reMarkable Paper Pro review: the writing tablet that's just for writing, now in color
reMarkable Paper Pro: Two-minute review
You don’t own the reMarkable Paper Pro, it owns you. This is a tablet with a single purpose – to capture your ideas. It does that almost perfectly. There are other things you can do with the reMarkable Paper Pro, but it won’t do anything as well as keeping your thoughts and ideas organized and flowing.
It does this by doing almost nothing else. The reMarkable Paper Pro is the follow-up to the reMarkable 2, a monochrome writing tablet with an E Ink display and a Wacom-licensed EMR stylus. The earlier reMarkable earned fans by offering simplicity and a distraction-free environment. It's so well designed and pleasant to use that it becomes addictive, and that’s why I keep using it.
I bring my reMarkable 2, and now my reMarkable Paper Pro, to every event I cover as a journalist. It’s not just because I love flashing the most pretentious, manicured, single-minded tablet you can own; it’s because the reMarkable feels free and easy in a way my laptop cannot.
When I have to type notes on a keyboard, I feel constrained. I need to sit. I need to follow the rules of the document app. I can’t easily create and organize notes in the way I want, not without fighting the app.
When I use my reMarkable, I can put my ideas to paper the way I like, and I still get to save everything to Google Drive. In fact, reMarkable has finally relented, and you can now edit documents from the reMarkable app, away from the tablet. That’s been a long-requested feature from reMarkable’s devoted fan base.
The Paper Pro finally gives the most-requested features to reMarkable fans, including a front light for reading in the dark (seriously, you can’t read the reMarkable 2 in the dark), and – drum roll please – a color E Ink display!
I wasn’t expecting a color reMarkable this year, because the color E Ink tablets I’ve seen haven’t been spectacular. reMarkable has incredibly high standards, and the company seemed in no hurry to launch a new, sub-par product.
The reMarkable Paper Pro is a different color E Ink panel from anything I’ve seen before – I’ll talk later about the technology that brought reMarkable out of Kansas to the Land of Oz.
The reMarkable Paper Pro is electronic paper (ePaper), pure and simple, and it’s best not to expect too much from this tablet. It’s the best ePaper you’ve ever used. Since the reMarkable 2 launched in 2020, the company has spent a great deal of its effort improving the writing experience beyond all expectations. There's no perceptible lag between the pen and the ePaper. Writing feels like writing, as it should.
If that doesn’t appeal to you, you may be outside of reMarkable’s target audience, because the reMarkable Paper Pro is truly a luxury device for people who want the feeling of writing on paper, with the convenience of digital storage. This is not a versatile tablet. The list of things the reMarkable cannot do is longer and more surprising than the list of what it can.
There's no web browser on the reMarkable Paper Pro, because the company says the primary goal of the Paper Pro is to help you avoid distractions. To that end, not only can you not browse the web, you can’t even check the time. There's no visible clock on the Paper Pro. No web windows, no clocks – it’s like a Las Vegas casino, if Vegas was about creativity instead of gambling.
Why is there no clock? Because reMarkable knows this won’t be your only screen, or even your second screen. This is the device you buy after your iPhone and MacBook, instead of a distractingly bright and colorful iPad.
The company is unapologetic about its spartan attitude. It takes pride in rejecting far, far more feature requests than it grants: around 95% of the features that users request are rejected, according to reMarkable reps.
If you want a tablet that does a lot more, get an iPad. If you want an E Ink tablet that does a lot more, like running apps and a browser, get an Onyx Boox Note Air 3. If you want an E Ink tablet that's good for reading books, buy an Amazon Kindle Scribe.
The reMarkable Paper Pro will have none of that silliness. This tablet is not for reading, and it’s not for apps, and if you want those things in an ePaper tablet, it’s not for you, either.
reMarkable Paper Pro review: price and availability
- Starts at $579 / £559 / AU $929 with a Marker
- New Type Folio available at launch for $229 / £180 / AU $330 extra
The reMarkable Paper Pro is very expensive, especially considering how much this tablet doesn’t do. An Apple iPad costs from $449 / £499 / AU$749, without an Apple Pencil of course, and Apple’s tablet can do just about everything. The reMarkable Paper Pro, on the other hand, seems positively archaic by comparison.
That’s entirely the point, and the design and materials are deceptively advanced, as I’ll discuss below in the Design section. This is an ultra-premium, luxury device, even though it lacks features we normally associate with luxury tablets.
