ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The ReMarkable Paper Pro is the brand’s newest e-Ink tablet, available now in a bundle with the Marker for $579 or the Marker Plus for $629.
- It improves on its predecessor, the ReMarkable 2, with a larger, colored screen and a host of integrations for popular productivity software.
- However, the device is expensive, the Marker is sold separately (even though it’s a required component), and a subscription is required to access all features.
Ever since the ReMarkable 2 came out, it’s been a mainstay in the premium E Ink device market, attracting a cohort of fawning power users on one hand and those who just don’t get it on the other. Taking the next step in its tablet line, ReMarkable just released the Paper Pro<!–>. It improves on the ReMarkable 2 with a host of new features, including a color display, backlighting, and more robust hardware.
I recently had a chance to test out the Paper Pro over the course of a few weeks and spoke with some of the device’s developers to break down its feature set. As an enjoyer of the ReMarkable product and what it stands for, I was thrilled to see the developers take user suggestions to heart when they approached the design for the Paper Pro.
Also: I gave away my Kindle and iPad within hours of testing this tablet
But if you’re new to ReMarkable, it’s an E Ink tablet that emulates the pen-and-paper writing experience better than any device I’ve ever used. Its impeccably chic aesthetic exudes premium, and the minimalist, Scandinavian design creates something of an anti-device, defined just as much by what it can do as what it can’t.
It can’t, for example, browse the web, play videos, or edit your photos. Instead, the Paper Pro takes a more disconnected approach, untethered from the distractions plaguing our phones and laptops: notifications, emails, and the ever-present temptation to doom scroll. The ReMarkable can’t do any of that, and that’s the point.
The Paper Pro doubles down on this by doing that one thing well. Writing with the Marker is immediately enjoyable. The pesky latency you often find when using a stylus is absent altogether here; there is zero lag between the motion of your hand and the line you’re drawing on the device’s screen, resulting in a realistic, enjoyable writing experience.
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That’s not to say that there is no lag on this device; there is, but it’s not while using the Marker. The processor onboard the device is a 1.8Ghz quad-core Cortex-A53, a bit beefier than the 1.2Ghz dual-core on the ReMarkable 2. But there is some lag when flipping pages, loading large documents, or quickly swapping tools.
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The Paper Pro is also larger than the ReMarkable 2, with an 11.8-inch display (up from 10.3 inches). It also features a backlight and support for color through its custom display stack based on E Ink Gallery 3. This means more room to write and draw, and the device’s matte, slightly textured display is at once lightweight and reminiscent of paper.
But the big thing here is the color display. The Paper Pro has a realistic, textured feel because it uses real ink particles held together in chambers that individually control each pixel. It also uses a dithered color system that mixes RGBCYM pixels with blacks and whites to create custom colors that look like realistic ink on a page.
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Like other E Ink devices, the color here does not have eye-popping vibrancy like that of an OLED screen, but it is a more muted, organic color palette. To increase the intensity of certain colors, you can draw multiple layers on top of each other to amplify them, similar to how a highlighter in real life would work.
Unfortunately, this also means that some artifacts occasionally remain from designs you erase or undo, and these can be particularly noticeable if they’re thick or heavy dark lines. This also occurs on the on-screen keyboard and sometimes when swapping documents, though they vanish when changing documents, and additional product upgrades should smooth this out.
Even better are the device’s integrations with OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, which vastly improve its practicality and useability with real-world applications and the work you’re doing right now.
You can also send webpages directly to the ReMarkable Paper Pro through a one-click extension for Google Chrome. Once on the device, it removes images and converts the text into a uniform format that you can then mark up and highlight in whatever colors you want.
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The Paper Pro also shines when handling documents that combine text and handwritten notes. The new “Refine mode” is accessible by a special key on the Type Folio keyboard–>
