reMarkable’s Paper Pro adds color, light and more but keeps the focus on ‘focus’

The new Paper Pro tablet from reMarkable moves the company’s vision of combining PC with paper closer to reality, adding color and capability while keeping the philosophy of focus intact.

The Norwegian company has been something of an unlikely success story. In a day and age where more and more functionality is crammed into our devices, reMarkable’s approach of doing a few things well — and largely in black and white — seems almost self-defeating. But despite swimming upstream, the company has prospered, growing and funding itself without resorting to venture capital, something few startups can say.

With the first reMarkable tablet, the company established the philosophy of focusing on one document at a time, reading and writing on the device as if it were a piece of paper. The reMarkable 2 significantly improved and streamlined the device, making writing especially much more responsive.

The $499 Paper Pro — a new naming convention to indicate it is a higher-end alternative to the now-$379 reMarkable 2, not a direct successor — is momentous for its addition of both color and a “frontlight,” though both features are what you might call muted.

I received a device to review, so expect that (as well as our own photos) to follow in due time; and I will also be putting some more technical details in a separate piece about the hardware. But for now, here’s the top line on the latest from reMarkable.

Oreos and Skittles

Color e-paper devices have never yet managed to convince me that the feature is worth the trade-off. For instance, comparing the color and monochrome versions of a Kobo e-reader, anyone can see that the color version is inferior for everyday reading. And color content, while passable, is vastly inferior to how it appears on an ordinary screen.

reMarkable’s hardware lead Mats Herding explained this succinctly. In reflective screens like e-paper, the pixels are kind of like glasses of milk with Oreos submerged in them. If the cookie is below the surface, the pixel is white(ish); if you make the cookie rise to the top, it’s black. Normally color is added by putting a RGB filter over the top so that the white pixels are colorized — but this also affects resolution and contrast.

As Herding explained it, what they’ve done is instead dumped a bunch of Skittles (the American type; taste the rainbow) in the milk. And they can surface the Oreo — or the red skittles, or the green ones, or whatever — with no hit to resolution or clarity.

The color is still muted, and I would not want to read a comic on the device, but the point of adding color is to enrich interactive and creative options. Whereas before you were limited to black and white, you can now highlight, circle, jot and sketch in a handful of distinct colors (they blend but look best in their pure form).

Anyone who works with text or mixed media regularly knows how limiting it can be to work with just one color; at the very least it helps with clarity to have a highlighter for important passages and a ballpoint pen for notes. reMarkable’s team is careful to take inspiration from real-world examples, so the software now supports quick switching between two pens, just as any professor or editor marking up a story would have.

It’s freeing for anyone who theoretically wanted to edit or mark up documents — design treatments, pitch decks, article layouts, books and all the rest — but it felt limited by the device’s colorless predecessors.

Light, stylus, (active)

The writing experience is, apart from the above, superficially unchanged, but ask Herding and you’ll get the full report on how difficult it was to simultaneously add color and a frontlight, increase the screen size, and further improve the already standard-setting pen/writing experience.

Everything, he stressed, more or less had to be developed from scratch, since they didn’t want to compromise on anything (with one exception: weight; something had to give). Just as filter-based color wasn’t an option, existing frontlights and stylus tracking tech weren’t either.

The new frontlight is not intended to get past ambient brightness; it’s a replacement for shining a light on the screen, not meant to be a light itself. It’s also locked to a specific color temperature range, because too much change there would cause the color cast to change.

That sounds limiting, but really, my experience with e-reader frontlights is that I pick a temperature and a minimal brightness or two and just stick to it. The reMarkable Paper Pro’s screen is a little cooler than I’d like for reading books, but it makes good sense as a virtual piece of paper.

There’s a new active stylus that works in synchrony with the screen to provide a sub-20-millisecond response time for producing a line when you write, which is past the inflection point of around 25 to 30 millliseconds that feels good enough and still does seem noticeably better. The pen pointedly has no charging port, and it only collects power by being stuck to the side of the tablet. It’s also more expensive, though, so be careful not to lose it — like I almost did within about two hours of getting my review unit.

Finally, a real out-of-the box typedeck?

One capability that has been more aspirational than functional on the reMarkable 2 is the ability to type on it. As a writer perpetually procrastinating until I get the perfect writing-focused device (people have resorted to creating their own “typedecks” since what’s on the market is generally lacking), I was excited for it but ultimately found the experience lackluster when reMarkable’s otherwise well-done keyboard case debuted last year.

The company has thankfully doubled down on the feature rather than allowing it to remain vestigial, and there is a new typing case for the Paper Pro and a redone typing/mixed-media experience that acknowledges the capricious and complex needs of writers: things like selecting text, copying and pasting, writing in the margins — you know, real high-tech stuff. There’s even a dedicated key for switching between sketching and highlighting and editor-type actions like selecting and shifting.

I only very lightly tested the new Paper Pro in its capacity as typedeck (having received the device before a long weekend, with the announcement immediately following it), but I’m optimistic this time. The type looks better, there are more options in-line, the interface is more robust, and I can actually edit my work. The keyboard itself has been improved as well, though I haven’t had time to directly compare to the original. (Again, a review is forthcoming.)