Depending on your region, reMarkable might try to sell you a tablet without a Marker, but don’t buy it – or rather, buy the Marker. You need it. The reMarkable Paper Pro isn’t a very good reading device. Also, unlike the reMarkable 2, the new Paper Pro doesn’t use Wacom’s EMR technology for its pen. The Marker is now proprietary reMarkable technology, so you can’t just get the tablet and then buy your own cheaper pen. A Samsung S Pen will not work with the reMarkable Paper Pro, as it will with a reMarkable 2.
You really should use a case or folio with this tablet, and the reMarkable Book Folios are very nice, whether you choose the recycled fabric or the leather. The newer Book Folios have a strap to hold the Marker in place. If you don’t like these covers, just wait a bit, because I’d expect a robust market for third-party covers will pop up on Etsy, just as it did for the reMarkable 2.
If you want to type on the reMarkable Paper Pro, in addition to writing with the Marker, reMarkable is offering a Type Folio keyboard for $229. Just like the tablet itself, the Type Folio keyboard is incredibly thin. With the Type Folio attached, the reMarkable is about as thick as most tablets with a basic folio cover. The Paper Pro is a larger tablet than the reMarkable 2, so the older Type Folio will not work with the new reMarkable.
The reMarkable 2 will still be available, now for even less. A bundle starts at $379, which is a drop from the previous $399 / £399 / AU$679 pricing, though still more than the Kindle Scribe, which sells for $339 / £329 / AU$549.
Unfortunately, reMarkable will not be accepting any older tablets as a trade-in for the new reMarkable Paper Pro. This is a big mistake, but for a company that started on Kickstarter, I get it. It’s not like reMarkable makes a new tablet every year and encourages regular upgrading. If you have the reMarkable 2, just keep it, it’s still great.
- Value score: 4/5
reMarkable Paper Pro review: specs
reMarkable Paper Pro review: display
- New E Ink Gallery 3 display isn't being used in other tablets
- Color is built into the pixels, not a separate layer
If you’re not familiar with E Ink, you should know about ePaper first. Unlike an LCD or OLED computer monitor, ePaper is a category of display that is designed to emulate paper. You can read an ePaper display outdoors in bright sunlight because it reflects light. An ePaper display also usually looks the same whether it's powered on or off.
There are a few different types of ePaper technology, and reMarkable uses an ePaper display from a company called E Ink – the screen tech is also called E Ink. Amazon’s Kindle e-reader tablets all use E Ink displays, and so do the reading and writing tablets from Kobo and Onyx.
E Ink is an amazing technology. Where your phone screen lights up and makes a picture when electricity passes through it, E Ink doesn’t light up at all. It makes a picture with tiny, almost microscopic balls. These balls sit in tiny little wells, and when electricity is applied, they rise to the top so you can see them.
The benefit of E Ink displays is that they can consume less power, because the screen will draw a page of words and then… do nothing. It sits still while you read, and it doesn’t require any juice. The screen only uses power when you have to turn the page, or scroll down. This makes it ideal for applications like reading and writing, where there isn’t a lot of page-turning and scrolling.
E Ink is very bad at displaying video and any task that requires a lot of movement on-screen. The screen cannot refresh nearly as quickly as a phone screen. Your phone's display can update at up to 120 times per second, while the fastest E Ink screen can barely top 10-15 frames per second – and even then, it’s drawing a lot more power than an E Ink screen was intended to use.
The reMarkable Paper Pro is a brand new E Ink screen, at least for tablets. The E Ink Gallery 3 technology has been used in digital signage commercially, but it hasn’t been used in a successful writing tablet. reMarkable is calling its brand of Gallery 3 E Ink the Canvas display.
There are other E Ink color tablets, like the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C and the Kobo Libra Colour. Those tablets use an E Ink Kaleido screen. The difference is where the color sits. On the Kaleido display, you have a black-and-white E Ink layer, just like any e-reader. Then you have a layer of color that sits just above the black-and-white layer.
The Kaleido display can refresh quickly, but the color has to allow the black and white layer to be visible beneath, so it uses a lower color resolution. The color does not look very saturated. If you see one of these screens in person, they almost have a layered effect to the color that seems off compared to color print or a similar medium.
The new Gallery 3 E Ink panel on the reMarkable Paper Pro, on the other hand, puts the color in the same layer as the black-and-white. This gives you better color resolution and a sharper image, but it takes the display longer to draw and update color. In fact, E Ink told me that while the black ink can refresh in 350 milliseconds (ms), the color ink can take anywhere from 500ms to 1.5 seconds to finish drawing, for the most accurate color.
