AI is good. AI is bad. You’ll be left behind if you don’t use AI. You’ll erode your brain if you do use AI. AI is destroying art. AI is making real art more important than ever. AI is— you get the idea.
The topsy-turvy discourse surrounding the doomed/promising future of the workplace (delete as appropriate) is enough to make your head implode, but reMarkable is among the few technology companies taking a more measured approach to the changing nature of productivity.
The Norwegian brand’s minimalist writing tablets are an antidote to traditional laptops. These stripped-back, distraction-free slates have gained popularity among professionals in recent years — you may have seen one or two floating around your office — but their high price tags have so far limited their wider appeal (the reMarkable Paper Pro, for instance, starts at $579 / £559 / AU$929). Now, reMarkable is releasing its first truly affordable tablet, the reMarkable Paper Pure — and it bridges the gap between the analog and the digital in exciting new ways.
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“We never intended to make products for only a few,” Jon Dalvang, VP, Head of Paper Tablet Product Management at reMarkable, tells me in an interview. “[Our existing tablets] are quite expensive products, and we have to acknowledge that. So that’s why we’re now really happy to finally introduce the second half of our product family. We’ll have a Pro line moving forward, and a Pure line.
“Innovation [these days] just seems to be about slapping on more and more features [to existing products], but with the Paper Pure, we’ve looked back to the original idea [of reMarkable tablets] and tried to make a paper tablet in its most essential form.”
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Starting at $399 / £359 (AU$TBC), the Paper Pure is much like the reMarkable 2 in that it uses a 10.3-inch black-and-white display and doesn’t feature a front light. It’s a back-to-basics alternative to the pricier (and color-compatible) Paper Pro line. But this is not an identical product to reMarkable’s 2020 offering.
“We always put a lot of effort into making our displays feel as close to paper as possible. And we’ve taken that one step further with the Paper Pure,” Dalvang explains. “Its display is whiter than ever before, and it’s got 20% better contrast than the reMarkable 2. Navigation, opening and closing documents, and swiping pages is also up to twice as fast.”
Beyond its display, the Paper Pure is a full 43g lighter than the reMarkable 2, it’s 50% faster, and its battery lasts 30% longer, too.
“It’s not a direct replacement of the reMarkable 2,” Dalvang clarifies, “but it’s an intentional take on trying to reach an entry point for a broader mass market.” Notably, the reMarkable 2 is no longer available to buy on reMarkable’s website.
The cognitive benefits of paper
Even if you’re not sold on the idea of using a pen and paper in the workplace, you’ll know that writing by hand forces you to slow down and think about the content you’re actually producing. It can even lead to moments of unexpected inspiration (in his hands-on reMarkable Paper Pure review, my colleague, Lance, notes that “minutes pass before I realize I’ve derailed from work to mind-soothing creativity”). reMarkable believes this analog approach to productivity has never been more important.
“Since the Industrial Revolution, speed has very much been the name of the game,” William Chaumeton, Head of Concept and Product Design at reMarkable, tells me. “Hundreds of years of focus on output, efficiency, doing more with less — quantity with acceptable degrees of quality. Over the last 75 years, we’ve added on top of that the information revolution and the digital age, and [as a consequence] a lot more cognitive load to the modern workday.
We don’t necessarily think that faster thinking means better thinking.
William Chaumeton, reMarkable
“Throw in the hypercatalyst that is AI, and things are getting even faster. A recent study showed that people who are actively engaging with AI in their workload are reporting that they’re more productive than ever, but also that they’re more exhausted than ever […] The expectations [of work] are growing in line with these new tools. If AI makes you 10 times faster, people don’t say, ‘Take the afternoon off,’ they say, ‘Why are you not doing 10 times more?
“We don’t necessarily think that faster thinking means better thinking. ‘Slop’ is a term that’s used a lot these days, and for good reason. We’re seeing a gap emerging in the workplace — the thinking gap. We refer to it as the cognitive disconnect: the disparity between the output and the input. People are reaching for the solution without a thorough understanding of the problem. The things we’re producing in much greater quantities are shallower.
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“Better thinking for us is about depth of thought,” Chaumeton continues. It’s about clarity of thought. It’s about the communicability of thought. The power of human cognition is being able to slow down, think about things differently, and mix new ideas. That’s the human advantage in the workplace. And that’s the advantage that we’re trying to protect at reMarkable.
“And just to be clear, we’re not anti-AI, quite the opposite in fact. But we think that the power of human thought is really simplified by pen and paper. Paper slows us down; it gives us room to think like humans. We don’t want to force people to think like machines. We want to make space with the machines, for human thinking.”
It’s clear, then, that reMarkable isn’t kidding itself about the need to merge the analog and digital effectively. If you can’t move your written work into a digital workspace, you may as well be scribbling it onto the walls of a cave.
And good news! The Paper Pure launches alongside several new software tools that make collaboration with non-reMarkable users easier than ever — though you’ll need to shell out for the brand’s Connect subscription service to access some of them (it’s currently priced at $3.99 / £3.99 per month).
Among the most useful new features is screen share, which lets you beam your reMarkable screen into your web browser for annotating content — in real-time — for an online or in-person audience. There’s also a new ‘Convert and share’ feature, which uses AI to turn your handwriting into editable, shareable web documents.
AI is likewise called upon for reMarkable’s new Send to Slack and Send to Miro features, which again automatically convert handwriting and sketches into sendable text.
In other words, there is plenty of useful software hidden beneath the reMarkable Paper Pure’s analog exterior. And all of these new features will be made available on the full suite of existing reMarkable tablets, too — even the 2017 original model.
The reMarkable Paper Pure starts at $399 / £359 (AU$TBC) for the device and Marker, with that price rising to $449 / £399 (AU$TBC) for the device, Marker Plus (which features a digital eraser), and Sleeve Folio. It’s available to order now, with shipping set to begin in early June.
For our early impressions of the device, check out our hands-on reMarkable Paper Pure review, and stay tuned to TechRadar for our full review.
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axel.metz@futurenet.com (Axel Metz)
