Way back in July, I ordered the new reMarkable2 tablet, and got into shipping batch 8, which was predicted to ship in early November.

It arrived a couple of days ago, and I have already moved all of my paper note-taking to it. Indeed, my biggest complaint with it is that I am no longer using my fancy fountain pens and notebooks. And I have been a fountain pen, notebook, snob for more than 30 years.

You can read about the device, if you’re interested, at the above link. The short version is that it’s a linux-based e-ink device that is optimized for pen note taking, and doesn’t really do anything else.

Which is exactly what I was looking for.

If your first response is that you can get an iPad for the same price – yeah, that’s true, and it does more, but it’s not what I was looking for. I wanted something that feels like paper, lets me take notes, and then converts them to text on demand.

And it does a few other things.

More importantly, it has a large hacker community around it who produce a wide variety of other tools for the device. Since this is the second version of the device, there’s already a large number of open source projects out there. And it’s growing rapidly.

So, initial take on it is that I’m very pleased with it, and recommend it for folks that prefer paper note taking to typing, but are frustrated that once something’s on paper it’s not easy to import that information into other formats.