We’ve been waiting four years for a new reMarkable tablet, and the addition of color was highly anticipated by fans, though I was skeptical, as I’ve seen tablets that use color E Ink ‘Kaleido’ panels. I can’t say that the reMarkable color display is perfect, but it definitely looks better than the E Ink competition, and it adds a layer of usefulness.
The colors are still faint, even though reMarkable has added a light to the new Paper Pro tablet. The light is very dim, just barely bright enough power to let you read in the dark. Unlike the Amazon Kindle Scribe, which packs a bevy of LED backlights, the reMarkable Paper Pro gives you a meager candle for reading, and little more.
That said, if you know where to look for the quality, you’ll find it. The reMarkable Paper Pro looks like paper and ink. The display may seem a bit grey, but it looks bone-white compared to other ePaper tablets. The ink color is highly visible and looks like real ink, no matter what color you now choose. The display feels great for writing – not so much like paper, but like expensive stationery. All around, this is a writing tablet for connoisseurs of writing tablets.
- Display score: 4 / 5
reMarkable Paper Pro review: Design
- Thinner than an iPad Pro, even with the new lights
- Accessories are a must, not a maybe
The reMarkable Paper Pro is an incredibly well-built device, and it has a premium finish and design that is truly… impeccable. Even though the new reMarkable Paper Pro has a larger battery than the reMarkable 2, a fully-lit display, and new color E Ink technology, it remains one of the thinnest tablets you can buy, if not the thinnest.
The new iPad Pro that Apple brags is its thinnest product ever? That 5.3mm fatso needs to lose a couple tenths of a millimeter if it wants to brag against the 5.1mm reMarkable Paper Pro, or the even thinner (and still available) 4.7mm reMarkable 2.
The latest reMarkable is larger than before, so unfortunately the older accessories like the Type Folio won’t work. And you’re definitely going to want a case for this tablet. It feels solid, but it's so thin and light that I’d hate to put its durability to a stress test. The reMarkable folios are all very high-quality, and I expect third party options will appear before long.
- Design score: 5/5
reMarkable Paper Pro review: Software
- Not so much software, more like paper with some features
- No apps, no home screen, just notes
The reMarkable Paper Pro keeps things very simple. You have notes (called Notebooks) and folders. That’s it. You can tag your notes, then search those tags later to jump to a specific notebook or section in a book.
There is no app store. There is no home screen with widgets and icons. You can see your folders, and you can click on the folders to see the notes inside them. That’s all. I love the simplicity. If you’re tired of saving photos or files on your phone, then having no idea where they went, the reMarkable Paper Pro is a soothing balm. You will never lose anything, because it’s simply right in front of you.
When you write a note, you can handwrite or type text. There's an onscreen keyboard for typography if you don’t buy the Type Folio.
The Paper Pro can convert handwriting to typed text, but the feature is very rudimentary. It was able to recognize most of my writing, but when it could not figure out my chicken scratch, it just skipped that word.
Worst of all, the final product is ugly and hard to correct. In fact, a huge weakness of the reMarkable software is how difficult it can be to edit, change, and move things around, especially typed text. It's very hard to select the right word, or a group of words, because the screen can feel unresponsive. It is almost impossible to create a proper layout using type – you’re better off just drawing what you want.
Sadly, there are very few helpful drawing tools, either. There is no help making straight lines, and nothing to make shapes. You can’t create stickers to add to your documents, which would be a boon for journaling fans.
You can write in color, or paint in color, or highlight in color, but the color features are just as limited as everything else. Don’t expect the reMarkable Paper Pro to be your new drawing tablet. The color options are scant and unalterable. You can’t tap to fill a space with color, for instance.
You can’t even pick your own colors. You get the colors reMarkable has chosen, and that’s all. No color picker, no blending colors. Colors are for organization and ideas, not, well, coloring.
Actually, that’s not true, because I downloaded a PDF with some mindfulness exercises that include coloring, and though my color options are limited, I can still have fun making pretty pictures. You can load any PDF or ePUB document onto the reMarkable Paper Pro, either through the mobile or desktop app, or using a Chrome extension that converts web pages into PDFs. Once you have a document loaded, you can draw and color upon it to your heart’s content.
- Software score: 2/5
reMarkable Paper Pro review: Performance
- Amazing pen response, with new pen technology
- Screen can feel very sluggish with touch, especially swipes
The reMarkable Paper Pro has a lot more power than before, but for what? The most advanced feature, and maybe the only advanced feature, is handwriting recognition, a technology that predates the earliest iPhone.
