Ring is rebranding its subscription products, ditching Ring Protect in favor of Ring Home, and to celebrate it’s bringing some new features along. The most notable change is the addition of 24/7 recording if you own select wired video cameras, ensuring you don’t miss anything if a motion alert wasn’t triggered. You’ll also get video clip previews sent through push notifications, rather than having to wait for the app to open.
In addition, users can now get Extended and Continuous Live View options for their cameras, letting them keep an eye on what’s going on when they need it. Extended Live View, for instance, will up the time limit on watching a camera from 10 minutes to 30, while Continuous removes the limit altogether. You’ll also get Doorbell Calls, which triggers a phone call that’ll connect straight to your smartphone when someone’s at the door.
The prices for each of the new Ring Home tiers will remain the same as their Ring Protect predecessors, at last for now. Home Basic is $4.99 a month, while Home Standard is $9.99/month, and Home Premium is $19.99/month. Unsurprisingly, Extended Live View and Doorbell Calls are available at the Standard tier, while the Continuous Live View and 24/7 recording are unlocked at the Premium level.
As for why the tiers were changed, it's to enable users to bolt-on additional packages from Ring's growing ecosystem of security products. It says that, when the change kicks in on November 5th, you'll be able to add Virtual Security Guard and Alarm Professional Monitoring to the same plan.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/ring-brings-247-recording-to-some-of-its-wired-cameras-130003545.html?src=rss
It’s wild to think the reMarkable 2 debuted in March 2020, a time now more famous for other reasons. A lot has changed in the four-plus years since, and now it’s time for its successor, the reMarkable Paper Pro. The third-generation, distraction-free writing slate gets a color e-paper display as well as a raft of other equally notable improvements. That includes a bigger screen, faster internals and an active stylus for a more paper-and-pen-like experience. But this much more tech comes at a higher price, so let’s answer the question: Is it worth it?
reMarkable is the standard bearer for devices straddling the gap between the analog and digital. It’s an e-paper slate with a stylus (and optional keyboard) that lets you read, write and edit your own documents and PDFs. The focus is on giving you a tool that’ll act like paper and pen or a word processor rather than anything more fully-featured. That way, you can focus on whatever you’re doing without the distractions a full computer, tablet or phone offers. If there was a way to make “medium tech” sound not like an insult, I’m sure reMarkable would wear it proudly.
Hardware
The new reMarkable Paper Pro measures 196.6 x 274.1 x 5.1mm, making it roughly an inch taller and a quarter-inch wider than its predecessor, the reMarkable 2 (188 x 246 x 4.7mm). But it doesn’t feel that much bigger, thanks to plenty of effort made to shrink the bezels around the display. And the left band (the chin when using the device in landscape mode) has been eliminated altogether here. All of that room has been made to accommodate the Paper Pro’s headline feature: an 11.8-inch Canvas Color screen.
I prefer tablets that have a slightly more austere design than where the industry has been for the last few years. The reMarkable 2 was one of many slates aping the then-current iPad’s rounded off corners and sides that never felt right. The Paper Pro is a delightful correction, with sharper lines and squarer corners that gives the device some much-needed visual rigidity. The edge band is also inlaid with grooves that, designer Mats Solberg explained, has two useful benefits beyond looking good. First, it evokes the idea you’re holding a sheaf of paper in your hand, and second, it adds some grip to a device that’s surprisingly thin.
The inside of the Paper Pro has been given a thorough upgrade as well, with a new 1.8GHz Cortex A53 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. This is underpowered compared to any smartphone from the last decade, but don’t forget the reMarkable doesn’t need that much grunt. It’s still a big leap ahead of the rM2, which was packing a 1.2GHz dual-core chip with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. The battery’s a lot beefier, too, leaping up from the 3,000mAh of the rM2 to 5,030mAh here. It needs to be, given this is also the first reMarkable with a backlight, making it the first model you can use in dark rooms without a lot of grief.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
To be clear, the new size and the switch from a passive stylus to an active one means none of your existing reMarkable accessories are compatible with Paper Pro. The accessory connector is on the backplate rather than the edge, and the new stylus is magnetically charged. So when you’re pricing one of these up, bear in mind that you’ll need a whole new set of extras, too.
