reMarkable Paper Pro: The Writing Tablet That’s Just For Writing, Now In Color

26.09.2024 16:01

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reMarkable Paper Pro writing tablet (Image: © Philip Berne / Future)

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on TechRadar, and is just a portion of their full review of the reMarkable Paper Pro. Read more about the reMarkable Paper Pro from TechRadar’s expert reviewers here.

TechRadar Verdict

The reMarkable Paper Pro updates the elegant writing tablet with a color E Ink display and finally a light for reading in the dark. It’s much larger, with faster writing response, but reMarkable hasn’t made the tablet any more complex than before. It’s aggressively simple, distraction-free, and frustrating if you were hoping for something more robust. If you want more, there are other tablets out there. The reMarkable Paper Pro is about wanting less, and it delivers in a big way.

reMarkable Paper Pro: Two-minute review

You don’t own the reMarkable Paper Pro, it owns you. This is a tablet with a single purpose – to capture your ideas. It does that almost perfectly. There are other things you can do with the reMarkable Paper Pro, but it won’t do anything as well as keep your thoughts and ideas organized and flowing.

It does this by doing almost nothing else. The reMarkable Paper Pro is the follow-up to the reMarkable 2, a monochrome writing tablet with an E Ink display and a Wacom-licensed EMR stylus. The earlier reMarkable earned fans by offering simplicity and a distraction-free environment. It’s so well-designed and pleasant to use that it becomes addictive, and that’s why I keep using it.

I bring my reMarkable 2, and now my reMarkable Paper Pro, to every event I cover as a journalist. It’s not just because I love flashing the most pretentious, manicured, single-minded tablet you can own; it’s because the reMarkable feels free and easy in a way my laptop cannot.

When I have to type notes on a keyboard, I feel constrained. I need to sit. I need to follow the rules of the document app. I can’t easily create and organize notes in the way I want, not without fighting the app.

When I use my reMarkable, I can put my ideas to paper the way I like, and I still get to save everything to Google Drive. In fact, reMarkable has finally relented, and you can now edit documents from the reMarkable app, away from the tablet. That’s been a long-requested feature from reMarkable’s devoted fan base.

reMarkable Paper Pro writing tablet (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

The Paper Pro finally gives the most-requested features to reMarkable fans, including a front light for reading in the dark (seriously, you can’t read the reMarkable 2 in the dark), and – drum roll please – a color E Ink display!

I wasn’t expecting a color reMarkable this year, because the color E Ink tablets I’ve seen haven’t been spectacular. reMarkable has incredibly high standards, and the company seemed in no hurry to launch a new, sub-par product.

The reMarkable Paper Pro is a different color E Ink panel from anything I’ve seen before – I’ll talk later about the technology that brought reMarkable out of Kansas to the Land of Oz.

The reMarkable Paper Pro is electronic paper (ePaper), pure and simple, and it’s best not to expect too much from this tablet. It’s the best ePaper you’ve ever used. Since the reMarkable 2 launched in 2020, the company has spent a great deal of its effort improving the writing experience beyond all expectations. There’s no perceptible lag between the pen and the ePaper. Writing feels like writing, as it should.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, you may be outside of reMarkable’s target audience, because the reMarkable Paper Pro is truly a luxury device for people who want the feeling of writing on paper, with the convenience of digital storage. This is not a versatile tablet. The list of things the reMarkable cannot do is longer and more surprising than the list of what it can.

There’s no web browser on the reMarkable Paper Pro because the company says the primary goal of the Paper Pro is to help you avoid distractions. To that end, not only can you not browse the web, you can’t even check the time. There’s no visible clock on the Paper Pro. No web windows, no clocks – it’s like a Las Vegas casino if Vegas was about creativity instead of gambling.

Why is there no clock? Because reMarkable knows this won’t be your only screen or even your second screen. This is the device you buy after your iPhone and MacBook, instead of a distractingly bright and colorful iPad.

Left: Apple iPad Pro 13-inch (2024) Right: The reMarkable Paper Pro is the anti-iPad (Image credit: Future)

The company is unapologetic about its spartan attitude. It takes pride in rejecting far, far more feature requests than it grants: around 95% of the features that users request are rejected, according to reMarkable reps.

If you want a tablet that does a lot more, get an iPad. If you want an E Ink tablet that does a lot more, like running apps and a browser, get an Onyx Boox Note Air 3. If you want an E Ink tablet that’s good for reading books, buy an Amazon Kindle Scribe.

The reMarkable Paper Pro will have none of that silliness. This tablet is not for reading, and it’s not for apps, and if you want those things in an ePaper tablet, it’s not for you, either.

Continue reading the full expert review of the reMarkable Paper Pro on TechRadar.

About the Author
Phil Berne is a preeminent voice in consumer electronics reviews, starting more than 20 years ago at eTown.com. Phil has written for Engadget, The Verge, PC Mag, Digital Trends, Slashgear, TechRadar, and AndroidCentral, and was Editor-in-Chief of the sadly defunct infoSync. Phil holds an entirely useful M.A. in Cultural Theory from Carnegie Mellon University. He sang in numerous college a cappella groups.