ReMarkable 2 Review: One Year On
- May 15, 2022
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 19, 2024
After noticing that my first review was over a year old, I updated my review on 15 May 2022, a few months over one year after I first purchased the device in March 2021.
Jump to the parts of this Remarkable 2 Review that are of the most interest to you:
Declaration of interest: I am not associated with reMarkable in any way and am not being paid, nor offered any form or inducement to write this review. reMarkable do periodically send referral codes to existing customers, which I may share on this site when they are made available to me, but they have no influence or relationship whatsoever to my reviews.
Please note that reMarkable have since updated their pricing and subscription models. See my most recent update for the latest pricing and up to dote review.
Updated reMarkable 2 Review: One Year On
One year on, I am still using it on a daily basis for work and occasional personal use and genuinely couldn’t be without it. It has therefore happily proven its value to me as a great productivity tool and not one of those ‘fad’ purchases that end up gathering dust in a drawer.
After one software update, I found that it wasn’t as easy to ‘flick’ between pages and the ‘zoom’ gesture was triggered a little too easily but, other than that, I have had very few gripes from a software perspective (update: both of these issues have since been rectified with subsequent software updates).
From a hardware point of view, the lack of back-light is still a pain point for me and I did end up getting a new Kindle so I could read Kindle books (which still can't be opened on a reMarkable) in low lights, resulting in an additional cost of £80 (without ads). I didn’t begrudge this too much though because, for me, the two devices serve completely different purposes, but it is something to consider if you’re looking for an all-in-one device.
"Connect" Subscription
Despite my overall positive experience, though, I have become somewhat disillusioned with the tablet’s creators and no longer feel quite so comfortable recommending it to others.
The main reason for this, of course, is the paid “Connect” subscription, introduced in late 2021. I was fortunate to have purchased my device before 12 October 2021, so was granted free unlimited subscription to the full service, but I feel bad for those that weren’t.
At the time of writing, the tablet itself is now £100 cheaper than the £399 I paid in March 2021, but you have to pay an additional monthly subscription (£71.88 per year) to use some of the features that attracted me to the product in the first place.
If you don’t subscribe to either of the paid plans, you basically get a very expensive notebook with 8 GB internal storage and the ability to arrange your notes into folders on the device itself. You can still use a browser plug-in to send web pages, EPUB eBooks and PDFs to your device to read and annotate; but only files and notes accessed within the past 50 days are backed up to the cloud. Any files opened less recently are only stored on the device itself and cannot be accessed from the reMarkable mobile or desktop apps. This could be a problem if you lose or damage the tablet and have no other way to retrieve your old notes.
The cheapest “Connect Lite” subscription, at £3.99 per month (£47.88 per year), gets you unlimited cloud storage but still doesn’t allow you to use the handwriting conversion, send by email or screen share features that came with the product when I bought it. Nor can you take advantage of the Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive integrations, which have since been added.
Only the full Connect service (£5.99 per month) allows you to make full use of the device and includes a 3-year extended warranty, which covers the tablet and any accessories (e.g. Markers). If you cancel or downgrade your Connect plan at any point, the limited warranty states there is no warranty coverage for the device or any accessories and you only have your statutory legal rights.
If you cancel your Connect subscription at any point, you forfeit the 3-year "protection plan" and only have the one-year limited warranty and your statutory legal rights.
Marker Plus
This brings me on to my second concern. About 13 months after purchasing the device and Marker Plus, I changed the tip on the Marker Plus, following the instructions on the supplied card, which advises you to remove the old one by sliding it into the slot in the card and moving it towards the narrow end. After changing the tip, I noticed that it no longer felt stable in the stylus and would only write well from certain angles. On closer inspection, I saw that a portion of the part holding the nib in place had come away - see the photo below:
After an internet search, I quickly discovered that this was in fact a common problem, as shown in this helpful video, comparing the Marker Plus with the 1st generation model.
I contacted reMarkable support and they were very helpful, offering to send me a replacement straight away, without the hassle of returning the defective item. The new stylus arrived via DHL from Hong Kong just 3 days later.
I can’t fault the customer service in my case but I also can’t help wondering if someone that bought their device after October 2021 and either didn't subscribe or subsequently cancelled their Connect subscription would have had the same experience, given that I was just outside the one-year warranty period. I also (perhaps cynically) question if the change in policy to charge for the 3-year warranty was at all influenced by the seemingly now well-known defect with the Marker Plus. It certainly can’t be cheap to keep shipping replacement markers, currently retailing at £119, without being able to recoup at least some of that cost.
