The reMarkable Paper Pro Offers a Novel Approach to Digital Note-Taking
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The Good
- Pleasurable writing experience
- Unmatched array of writing implements and options
- The best-looking color e-ink technology
- The "Infinite canvas" is a clever concept
- It's really big!
The Bad- Tools for sorting and linking notes are lacking
- Slow performance, especially when using color
- The front light isn't very bright
- More expensive than competing devices
- It's really big!
Table of Contents
For me, 2024 was all about trying to doomscroll less and read more, which is why I found the phone-shaped but much less distracting e-ink Boox Palma e-reader such a godsend. So this year, I'm trying to go one better by eliminating distractions and writing more—and I've been testing e-ink digital notebooks, from the Boox Note Max, to the Boox Note Air 4C, to the Supernote Manta and Supernote Nomad.
One of the most venerable competitors in this still niche space is reMarkable, which launched its first paper-like e-ink notebook in 2017, and began building a dedicated, cult-like following of adherents who praised its fantastic writing experience. Last year, the company launched the reMarkable Paper Pro, its biggest notebook yet, and the first to incorporate color.
After using it for about two weeks, I can easily say that it's one of the best devices in its class, but also the most expensive, and not without its frustrations.
It's all about the writing experience
While some e-ink notebooks are all about imitating everything you can do on an iPad, the reMarkable Paper Pro is only trying to replace your notebook—it doesn't run apps, not even email or a calendar. Given that it costs more than most full-featured tablets, then, it'd better be damn good at its primary task. And it is.
The Paper Pro's 11.8-inch textured glass screen is pretty massive, offering an expansive canvas to take notes and draw in both black and white and color. It uses an E Ink Gallery 3 display, one of two competing technologies for bringing color to e-ink screens. Though I've reviewed devices that use competing Kaleido 3 color screens, this was my first experience with Gallery 3, which works a bit differently. Generally, I found it produced better, more accurate colors, but with a tradeoff—it's a lot slower, requiring more refreshing and load time to display a full-color image.
If you care about specs, the resolution is 2,160 by 1,620 and 229 pixels per inch (ppi) for both color and black and white content. These days, most e-readers are 300ppi when reading in greyscale, but the Paper Pro has better color resolution that Kaleido 3 devices, which top out at 150 ppi. It has a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 processor with 2GB of RAM, and there is 64GB of onboard storage space. Unfortunately, there's no Micro SD card slot for added storage.
A disappointing front light
The Gallery 3 screen is also a bit darker than, say, the purely grayscale displays of the Supernote devices I've tested, which meant that I almost always left the front light turned on, just to make the screen more legible to my tired, middle-aged eyes. Unfortunately, the front light isn't very bright—even at full brightness it looks murky in a dim room—and increases battery drain.
That issue aside, the tactile writing experience is pretty fantastic—and notably different from the Supernote Manta, which uses a soft film over a flexible plastic screen and a ceramic-tipped stylus to recreate the feeling of writing on paper. The reMarkable Paper Pro has a textured glass screen that feels smoother to write on, but no less satisfying—it feels a great deal like writing on paper with a pencil.
Choose your writing implement
Of all the devices I've tried, the reMarkable Paper Pro has the best and widest array of virtual writing implements—pencil, mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, fineliner, highlighter, paintbrush, and more—with three line weights for each, and a selection of nine different colors. I'm honestly kind of obsessed with the calligraphy pen, which makes it look like I have the fancy handwriting of a 16th century noble.
Using color requires patience
I appreciate that the Paper Pro incorporates color for your drawing and note-taking, but as always seems to be the case with color e-ink, there are some compromises involved. Specifically, writing in color is really slow: When you make a mark in color, it will initially appear in black, then flash a few times (even disappearing for a half-second) before settling down.
A pretty good battery-powered stylus
While Supernote uses an unpowered stylus, reMarkable's option is battery powered (it charges when magnetically attached) and must be paired with your device. That said, it's a pretty good option—far better than the kinda cheap-feeling ones that come with a Boox tablet. It's got some weight to it (14g for the standard Marker, and 18g for the Marker Plus, which includes an eraser tip), with a carbon fiber nib that slides smoothly over the textured glass display.
