The Remarkable 2 has now been out for roughly four years. For context, the original Remarkable came out in November of 2017. Given that The Remarkable 2 is nearly four years into its life cycle, I'd like to think that development of a third version is well underway. Therefore, I wanted to create this video to relay some of my thoughts and also poll a few of the experts in the field that I collaborated with on what they would like to see changed.
I also get the sense that there will be an impending spring launch as a few weeks ago two very large youtubers were sent remarkable twos to review. Which to me seems like a tactic to sell off remaining inventory as the device is nearing four years old now. I broke this topic down into four parts on what we would like to see changed or improved.
I'll also post the full conversations I had with Kit and Brandon in the coming weeks. First, while the Remarkable 2 isn't heavy by any means, the introduction of the Typefolio last spring introduced a new problem. The Typefolio along with a pen are heavier than the Remarkable 2 itself. With this in mind, I'd certainly like to see a lighter device with the Remarkable 3. My original thoughts pointed at creating something with aerospace grade materials, perhaps carbon fiber or magnesium for the build.
Also, improvements in glass thinness could result in less weight on the screen. Advances in CPU efficiency too could potentially mean the battery density could be decreased without impacting overall battery life, but saving some grams of weight. The original Remarkable was just over 100 grams lighter. I think if Remarkable were to make something around the 300 gram weight, then the type folio would be something I wouldn't mind lugging around.
Currently I always question if I need it. If I don't, then I take the normal folio to significantly reduce the weight. The most apparent hardware change that will certainly come will be the screen itself. The screen really didn't change much, if at all, from the original Remarkable. It's still 226 pixels per inch.
I haven't had any complaints about the screen, but There are now 300 ppi screens available, like the one on the Kindle Scribe. A switch to that screen would be likely. While I used to think that there would be a front light added, I'm less sure now that they would actually add this feature, as the Remarkable is dedicated to the distraction-free writing experience.
The front light would compromise a lot of the pen-to-paper distance that for purists could detract from the actual experience. Adding a front light creates an extra layer on the screen that creates some separation between the pen tip and the e-paper. SuperNote is another company that has stuck to this ideology and released a statement about it as they want to be dedicated to the writing experience. Another feature I'd like to see would be a magnetic unlock slash lock ability with the folio. The typefolio clearly already has some magnets in the top section as it magnetizes to the bottom.
when flipped around. Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of this feature. For the normal folio, I'm sure they would have to make a new version for the Remarkable 3. With a redesign, however, it's likely they will already be doing that.
This is a feature that a lot of the competition has, and it's incredibly useful when using it multiple times per day or opening slash closing it in one sitting. Historically, Remarkable has always had one main product with a few accessories coming alongside. I don't see Remarkable having a massive range of different products anytime soon. But what I do think that they will have to do is they'll have to have more regular releases. And I think that in three years time, I think there'll be a Remarkable release of some sort, which isn't just a new accessory.
I think there'll be maybe even every six months, because I think that that is just what... the big tech companies do they have to keep that turnover their sort of mantras with their business is that they what they don't want to make devices obsolete every six months what they want to do is they want you to buy a device and then love it for three or four years um so i i think they'll go to a bit of a cycle of um every other year there's a main release and then there's the pro version maybe like every every other year as well a bit like again early apple you had the five and you had the five s the six and the six s yeah and i think that they will do something like that they might not call it a pro they'll probably make up their own sort of thing i think there'll be a remarkable three maybe next and i think shortly after that would be a three pro what i would really like i'd love to see a remarkable student a remarkable you um you know which actually goes back to the kind of design cues of the first remarkable which you know it was really nice it was really light it felt more robust it's like I really, really enjoyed the first Remarkable. I like the buttons even. Likewise, yeah. And actually just make it that bit more plastic feel, you know, and make it something that students could actually afford, because that's what's stopping students from getting into this e-ink world, is stopping them, is the price, frankly.
And actually now there is the option to really diversify, because they can make that student with this this type of screen with the 207 227 ppi i think it is this screen um and now the kindle scribe for instance has the 300 ppi screen so the you know that's a very easy delineation isn't it a pro has that in it a student version has that in it um then the pro has the you know maybe 128 gigabytes of storage and the student has 32 gigabytes you know differentiate differentiate like that there's four cores in this there's two cores in this whatever it needs to be um i just use like remarkable two tech or remarkable one tech exactly yeah basically the student would be remarkable two tech but in a plastic um cheaper to manufacture housing i think with cheap a cheaper line of accessories and you know and all these things you know and then the people who go for that look the the people who want to look swaz in in meetings like they'll still go for the pro version and then also you can have the color on on top as well if you want and i would love to see you know we talked about drawing it earlier i would love to see an a4 color remarkable so i think they do a fabulous job of it that would be really cool yeah kind of think if there's some sort of hardware feature that that you would like to see on the remarkable 3 and if so what are your kind of thoughts or what you've been thinking about Yeah, so I am a minimalist in this regard. And I'm going to go with, I just want a 300 pixel per inch screen. I don't want color.
