time. Over the next four or so years, I made good use of it
to
read papers;
read drafts of my own papers and chapters;
read a small number of technical books;
use as a daily planner;
take meeting notes for work, PhD and later, personal matters.
I didn’t buy the remarkable stylus or folio cover instead opting for a (at the
time, slightly cheaper) LAMY AL-star
EMR.
And a fantastic fabric sleeve cover from Emmerson
Gray.
I installed a hack which let me use the Lamy’s button to activate an eraser and
also added a bunch of other tweaks. I wouldn’t recommend that specific hack
anymore as there are safer alternatives (personally untested, but e.g. https://github.com/isaacwisdom/RemarkableLamyEraser)
Pros: the writing experience is unparalleled. Excellent. I enjoy writing with
fountain pens on good paper but that experience comes with inky fingers, dried
up nibs, and a growing pile of paper notebooks. The remarkable is very nearly
as good without those drawbacks.
Cons: lower contrast than black on white paper and no built in illumination. It
needs good light to read. Almost the opposite problem to the iPad! I’ve tried a
limited number of external clip on lights but nothing is frictionless to use.
The traditional two-column, wide margin formatting for academic papers is a bad
fit for the remarkable’s size (just as it is for computer display sizes. Really
is it good for anything people use anymore?). You can pinch to zoom which is
OK, or pre-process papers (with e.g. Briss) to reframe them to be more suitable but that’s
laborious.
The newer model, the Remarkable Paper Pro, might address both those issues: its bigger; has
illumination and has also added colour which would be a nice to have. It’s also
a lot more expensive.
I had considered selling on the tablet after I finished my PhD. My current plan,
inspired to some extent by my former colleague
Aleksey Shipilëv, who makes great use of his,
is to have a go at using it more often, to see if it continues to provide value
for me: more noodling out thoughts for work tasks, more drawings (e.g. plans for
3D models) and more reading of tech books.
