If you remember the reMarkable 2 that was announced in March 2020, you’ll be excited to hear about its successor: the reMarkable Paper Pro. This new distraction-free writing slate comes with an improved chassis, faster internals, a bigger display, and most importantly, a color screen.
If you’re unfamiliar, the reMarkable is the standard bearer for devices that stand in the delta between high and low tech. It’s an e-paper slate with a stylus (or keyboard) for reading, writing, or editing your own documents, or annotating PDFs. The focus is to give you a quiet place to get some Serious Work(™) done, free from the distractions of a “proper” computer or tablet.
The company has always made sure that its devices make you feel like you’re working on paper, without actually working on paper. Despite its age, the reMarkable 2 has been a mainstay in our E Ink tablet guide, as it’s the best option for most people.
The Paper Pro is a little over an inch longer and a quarter of an inch wider than its predecessor, but it can hold a lot more stuff. The rM2 had a 10.3-inch monochrome display, while the Paper Pro has an 11.8-inch display. Mats Solberg, reMarkable’s chief design officer, explained that his team worked to reduce the size of the bezel and chin to accommodate the larger display.
While the old model stuck to a rigid notion of post-iPad design language, the new Paper Pro has a more rugged look and feel. The edge band is sharp, yet comfortable to hold, and Solberg emphasized the grooves on the sides. He explained that they both evoke the idea that you’re holding a stack of papers, and give this thin device some much-needed grip.
There are dramatic changes on the inside, with a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex A53 paired with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. For comparison, the rM2 had a 1.2GHz dual-core chip, 1GB of RAM and just 8GB of storage. As soon as you turn the Paper Pro on, you’ll see the benefits of the new silicon, with a much faster response time. You even get proper animations during the setup process.
But the real showstopper here is the display, which uses a modified version of E Ink’s Gallery 3 technology called “Canvas Color.” That means the display places a series of ink particles inside each pixel — a white, cyan, magenta and yellow — as in most regular printers. reMarkable says the display is similar to newsprint and it’s an apt analogy, with clear, if muted, colors.
This technology can also vary colors, mixing each ink particle to generate up to 20,000 other colors, and colors can even be layered. This means you can highlight sections of text the same way you would use a highlighter on paper, except the more layers you draw, the darker the colour. Of course, the advantage of using a digital device is that you can highlight as many times as you want without getting anything wet.
As usual, reMarkable has taken a limitation and turned it into an advantage, giving you colour with a heavy dose of restraint. And if you’re trying to organise your thoughts before a big meeting, you don’t really need to burn your retinas from the inside out. However, after being spoilt by so many great displays lately, I do wish the colours popped a little more.
The Paper Pro is the first reMarkable to have a frontlight, which finally allows you to do some work in dark environments. Solberg explained that one of the toughest challenges was making the frontlight work without harming the distance between the stylus tip and the display. He said the team was determined to keep the distance between the pen and the display to less than a millimeter, and it succeeded.
The previous two slates had active displays but passive styluses, but the Paper Pro also has an active stylus like the Apple Pencil. It will charge by magnetically connecting to the edge of the bezel, and the new components help improve accuracy and latency. Solberg said the reMarkable 2 had an input latency of 22ms and they aimed for 15ms for this model. He’s proud to say the team achieved that goal, with the Paper Pro’s latency dropping to just 12ms.
And yet, despite all the core changes, it’s the added responsiveness that’s the really appealing feature. The rM2 was no slouch, but the faster input really helps sell the idea you’re sketching on paper. You can always give the company credit for its attention to details, such as allowing you to add highlights or handwritten annotations to typed text that will follow along with the text as you edit.