I'm a little concerned about the durability of the nibs—mine is showing quite a bit of visible wear after just a few weeks of testing. (The Marker Plus I was sent to test out comes with six extra nibs, and you can, of course, order more.) If you've got an older reMarkable 2 device, it's worth noting that the styluses are not interchangeable.
Take notes on an "Infinite canvas"
While the Paper Pro doesn't have the tagging and linking features I've come to appreciate with the Boox and Supernote notebooks I've tested, it does have a unique option that I find pretty cool: Instead of confining you to a virtual page that's the same size as the physical device, reMarkable gives you the option of writing on an "Infinite canvas," which is really a bit of a misnomer—it's really more of an infinite scrolling canvas.
You're still limited to the confines of a horizontal page, but you can keep writing as far down the page as you'd like. This allows you to keep all your thoughts on a particular subject confined to a single page, which in theory will make your notes easier to organize. If you're into mind-mapping, you can also zoom in and out on the page to add elements of different sizes, recreating the feel of sketching on a much larger sheet of paper.
Otherwise, the Paper Pro does all the usual note-taking things you'd expect, with a lasso tool that allows you to copy chunks of text and move them around, to the ability to insert new pages into your documents or switch between templates (there are some 47 pre-loaded templates, with an option to import more). And though I do miss the linking functionality, you can at least tag your documents and sort them into different folders in the file system.
Switch between writing and typed text
Another thing that's novel about the Paper Pro is the ability to seamlessly integrate handwriting notes and typed text (from either an onscreen keyboard or the keyboard folio case, which I'll talk about below). You can switch between formats at a tap, and use OCR (optical character recognition) to turn your handwriting into type. (The OCR is pretty good, but as ever, will be more accurate the more neatly you write.)
Read and mark-up PDFs and EPUBs
The Paper Pro's large screen and accurate color make it a good choice if you do a lot of work reading and marking up PDF and EPUB documents. When you open either file type, you can use all the writing, highlighting, and markup options you have when drafting your own documents, as your changes will "stick" when you save and export them (though your changes won't remain editable once exported). Navigating around a PDF and zooming in and out takes a little getting used to (you have to use two figure gestures for everything, but I kept forgetting and using one finger, which would move me to another page.)
Note that while you can highlight and underline in EPUBs too, but when you export them, the marked up version will be saved as individual document pages, rather than integrated into the EPUB format.
A mediocre e-reader, despite the nice colors
While competitors like the Boox Note Air 4C tout that they can run any app from the Google Play Store—including all your favorite e-reading apps, from Kindle to Libby—the reMarkable Paper Pro is really built for a single purpose (note-taking), and doesn't run apps. That doesn't mean you can't use it as an e-reader, but I can't imagine you'd want to.
You can load up EPUBs in the native reader by sideloading them onto the device (more on that below), and they will appear with nice crisp text and color images, if applicable, but the performance is markedly slower than any other modern e-reader I've tried. Page turns are noticeably laggy, and text formatting options are limited to five different fonts; changing type size or switching the font is also slow, taking about 10 seconds.
The same holds true for using it to read PDFs of comics: Though the color reproduction is nice (an improvement over other color e-ink tablets I've tried that use Kaleido 3 screens), switching between pages is achingly slow and involves a full refresh (with the screen flashing) each time. The device also doesn't support .cbz, which is the most common file type for digital comics; I had to hunt down a PDF of Saga No. 1 just to test it out.
There's also no audio support (headphone jack, Bluetooth, or speaker) so you can't use it to listen to audiobooks, even if you could somehow figure out how to load them onto the thing. That's not really a knock against it—no, it doesn't do a thing it wasn't built to do!—but a reminder that it's a specialized device, not a multi-purpose one.
The cloud features are great, but the best one is paid
The biggest advantage a digital notebook has over pen and paper is that all your work isn't trapped on the page, and reMarkable has developed an elegant solution to integrating the Paper Pro into all of your workflows. Its cloud storage feature, called Connect, includes mobile and desktop apps that allow you to seamlessly sync your notes and documents, wherever you're working on them.
You can start a handwritten document on your device, then pick it up via the desktop app, convert it to text, and keep going. You can also upload PDFs and EPUBs to one of the apps, and they will appears on your Paper Pro in a matter of minutes. Depending on how large the files are, syncing can take a bit of time—I uploaded a few 300MB+ PDFs and it took five to 10 minutes for them to all transfer over—but the convenience is still a major plus.