Features
Google Drive Integration
I did list the lack of 3rd party cloud storage integrations as a shortcoming in my original review and have found it to be a very useful feature since its release. I can open a PDF on my tablet, read, annotate and/or sign it and re-upload it to my Drive for safekeeping or sharing, all without having to email it to myself or use the reMarkable app.
It is slightly annoying that I can’t file notes and documents in my Google Drive folders directly on the device. You can only send them to your drive and then file them, using Google Drive’s own mobile, desktop or web applications, but this is still easier than having to export them to another device’s local storage using the reMarkable app, upload them manually to Google Drive, then file them. Similarly, you have to copy files from Google Drive to “My Files” on the tablet to be able to open, view and edit them on the device, but this is also a relatively minor inconvenience. It does however have the advantage of preventing you accidentally editing or deleting the original file on your Drive.
Handwriting recognition
This is still a good feature, but one I admit I don’t use much any more. It theoretically enables me to send my handwritten notes to myself to edit and send out, rather than having to type them all up; but the fact that line breaks aren’t respected and certain symbols (e.g. £ / &) aren’t always recognised still entails a degree of manual intervention that makes it easier for me to type the notes up from scratch.
I also tend to use long brackets and arrows when I’m writing, which don’t convert to text and if I end up writing text in columns, rather than straight lines, it obviously also gets converted to nonsense. It has potential, but I think it needs work to make it a truly useful feature.
Screen Sharing
This feature (previously called Live View) was in beta when I first bought the tablet and although it did work, I found there was a bit of a lag in changes made on the tablet appearing on the screen. I hadn't felt the need to use it since the feature came out of beta, but did test it on my Windows PC for the purpose of this review and saw the prompt to accept the connection in the app, which I did, but it got stuck at this point and the notebook I was sharing failed to materialise on the screen.
I followed the troubleshooting steps but they didn’t help.
ReMarkable 2 Review One Year On: Conclusion
While I can sympathise to an extent with reMarkable, in that the original price point was considered by many to be too high and they were probably under pressure to reduce it, without diminishing their profit margins, I vehemently disagree with the way they went about it.
For me, the £100 reduction in cost of the base product isn’t sufficient to justify paying an additional £71 per year for features, most of which in my opinion are not even production-ready, let alone worthy of an additional fee.
I also object in principle to them charging an ongoing fee for the extended warranty. If a product isn’t of durable quality or fit for purpose, it should in my opinion be automatically repaired or replaced under warranty, without having to resort to legal recourse.
For me, the reduction in the cost of the base product wasn't sufficient to justify paying an additional fee per year for features, most of which in my opinion weren't worthy of the extra cost. I also object in principle to them charging an ongoing fee for the extended warranty. If a product isn’t of durable quality or fit for purpose, it should in my opinion be automatically repaired or replaced under warranty, without having to resort to legal recourse.
Based on the current £5.99 monthly Connect subscription, customers will pay £215.64 over the 3-year warranty period and presumably (hopefully!) more over the full lifetime of the product. That’s 72% of the retail price (not manufacturing cost) of a brand new device, 60% if you also purchase a Marker, or 53% if you opt for the Marker Plus. This says a lot to me about the manufacturers’ confidence in the the quality of their product and as a result significantly undermines my own confidence in it too.
Instead of risking lower short-term sales volumes by keeping the price as it was and letting the device prove its own value and grow in popularity by recommendation, reMarkable in my opinion shot themselves in the foot. They potentially increased interest by lowering the price, but I believe the subscription fee will still raise a red-flag for many consumers and create even more hesitancy to purchase than the higher price tag, which is still significantly higher than a number of similar products on the market.
They have also effectively excluded the gifting market because who wants to buy a gift for which the recipient will have to pay an ongoing fee? At the time of writing, you couldn't even gift the Connect subscription because it’s non-transferable and has to be linked to the owner’s account.
Worse still, I don’t see how reMarkable can even row back from this decision if they do end up regretting it. Current subscribers won’t be happy if they suddenly start offering a subscription-free option and new purchasers won’t want to pay a higher up-front cost.
It will be interesting to see what happens next to the reMarkable 2, but I sadly won’t be recommending it to anyone else for now.
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