Andrew Cunningham
Our main criticism of Amazon’s Kindle Scribe when it launched in late 2022 — and one that still largely holds up — was that it felt like a large e-reader with writing functionality tacked on rather than a tablet designed specifically for writing and note-taking. While Amazon’s hardware is arguably better (and certainly more affordable), we definitely wanted software that was closer to what’s available on the reMarkable 2 tablet.
The reMarkable 2 isn’t quite as concerned with e-reader capabilities, though it does support EPUB and PDF documents; it’s focused almost entirely on taking and organizing notes in various formats. And now, reMarkable (the company) has come out with a new reMarkable (the tablet), one that attempts to catch up to and even surpass Amazon’s hardware, while still keeping the focus on writing.
Writing is fun
The new $579 reMarkable Paper Plus is an evolution of the previous design: slightly larger and heavier, but with a much larger 11.8-inch display (up from 10.3 inches in the reMarkable 2) that also adds a front-lit display and color e-ink support. Where most color e-readers use E Ink’s Kaleido technology, which offers faster page refresh times but comparatively dull, washed-out colors, the reMarkable Paper Pro uses E Ink Gallery, which offers richer color reproduction at the expense of refresh rate.
Other small quality improvements improve the writing experience; there’s slightly less space between the surface of the “paper” and the tip of the pen, and writing latency has been nearly halved, from 21 ms to 12 ms. The new Marker attachment is also now an active pen rather than an electromagnetic resonance (EMR) pen—like the newer Apple Pencils, it has a small battery that charges by magnetically attaching the Marker to the side of the tablet.
Andrew Cunningham
Unfortunately, you do lose compatibility with the wider spectrum of EMR accessories, as we discovered when we tried to use the new Marker to sketch on the screen of a Kindle Scribe and when we tried to use the Scribe's EMR pen on the reMarkable Paper Pro.
But what you get in return is a digital pen experience that feels more like writing with a pen on paper than anything else I’ve tried, whether you’re talking about older reMarkable tablets, the Scribe, Microsoft’s Surface Pro, or Apple’s latest iPads. When writing, you get the responsiveness and fluidity of the Apple Pencil Pro, but on a textured E Ink screen with a very paper-like amount of resistance.
There’s really no noticeable delay here between the time your pen hits the screen and the time “ink” appears, whereas the Scribe and reMarkable 2 do have a slight delay. In our use, we noticed more delay in two scenarios. The first was when writing in color: once you’ve finished writing, you can see the text flash briefly a few times as what you’ve just drawn is incorporated into the rest of the note you’re working on (you see something similar when using the highlighting feature on the Scribe, albeit in grayscale). But this is mostly a visual break, and it doesn’t really last long enough to get in the way of using the tablet.
The second and most noticeable place we saw some lag was when we were writing or taking notes on something with a dark background instead of a white one. For whatever reason, this was the only time we actually noticed a significant delay between touching the screen with the Marker and seeing lines appear. We didn’t encounter this often, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
The major functional hiccups are all things that should be fairly familiar to users of any E Ink device: pauses while the tablet draws menus, pauses while you wait for full-screen refreshes, just generally having to wait a second or so between tapping your finger on the screen and it actually happening. It lacks the fluidity of even an entry-level iPad. But that’s always been the trade-off with E Ink displays: You’re buying something that looks and feels a lot more like paper, and if it makes the device feel a little less like a modern computer, that’s either something you won’t mind or something you’ll actively prefer.