I don't think the Remarkable needs that. I just want the increased display resolution. So we already have this on the Kindle Scribe. The challenge is that the Kindle Scribe doesn't do a lot of the things that the Remarkable does well.
And so I think once Amazon's exclusivity on that e-ink panel goes away, that I think... we'll see a lot of devices move to that 300 pixels per inch, the remarkable included. So that's the key thing for me.
Like we don't need to complicate it. I just want the core experience to be as good as it can possibly be. I think that's what makes the remarkable strong.
I think that's what differentiates them in this space. And so it'd be great to see them get a paper like screen. Lastly, for hardware features, it'd be nice to see some modularity for upgrade ability, like the new super note nomad has done. I find this unlikely to happen, though, as it would inevitably make Remarkable lose the moniker of the world's thinnest tablet. In terms of the software, I will say that in my seven years of Remarkable ownership, I've witnessed first-hand a slow but very steady improvement overall.
There's still a small host of features Brandon, Kit, and I would like to see. The first being some form of a live editing collaboration. This would be incredibly useful for note sharing. More specifically, in my Typefolio review, I mentioned that for writers that have an editor, moving a script out of the Remarkable platform would make more sense. With a live collaboration feature, there'd be no need for that.
I've always wanted them to do it, it would be to make a dedicated drawing app. Because when I first picked up the Remarkable, I don't know about you, I know that you draw as well, don't you? I know that you're very interesting in drawing as well.
and i know that you like me you you still you've not found anything that's totally replaced lovely paper sketchbooks but um when i first started drawing a remarkable and using the pencil tool i was like wow this is actually something that straight away feels it does feel immediately like real pencil but what i want from them i want um i want you know think like textured brushes think uh you use of adobe fresco yeah yeah and that's like use sketchbook more often but i have used yeah sketchbook exactly another example but just think about like all the like blending options all the different brushes you get from that i think that actually this could be a such a powerful device for artists if they just give us you know the amazing brush options um let proper layer blending you know different options for you uh layer blending it's great you can have layers and you can hide one it's great you can export as svg as well but just a bit more on the device it would probably need a bit more ram to make it work perfectly probably a bit more processor speed you actually just think of something what about opacity on layers Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. So properly, opacity channel. Yeah, absolutely.
Properly. That's what you're getting on. Yeah, yeah. That's something that's like definitely missing.
Yeah. And what do you think? Is there anything like what other features you'd want to see in a drawing app?
I've been racking my brains a little bit. You know, to be honest, that was not on my wish list, but it is now. I haven't really thought of any, but perhaps the ability to import. like if they make a drawing app the ability to import jpegs pngs other sorts of files where you could then add that as a layer of some sort so i know some people you know that are more like industrial designers they pull in graphics and then they like trace over and whatnot yeah like within the drawing app having the ability to to pull that in and just like quickly rescale it to whatever yeah totally yeah yeah yeah because i mean drawing works great on on here Personally, I would love for a soft eraser feature as well. I think the big thing that's missing for the Remarkable currently is indexed document search.
So what I mean by that is if you wrote something a few weeks ago and you used a specific word and you can't remember exactly when you wrote about it or what page it's on, it would be really great if you could search for that term and be able to find it. So they have the foundation for this. They just haven't really hooked it up.
So there's currently already a search function for the Remarkable that will search across your notebooks, but it only works for type text. It doesn't work for things that you've written. But at the same token, they also have handwritten conversion that they can do in the cloud. They just need to bring that locally to the device, even if it's a low-tech version, so that you can find those notes, but not necessarily be for export for some finished document. It's really just about finding things more quickly and knowing whether you wrote about something at all and be able to get to it.
So for instance, the SuperNote already does this with what they call a handwriting document, or excuse me, a text-based document. And so I think Remarkable is actually a little bit behind here. They just need to implement this. I think they're just a little behind because they've done handwriting in the cloud for quality reasons. And I think they just need to bring a lower tech version of that on the device itself.
For this specific script and notes that I took, I have some qualms about the app. The pinch and zoom on a touchscreen laptop does not work. Oddly, you can only do it with your trackpad or mouse. Also, as styluses become more commonplace in phones, tablets, and laptops, it's perplexing to me that in the respective app, you cannot live annotate anything. You can only write with typed text.
Continuing your experience on another device will not replace the Remarkable, but merely supplement it. Having the app be viewable in full screen is quite nice in the desktop app. Also, it'd be great if exported notes would be of a higher quality. Currently on large screens, they don't look ideal. It'd be nice to toggle off the pinch and zoom feature, as sometimes that can be a nuisance when panning around and you accidentally zoom in a bit.
Speaking of toggling, I'd also like to have the ability to quickly swipe or switch between my last note and current note for multitasking. Having a Sheets app or a basic Microsoft Word slash Excel integration would be awesome too. Understandably, I don't think on a Remarkable 2 this would run very well, but with inevitably more horsepower under the hood, I don't see why this integration couldn't happen.
Landscape support would be great too. Currently, it's only supported with the typefolio. My guess is they would need to and should add a gyro into Gen 3 for this to happen.
