A ReMarkable Plan: Is This the New Paper?

Lately, digital drawing and sketching are booming. Where paper and pen are no longer in use, tablets such as Surface, Wacom or iPad and their styluses are taking over. In creating experiences as close to the real as possible, producers face not only a common goal but also a common difficulty. Now reMarkable, the self-named paper tablet, enters the market.

The New Player on the Field

ReMarkable comes with a 10.3” e-ink-display which has a resolution of 226 pixels per inch, an ARM processor at 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM and 8 GB memory cell and is operated with “Codex”. With its e-reader and digital notebook function, the 350g tablet serves different purposes at once: Enthusiasts can sketch, draw, takes notes or annotate documents on it. Synchronized into a cloud and transferred to standard apps like iOS or Windows, work-sharing is another interesting feature.

Yet, it’s a special technology called “canvas”, which differentiates reMarkable from its competitors: So far, the so-called latency (the discrepancy in time between the emergence of a signal and its effect) has been a major problem with tablets. “Canvas” reduces this discrepancy to 55 milliseconds.

ReMarkable – An Alternative to Paper and Pen?

Using one single device to read your books, share documents with colleagues or work on and store self-commented texts surely sounds promising. But what about the accuracy of the notes and sketches? After all, the inventors of reMarkable have not managed to fully resolve the problem of latency – at least not yet.

For now, whether or not reMarkable and similar tablets provide alternatives to paper and pen will probably depend on the user’s purpose. Do I need an all-in-one solution? Then I might be better off with digital devices. Or am I looking for a digital sketch board, which allows paper-and-pen-like results? Then the choice might be a different one.

Do you have any experience with paperless drawing, sketching or writing? Leave your comment below this blogpost.