But why would I need one? I asked. I have a notebook. I have a pen. And while I'd never choose it over the above for note taking, I also have an iPad. What could an e-ink tablet offer me?
This was my skeptical response to being offered the new reMarkable Paper Pure for review. I was vaguely aware of the brand and its 'paper tablets', but could never quite envision a use case for me. But after just minutes with the thing, I was fully converted. It might not be the best drawing tablet I've tried, but it's certainly the best writing tablet.
Released this month, the reMarkable Paper Pure is the follow-up to the reMarkable 2, featuring a black-and-white e-ink display with a textured finish. Aside from features like handwriting-to-text conversion, perhaps the biggest selling point of these tablets is the paper-like feel. And it really does feel real.
My handwriting is poor at the best of times, but on iPad, it's abysmal. Writing with a stylus on glass just doesn't cut it. But here, I genuinely felt like I was writing in a notebook. The Marker Plus might not feature all of the bells and whistles of, say, the Apple Pencil Pro (although the erasing tip is cool), but combined with the matte texture of the tablet, it makes for the best digital writing experience I've encountered.
It was at this point that I started to see, well, the point. I realised that my experience of digital notebooks has been unfairly coloured by the suboptimal experience offered by devices that aren't dedicated solely to drawing and writing. Like a paper notebook (and unlike an iPad), the reMarkable tablet offers a distraction-free writing and drawing space.
But where it differs from ye olde paper notebook is storage. If you're somebody who either writes a lot or reads a lot, you've probably had to deal with reams of paper in your life. Paper that stacks up, takes up space and is easily lost or damaged.
And then there's the editing tools. As somebody who scrawls quicker than he can think, I'm always crossing out large swathes of text – which is one surefire way to fill a notebook with junk. The reMarkable solves this issue by easily letting the user circle text to select it, then erase (or move or resize).
Ultimately, the Paper Pure is an extremely simple device. It's nothing more than a digital e-ink notebook – this one doesn't even have keyboard support unlike previous models. But that's the beauty of it. It does one thing extremely well. But it offers just enough to make it worth considering over its analogue counterpart, the humble notebook. I'm sold.
