Yesterday, reMarkable announced a new colour e-ink tablet; the reMarkable Paper Pro.
And, unlike the majority of colour tablets on the market that use Kaleido 3 technology (which is essentially a colour filter layer placed over a monochrome e-ink screen), reMarkable opted to use Gallery 3.
Gallery 3 resolves many of the limitations of Kaleido 3. The screen itself creates the colour rather than relying on a filter, which means it can show an order of magnitude more colours (tens of thousands versus Kaleido’s thousands).
It also does not have many of the inherent limitations of Kaleido 3 (for example, it does not make the screen darker, and resolution/PPI are the same for both colour and monochrome).
However, the only other e-ink tablet that I know of to use Gallery 3 was the Bigme Galy which had lots of issues, including sluggishness and ghosting. As Jeff points out in his review here on eWritable, he was unsure if this related to the Gallery 3 technology itself or Bigme’s software implementation of it. Because reMarkable launch new products very rarely, they tend to ensure that they are good and ready before releasing (as opposed to Bigme’s rapid product cycle) – this would suggest to me that they have managed to get Gallery 3 working to a decent standard.
Other points of note are the larger 11.8″ screen (which falls approximately in between A5 and A4 sizes), the frontlight (yes, this is the first reMarkable tablet with its own light source), and 64Gb of storage (compared to the reMarkable 2’s paltry 11Gb).
And it will not be using Wacom EMR technology for writing (which means Wacom-compatible styluses, including the reMarkable 2 stylus will not work with it). My previous experience of non-Wacom stylii have not been good (horrible writing feel, require batteries or recharging etc.), but maybe reMarkable have done something new and different to make it work.
To me, this looks like a very intriguing tablet, so I ordered one for review on this website. However, at £640 for the tablet, basic stylus, and cheapest book-style folio (the pricing of their accessories is ridiculous) it is rather expensive, so it’s going to have to be pretty amazing to make me want to keep it (thank goodness for reMarkable’s 100-day returns guarantee!)
I’m also reminded that reMarkable’s software is not as powerful as other brands on the market (such as Boox and Supernote) and they charge an ongoing monthly subscription fee to access certain features in their desktop/mobile apps.
Despite this, reMarkable do make quality products that are unique and innovative, and the lack of versatility (e.g. there’s still no global handwriting search) is made up for by the intuitiveness and laser-focused design of their software. And they are the only brand that allow you to edit your typed notes from other devices.
Overall, my experience of reMarkable is that their tablets are great for note-taking, typing and annotating documents, okay (but limited) for reading, and do very little more than these core functions.
The reMarkable Paper Pro is available is available from the official reMarkable Store.
About the author
Dan Dutton is passionate about E-ink writing tablets, which bring together the pleasure of writing on paper with the power of digital technology. When he bought his first tablet, he realised that there wasn't a lot of unbiased information available for people that were considering buying an E-ink tablet, and so he built eWritable.
