reMarkable 2 Hands-on: The world's thinnest tablet

reMarkable 2 Hands-on: The world's thinnest tablet

Video Transcript

CHRIS VELAZCO: This may be a weird thing to admit as an adult, but I don't feel like I was ever smarter than when I was in school. And it was my job to learn and I accomplished that mostly by writing stuff down by hand. I am definitely one of those people who only really stores and processes information if I-- if there's, like, a physical action that goes with it. In my case, that was writing, because typing in class was a thing in college, but definitely not in high school.

So I've really kind of formed my learning behaviors around that mechanical action. And since I don't do that so much anymore, I honestly feel a little bit dumber for it, which is why devices like the Remarkable have seemed so interesting.

Now if you're not familiar with the original Remarkable, it was an e-ink tablet developed so that people who like me and like business leaders, I guess, who would prefer to write stuff down and annotate stuff on a tablet had something to work with. But because it's e-ink, it had something approaching the feel of writing on paper with the pen. And that was honestly huge for quite a few people who didn't know they needed this device until this device existed.

Now as appealing as that original hardware was, it definitely wasn't perfect. For one, it had a plastic body, which I mean, I guess was fine for the time, but the stuff inside was a little more concerning to me, at least. As someone trying to use it, the fact that we only had 512 megs of RAM, and a single core 1 gigahertz processor really kind of let things down.

For the past week or so, I've been living with the Remarkable 2, which in terms of hardware, is clearly superior to the original in every single way. Not only is it beautiful, it packs updated internals and a really nice new marker, which we'll get to in a little bit. The experience is maybe not as groundbreaking as the original Remarkable was, but there are a lot of really important updates here.

Now before we get into what I did and didn't like about the Remarkable 2, I just need to be clear upfront-- this is a preproduction version of the tablet itself. So the people who have already spent $399 or are considering buying one of these things for $399 will get a slightly different experience than what I've had so far. So if you want to know more about what this thing is like to live with closer to the launch date, please let us know down in the comments or via email. But in the meantime, this is something of a snapshot of where the Remarkable 2 is right now.

So let's talk about the hardware. And right up front, I cannot overstate just how much better this new design feels compared to the original. The evolution of the Remarkable 1 to the Remarkable 2 honestly feels quite a bit like Amazon's Kindles evolving over time. We had soft, friendly, white, plastic designs up first, eventually leading the way to really sleek beautiful minimalist designs like the Remarkable 2.

Now the size of the screen itself hasn't changed. Both versions of the Remarkable have a 10.3 inch canvas e-ink display. But the stuff around the display in the Remarkable 2 is hugely different. That's because we're looking at an aluminum build instead of that plastic we gotten a Remarkable 1. That gives it an extra sense of sturdiness that also allow Remarkable to make this what they claim is the world's thinnest tablet.

Now the physical controls that we got in the Remarkable 1 are largely gone here. There is exactly one button on the Remarkable 2. It's on top that you use to put the thing to sleep and wake it up again. But other than that, you're looking at a primarily touch interface. I should also point out that instead of the micro USB port that we've got on the original Remarkable, we finally have USB-C, which just-- it was just a nice thing to see in 2020. I mean, everyone is already kind of adopted the standard with a couple notable standouts, which I will continue to judge, but I'm glad that they've jumped on the bandwagon here. It really just makes it easier to charge this thing with one cable that you use for all of your other stuff, too.

Really though, it's the stuff insight that should make the most difference-- emphasis on the word should. You're getting the same 8 gigabytes of storage from the Remarkable 1 in the Remarkable 2, but the newer model has double the RAM. It has 1 gigabyte of RAM, which should help keep system tasks running smoothly. And so should the dual core 1.2 gigahertz processor, which by all accounts, should be a huge improvement over what we got in the original.

And I have to say, in terms of day to day performance, I don't really see a huge difference. Sure, there are some tasks that happen faster. If you load an e-book onto these devices, you will see that switching the fonts and the line spacing and the alignment and the justification-- all of those little things happened marginally faster on the Remarkable 2 than they did on the original hardware. And the same feels generally true when you're working with PDFs.

In general, in situations where you see art or diagrams, in addition to plain text in a PDF, that actually loads and aligns itself correctly slightly faster on the Remarkable 2. But again, I'm not seeing a quantum leap in performance, which is, again, a little weird, because we're going from a single core to a dual core and slightly higher clock speeds and double the RAM. Like, it should be better than this and it may well be better than this in use cases that I haven't really tried out yet.

What I have noticed is that the very act of writing on the Remarkable 2 is quite a bit better. That is for a few reasons. One, Remarkable has developed a new kind of screen coating for the Remarkable 2 that they say makes this display feel more like paper when you use the pen. I should also point out that with this generation canvas display and the marker, you're getting for 4,096 levels of pressure, which is twice what you'd get out of a Remarkable 1. That, again, is one of those things I'm not sure a lot of people are going to see the value of immediately. Artists will almost certainly see a change because you are able to, for example, get a pencil and sort of really get fine-grained, light, wispy marks on a Remarkable 2 that take a little bit more effort to get just right on the Remarkable 1. But in day to day use, again, I'm not sure that you're going to see the difference.

And much like the Galaxy Note 20 this year, which has seen significant improvements to pen latency, those improvements are kind of happening on this front, too. We're looking at a latency of about 21 milliseconds on the Remarkable 2, which is quite a bit lower than what we got previously. I think the original Remarkable tablet was-- it started out at, like, 51 milliseconds, then they eventually got it down to 40 via software updates. But 40 to 21 is still a pretty big deal.

And again, if you're an artist, you'll see that as you make big sweeping strokes along the display. The amount of gap between the stroke itself and your pen tip is about half. But if you're more like me, and you mostly deal with quick shorts punctuated strokes when you're just trying to get notes down in the middle of a meeting or a conversation, then that value might not be immediately apparent.

To Remarkable's credit, for now at least, the plan is to make sure that there is no feature gap between the original Remarkable and the Remarkable 2. So if you splurged on the original model years and years ago, you will continue to get software updates and for the time being at least, you won't see a huge gap in software between one versus the other.

I know it's a bit early for sweeping judgments, but even after just a week of testing, again, this non-final hardware, I can't help but really love it, just because the act of writing means so much to me, and this gives me a way to do it in a way that just feels more focused and honed. That said, there is a pretty significant flipside to that argument, and that is the fact that this is a $399 e-ink tablet that does a fraction of a fraction of what other $399 million tablets will do for you. You cannot play movies, you cannot play games, you cannot get on the web in any meaningful way.

So at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, do you want to buy a thing that will solve one very specific problem in your life? Or do you want to buy something that for the same amount of money will do a pretty good job at solving said problem and tackle a bunch of others, as well?

If you have any feedback about the Remarkable tablet, please let us know down the comments or email me at v@Engadget.com. We really appreciate the support and we'll see you next time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]