Unfortunately, this convenience will cost you—a Connect plan costs $30 a year or $2.99 a month. This isn't a lot, especially if you're the sort of person with the disposable income to support buying a $630 notebook. But also, you're buying a $630 notebook. Do you really want to be saddled with an ongoing subscription fee too?
Google, OneDrive, and Dropbox integrations as a free workaround
If you don't want to pony up, you aren't totally out of luck: You can move documents on and off the device by linking your Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox account. In practice, I found this much more of a hassle than using Connect, and experienced lots of loading time and difficulty getting different files to open, but it's a free option.
"Read on reMarkable"
While there's no native internet browser app, reMarkable does have a pretty cool (also free) solution for accessing web pages on its devices: Read on reMarkable is a Chrome extension that allows you to instantly send any web page to your device as a document file (with images removed) or as a PDF (theoretically with images included, though when testing it out with Lifehacker article pages, embedded images showed up as blank squares).
An e-ink battery hog
reMarkable promises up to two weeks of battery life from your Paper Pro's 5,030mAh battery, but after testing it out, that feels wildly optimistic to me. An hour or so of extensive testing (writing on the screen, flipping through PDFs, importing and exporting files, mostly with the front light turned on) consistently drained the battery around 10%, so expect to charge it every week or so.
This thing is heavy
I think it's safe to assume that most potential e-notebook customers care about portability at least a little bit, given that the devices are supposed to be carried to and fro from meetings and coffee shops and wherever you pause to be inspired to write. And among the devices I've tested, the reMarkable Paper Pro is among the heaviest—which is probably a given, as its 11.8-inch screen is second only to the Boox Note Max's 13.3-incher. Like that similarly beefy boy, the reMarkable Paper Pro is mostly made of metal and has a definite high-end feel—in terms of both look and heft.
Still, I can easily imagine scenarios where you're using the reMarkable Paper Pro while standing up, so it's worth knowing that the device and stylus weigh in at 527g—more than a pound, and a bit more than an 11-inch iPad and Apple Pencil (roughly 487g). Stick it in the keyboard folio case and that takes it up to 1,033g, approaching the 1,281g weight of my MacBook Air.
There's always going to be a tradeoff between usability and portability, of course—but I think the reMarkable Paper Pro is approaching the limit for the use most people are buying it for.
The keyboard case feels premium
I'm a bit torn on the utility of a keyboard folio case for device designed to favor note-taking by hand, but reMarkable has put in a lot of effort to make it feel like more than an afterthought. The case itself feels pretty premium—which one would hope, given it retails for around $230—with a dark canvas exterior and an inner panel that slides to reveal the keys (and support the weight of the tablet itself).
Typing on it feels pretty good, though I imagine the low profile would fatigue anyone's wrists over the long haul, but it could still be preferable to just writing on your laptop if you're truly committed to being distraction-free (it's hard to fake like you're working on your novel at the cafe when the device you're typing on basically can't do anything else).
The company has made some effort to integrate typing into your workflow with a "Refine mode" key that removes the toolbar from the screen and allows you to use the stylus to select, copy, cut, and move around text at a tap—all features I do think would be pretty useful if you were using this to write a novel or presentation.
A great choice (for the right user)
I've nitpicked a lot in the review above, which might make it seem like I'm mixed on the reMarkable Paper Pro. That's not really the case—I think it is excellent at doing the things it was primarily designed to do (replace your pen-and-paper notebooks) and OK at some of its secondary functions (reading PDFs and e-books). Even though it's a little slow, the color option really sets it apart from the likes of the Supernote Manta, with better vibrancy than the Boox Note Air 4C. Most importantly, writing on it is really satisfying.
But it's also a really pricey device, considering its limited functionality. Bundled with a Marker Plus, it'll cost you $629 on Amazon (for now—these things are made in China, so there's no telling how they'll be affected by tariffs). Add in a keyboard folio and you're looking at nearly $1,000. For that price, you can pick up a really good iPad, or, heck, an M4 MacBook Air.
On the bright side, if you're on the fence, the company offers a generous 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Maybe you'll try it, and fall in love.
