Seems fairly different from reMarkable; they both use e-ink displays and they both support pens, but I’d say that’s about the extent of the similarity.
reMarkable has focused very tightly on its writing niche to the exclusion of other things, and it shows: the pen-to-screen gap is small, the surface is pleasant to write on (not paper but not awfully far off it and certainly not glass), pen-to-screen latency is finely tuned throughout in the software and hardware, it doesn’t have speakers, the processor isn’t very powerful at all, it has very little memory or storage by current standards, that kind of thing. They’ve done a good job with the experience; I really enjoy using my reMarkable.
Meanwhile, PineNote has a hardened glass surface, is at 7mm thicker than the reMarkable (6.7mm) and reMarkable 2 (4.7mm), has speakers, has lots of storage, has a powerful CPU, has lots of memory, has a frontlight (yay!), supports a pen but in a way that seems like an afterthought, and isn’t concerning itself with the software side of things at all. They’re producing a device for developers to see what they do with it, and maybe the developers will help them turn it into something suitable for normal humans.
IMHO, the huuuuuuuge Achilles' heel of the ReMarkable is no Bluetooth, which means no Bluetooth keyboards.
I want a pen about 10% of the time, for doodles. The rest of the time, I want a keyboard and mouse, or at the very least a keyboard and touchpad, and an e-ink tablet is just a low-power way to achieve that. ReMarkable is sort of famously hackable, but the Bluetooth chip is physically not wired.
PineNote has a sane pathway to being a low-power tablet with both Wacom and captouch input, and proper keyboard support. The only way to attach a keyboard to the RM2 is with a USB OTG dongle and external power pack, which is just bonkers.
I'm keenly aware that PineNote is a few steps beyond a figment of a designer's imagination, but still far far far from a finished product; they only just got the screen working to display a static image. It's not going to do everything the ReMarkable does for a long time yet.
But it's already as useful _to me_ as my RM2 is _to me_. And unlike the RM2, it's going to get better over time. I'm absolutely getting one.
reMarkable has focused very tightly on its writing niche to the exclusion of other things, and it shows: the pen-to-screen gap is small, the surface is pleasant to write on (not paper but not awfully far off it and certainly not glass), pen-to-screen latency is finely tuned throughout in the software and hardware, it doesn’t have speakers, the processor isn’t very powerful at all, it has very little memory or storage by current standards, that kind of thing. They’ve done a good job with the experience; I really enjoy using my reMarkable.
Meanwhile, PineNote has a hardened glass surface, is at 7mm thicker than the reMarkable (6.7mm) and reMarkable 2 (4.7mm), has speakers, has lots of storage, has a powerful CPU, has lots of memory, has a frontlight (yay!), supports a pen but in a way that seems like an afterthought, and isn’t concerning itself with the software side of things at all. They’re producing a device for developers to see what they do with it, and maybe the developers will help them turn it into something suitable for normal humans.
I suspect I’m still going to get one.
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