Review of Digital Paper Tablets

I consider myself to be an amateur writer (albeit not a very good one hence the amateur monicker). One of the things that I find most critical to me in my writing pursuits is great paper and pens. I will sometimes spend hours doing brainstorming work on a given project, so having the right tools is something that I have found to be very important to me. 

I am also an avid reader (have been for as long as I can remember). The Amazon Kindle is one of my favorite devices because it uses digital ink which doesn’t cause eye strain like reading off a computer screen, and has a longer battery life than most other devices because of the nature of how digital ink works. These attributes led me to do some research into other uses of digital ink outside of the Kindle, specifically in the realm of digital paper.

I looked at two different eInk devices - Sony’s Digital Paper, and the ReMarkable digital paper tablet. In full disclosure, I am also a fan of using LiveScribe smart pens (especially the new Aegir ones); I think Digital paper is just a bit more elegant. It also allows for storing several notebooks on a single device, as opposed to carrying around many notebooks. That being said, the user experience with Digital paper is significantly better than smart pens (but it does come at a price point substantially higher).

So in the match up between Sony and ReMarkable, there is also a clear winner from my perspective. Both devices cost about the same amount of money ($700), but I found the end user experience with ReMarkable to be a hands down favorite. The main benefit from the ReMarkable device is the ease of use through superior design and compelling mobile and computer based apps. 

The Sony device does a great job on redlining PDF’s, but using it for free form writing (more creative in nature or brainstorming) is far less intuitive. Yes - you can do it, but it takes more time to figure out how. The interactivity between the device and my iPad, iPhone, and Mac is there but it uses more of a point to point approach as opposed to using the Cloud. The result is more of a disjointed approach to sharing (almost like it was done as an afterthought). 

The ReMarkable tablet has none of these issues. I was up and running with the ReMarkable tablet in minutes on all devices, and creating free form documents as soon as the first charge was complete. The stylus with the ReMarkable device has no charging element (you just charge the tablet itself), so there is no need to have two micro USB chargers going at the same time. 

Overall, there is no comparison in the end user experiences, even though both devices use the same digital ink technology. The ReMarkable device is... well, it lives up to its name.