Actually, I’ve talked to developers who work with E Ink who tell me that the screen technology is astonishingly difficult to program, so perhaps the improved performance is driving the more complex color display.
The problem is that the reMarkable Paper Pro feels very slow. Not when you’re writing. Writing works at light speed. The new Marker uses an active technology, powered by a rechargeable battery, that makes response time even faster, according to reMarkable. Writing feels very fast and fluid, with absolutely no discernible lag.
Navigating the reMarkable Paper Pro, though, feels like a serious drag. Swiping to the next page often took multiple swipes. Scrolling could be unresponsive on longer documents, and pinch-zooming might not work on the first attempt.
Once you have your document template set up, everything feels snappy. Writing, drawing, and coloring with the new brushes works with perfect fluidity. It feels like writing on real paper, not writing on a laggy screen. Once you’re done, have some patience, because it could take a while to send your file, or navigate to the next folder.
- Performance score: 3 / 5
reMarkable Paper Pro review: Battery
- Two weeks of battery life, even with the light continually on
- That's because the light is very dim
Before you get impressed by the two weeks of battery life that the reMarkable Paper Pro can offer, remember that an Amazon Kindle with an E Ink display can last more than a month with steady use. The reMarkable is impressive, but it isn’t the best ePaper device for battery life.
It’s still much better than competing devices from Onyx, like the Onyx Boox Air 3. Onyx pushes its E Ink displays to the limit, and Boox tablets can actually display videos, or browse regular web pages, or even run games, like any other Android tablet (almost). Pushing E Ink faster drains power very quickly, though. E Ink is meant to be slow and steady, not fast.
The reMarkable Paper Pro charges via USB-C, and it comes with a charging cord. I’m not sure how fast it charges because the battery lasts two weeks, so I didn’t mind a slower charge-up.
- Battery score: 5 / 5
Should I buy the reMarkable Paper Pro?
Buy it if...
You want a premium digital pen and paper experience
At its heart the reMarkable Paper Pro is simply electronic pen and paper, with all the benefits of the cloud. If you embrace that simplicity, you’ll love it.
You need freedom from distractions
There is no web browser, no games, no app store, not even a clock to tell you how long you’ve been procrastinating.
You’ve been waiting for a color reMarkable with a light
A color screen and a light are by far the two biggest requests I hear from vocal reMarkable fans. Those folks get their wish with the Paper Pro.
Don't buy it if...
You want to read books, or do anything else but write
The reMarkable Paper Pro can read PDF files and ePUB books, but it's better for marking up documents than for reading a novel.
You’re going to complain about what it can’t do
Look, the reMarkable Paper Pro can’t do a lot, that’s the point. It’s time to simplify! If you can’t get with that, buy something complicated.
You lose pens all the time
The Paper Pro Marker pen is proprietary, so there are no cheap third-party options, and it’s easy to lose since it only attaches magnetically.
Also consider
Amazon Kindle Scribe
If you read more than you write, get the Amazon Kindle Scribe, which gives you access to Amazon’s huge Kindle library, without all the distractions of an iPad or Android tablet.
Read our full Amazon Kindle Scribe review
Apple iPad 10.9
If you need a lot of distractions, or a more capable tablet, the Apple iPad is the same price as the reMarkable Paper Pro, and it has a lot more colors. It’s very distracting, indeed, and it works with an Apple Pencil.
Read our full Apple iPad 10.9 review
How I tested the reMarkarble Paper Pro
I received the reMarkable Paper Pro a few weeks before this review was published, and I used it as my primary note-taking and journaling tool, both for work and personal use. I normally use a reMarkable 2 for these tasks, so I'm familiar with the tablet’s capabilities and limitations.
I charged the reMarkable Paper Pro at the beginning of my review period and then didn't charge it again until I needed to take photos for this review, to ensure that reMarkable’s battery-life claims were accurate. After two weeks, I tested charging again on my standard USB-C charger.
I connected the reMarkable Paper Pro to my Google Drive account for document synchronization, as well as the Google Chrome browser. I used the reMarkable app on my MacBook, Android phone, and iPhone.
I gave the reMarkable Paper Pro to folks with more drawing ability and artistic talent than I have and asked them what they think. I did not tell them what tablet they were using. I also downloaded a number of third-party PDF files from Etsy to try them with the reMarkable Paper Pro.
I used the reMarkable Paper Pro with reMarkable’s Book Folio and Type Folio cases, typing extensively with the keyboard.
Read more about how we test.
- First reviewed: September 2024
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