In terms of future accessories that Remarkable could potentially make, I'd really like to see a larger pen line. One of the hardware things I was thinking of was just honestly the pen. Like, you know, they make the white one without the eraser, the black one with the eraser. But they could launch a host of like a line of pens like with like, you know.
I used to collect pens when I was younger, so I had all forms of pens and whatnot. And I would buy one immediately, you know, because I prefer ergonomics over like a sleek kind of slim pen like that. Yeah, I'm a pen lover as well.
But that's what SuperNote does so well, I think. Is that you can use like any Wacom kind of... Well, I mean, with the Remarkable, you can as well, right? Yeah, you can use any Wacom pen.
This is the SuperNote pen. yeah it's got a ceramic nib it works on anything but like they'll say it'll scratch normal normal surfaces but the supernote it um has a special type of film that it kind of indents into how do you uh how do you find the ceramic nibs i love it i've actually never used one of them Yeah, so this is, this super note is really geared towards writing. I make bags and apparel and I think people would buy them. Like they do have a whole accessory line.
Yeah, yeah, they certainly. I think there's room for a pro pen. I still think there's plenty of room for improvement in the tool switching experience on the Remarkable.
So there's precedent here. There are already plenty of Wacom styluses that exist that have side buttons. And so I think a pro pen that would let you program what that button does. And one of those options being to be able to switch between two tools with the press of a button or hold to toggle.
I think Remarkable takes a lot of design cues from Apple. And so they err on the side of as little configuration as possible. But I think with Apple bringing the action button to the side of the iPhone 15 Pro, I think Remarkable can finally do this and not feel foreign to how they. typically operate i don't know if you ever use like sketchbook or anything but like you're talking about with the button uh it's kind of nice between changing within tools because they have this little palette you can move so you can like have it like right next to your sketch and when you're sketching you can just quickly go like between opacity colors tools right there and it just makes it more like a seamless kind of uh transition but so i was talking about that to kit because i was like well remarkable like they're kind of focused on focus. So it's like, does color like kind of go against that or what are your thoughts on that?
I don't think color necessarily goes against it, but I think the current color ink technology creates some challenges with, for them in the core experience, which is just black and white writing is not as good on the color display, in my opinion. And you can actually see the, the color pixel grid. And so that, That takes away a bit from that pen and paper feeling in a way that I don't think Remarkable will do it, at least not with the current technology.
But I don't think they would avoid it as a fundamental. I think when the technology gets there, being able to do a legitimate yellow highlight is very on brand for them. Yeah. And I think with that, they get full color. So I don't think they'll implement it in its current iteration.
But. I wouldn't roll out a color remarkable in the future. Okay. I really think that either of the pens need to have more magnets inside of them because they can really dislodge very easily in the off axis when putting it in and out of your bag, which can result in you losing the pen. And I wonder, you know, we'll talk about the hardware a little bit later, but I wonder whether actually they've designed this to fit a future iteration of remarkable as well.
So if you look closely at what it's called, it's called the Remarkable type folio. It's not called the Remarkable 2 type folio. I think they've got something in mind to have this have a longer lifespan.
We'll see. I think, you know, Remarkable might do well to partner maybe with a sort of PC manufacturer or another software manufacturer to make it really close, able to closely link with your desktop. So maybe it's something that you could actually like.
you know it could come in and sit in a dock and then you very very easily you can just uh send um a file across for reading or something that you've got to mark up oh and it'd be that kind of second screen like we were talking just before we went on air about using e-ink tablets as a second monitor for your actual laptop you know just things like that what you're what you're pointing at is like i think ideal because we were just talking about this before like with the onyx book you can have that set up as a second screen for your monitor and like if you're reviewing a document there's really no need that it should need to be on an lcd or an oled you could just have it on there what if the remarkable could do the same if it had some form of pogo pin dock that would just directly connect to that and then become like some form of an external monitor or some better integration just like you're talking about you know yeah exactly yeah and so i could imagine you just you could have the files you know you could literally look through the files on your pc on here and just open up whichever one you needed to read and then you could like carry this you know maybe your desktop still obviously stays with with the desk and you carry it through to your living room or your laptop stays connected and you just carry through it's just like a periphery it's like a satellite to your laptop maybe uh to um and i couldn't kind of imagine that maybe maybe they could build like a smaller one that just like you know slots in kind of like you and i have been talking a little bit about the framework, like an E-Ink module, you know, that could just sit in the sort of side panel and become, pull it out, it's your little reader. Oh, I've just got to go and read this and review this. So take it out, make my notations on it, plug it back in and the file's there on the computer. You're saying Remarkable should make a screen for the framework.
Yeah, this is the... That'd be pretty cool. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, that's awesome. I hope this comprehensive list gave you an idea of important features that could hopefully be integrated on a future Remarkable 3. Certainly comment below if you think we missed anything.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'll link both of the conversations I had with Kit and Brandon here if you'd like to check those out as well. We'll be going to much further discussion about all these topics and even some I didn't include here.