Authentic Review — reMarkable
This is not a review written after two weeks. This is 8 years of daily use, across 4 continents, in every condition from a Buenos Aires café to the Aiguille du Midi at 3,842m above Mont Blanc. The device was bought at the reMarkable beta store in San Francisco before most people knew it existed.
The problem with tablets and phones for reading is distraction. Notifications, apps, social feeds — they interrupt the one thing you went to read. The reMarkable has none of that. The screen is matte e-ink. It feels like paper. There is nowhere else to go.
The problem with physical books for travel is weight and decision paralysis. Which books to bring? How many? What if you finish them? The reMarkable resolves this completely — it carries everything.
"When I'm traveling, it's just so much lighter to have just a reMarkable with you. This gives a lot of independence."
The note-taking and reading live together on the same device. You read something, you put the device down to write — except you don't put it down. You flip to a blank sheet, write by hand, and return to the page. The workflow is uninterrupted.
Locations where this device has been the primary reading and note-taking tool:
"You'll probably never see me without it. It's one thing that I almost all the time have with me because basically all my thoughts are on there and I can read on it."
The reMarkable does something other devices do not: it externalises thought. When a problem is complex, typing slows the process. Drawing it, sketching connections, annotating a margin — this is faster and more accurate for the way thinking actually works.
"I personally often need to visualize or sketch out my thoughts — and this is always why I always have it with me."
It also works as a goal-tracking surface. OKRs, decisions, priority lists — kept offline, always accessible, updated with a pen rather than a keyboard. For a person who moves constantly, having personal goals not locked in a cloud app is its own kind of freedom.
"The reMarkable is also the space where I document my personal OKRs — to really have them offline and see whenever I do changes, I strike things through or do checks. For me that's a very important part to have them always with me without needing a screen."
One of the most practical use cases is also the least glamorous: middle-of-the-night thinking. Waking with a thought and wanting to record it without turning on a phone screen, opening apps, or triggering a notification spiral. The reMarkable stays by the bed. The thought gets recorded. Sleep continues.
"It's always actually next to my bed whenever I have some thoughts, so I can put them down — because that's important to get rid of everything in your head to clear up space."
The device in use here is the original reMarkable 1 — bought at the beta store in San Francisco 8 years ago. The Paper Pro was tested and returned: the glass screen on the color model did not survive the same conditions. For pure traveller use — expedition-grade durability, maximum battery life, paper-like screen — the Paper Pure is the current recommendation if buying new.
The Paper Pro's color screen is a feature for people who work primarily indoors. For someone moving through mountains, desert, and tropics, durability over features is the correct tradeoff.
"I wish I had a commercial partnership with them 10 years ago because I do not know how many people actually already bought a product because of me — from my friends in Austria to Argentinian friends to Silicon Valley. All over the world, people love it when they see me with it and then hear my thoughts on it. The conversion rate for people buying it is just insane."
This is what 8 years of genuine daily use generates: word-of-mouth that no marketing budget can replicate.
Explore the reMarkable Paper Pure
→ remarkable.com