In use
As soon as you turn on the Paper Pro, you’ll notice the leap in performance compared to its predecessor. At the risk of damning this thing with faint praise; If the reMarkable 2 felt like a fancy ereader, then this feels more like a slow tablet. The faster internals and display mean the experience is a lot more responsive and snappy, with far less delay between action and result. There are even little animations during the setup process and unlocking the device with a six-digit code feels like you’re unlocking a phone.
The Paper Pro uses a modified version of E Ink’s Gallery 3 technology called “Canvas Color.” Each pixel in the display holds a series of particles: White, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. These can be combined to make eight solid colors (Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, White and Black) or, with dithering, up to 20,000 different shades therein. The analogy the company uses is in the CMYK inks found in most printers and newspaper presses.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
The end result is a display with visible, if muted, color reproduction with some limitations you’ll need to work around. If you’re making handwritten amendments to a document, you’ll need blue, cyan, magenta or red. Because yellow, green, gray and cyan are irritatingly faint when you write with a thin nib on existing text. The inverse is true for highlighting, where the gentler colors are better.
There’s no big difference in readability between the Paper Pro (229 ppi) compared to its predecessor (226 ppi). But I can’t quite shake the nagging feeling that the smaller, older device has sharper text when I’m looking at it. Your mileage may vary.
Because of how much new tech has been crammed inside the Paper Pro, you’ll find scrolling speeds are much faster. When I used the reMarkable 2, I felt I could see its processes taking place in real time. You know, “Identify input, process input, send command to screen, refresh screen,” with a notable delay. Here, any lag feels more like a result of the e-paper display’s natural limitations and slow refresh rate rather than slow processing speed.
Plenty of work has been done by the reMarkable team to reduce the latency between the pen and the display. Even after the addition of the color screen, which necessitated some compromise, the input lag was cut from 22ms on the rM2 to 12ms here. Similarly, there’s no lag when you’re typing as there could sometimes be when you were using the older slate. If there’s one thing I’m still not sure about, it’s that when writing in color, the text doesn’t initially render in the color you’ve chosen. Your first blast of scrawling pops up in gray and it’s only after the screen refreshes that it reloads in the correct color.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
There’s one other thing that I want to draw attention to, and it’s a subtle thing but well worth pointing at. A lot of time and effort has gone into ensuring that handwritten notes and highlights can work seamlessly with text inputs. For instance, if I’m typing something and feel the need to highlight, underline or draw a ring around the word with the pen, I can. If I then have to go back and amend that text later, it’s easy enough to expect the handwritten additions to become unmoored from the text. But reMarkable has done the hard work to ensure that it all remains in place — it’s a subtle piece of engineering, but one I deeply appreciate.
Backlight
Paper Pro is the first reMarkable with a backlight, and its inclusion here is very much “better late than never.” I’ve often enjoyed writing notes with the reMarkable 2, but found it frustrating that it’s unusable in darker environments. That both the slate and the new Type Folio are now backlit – activated by tapping the top right corner of the screen — means that’s no longer an issue. The light emitted from both is in my experience gentle rather than eye-searing, even when I pushed everything to maximum. Fundamentally, you’ll be able to use this in a dark room or on an airplane with the cabin lights dimmed without any stress or eye strain.
Marker
Like its predecessors, the Paper Pro comes with a choice of stylus. What separates the Marker and Marker Plus is that the latter, as before, has an active surface on top, allowing you to use it as an eraser. Make an error, and all you have to do is flip it over to get rid of your boo-boo, whereas with the Marker you’ll need to select the erase tool from the menu.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
But while you might not notice much of a difference at first blush, plenty has changed on the inside. The older reMarkable styluses were passive, enabling you to use a number of compatible third-party styli in their place. This time around, both versions are active — full of technology to help orient the pen and communicate with the tablet for faster processing. It connects magnetically to the “right” hand side, wirelessly charging from the slate like the Apple Pencil.
Ironically, a lot of effort has gone into ensuring that, despite the raft of changes between this model and its predecessor, you’ll struggle to notice the difference. I’ve seen some folks saying that the new Marker has a harder tip and that as the display is rougher, it’s less fun to use. I’m not sure my experience matches that, and every time I compare the two, I feel like it’s more or less the same.
As for the Marker’s battery life, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get this thing to run out of juice under what I’d describe as normal use. An hour or two a day for more than a week and I never managed to run the stylus flat — hell, I barely got the Paper Pro’s battery to half in that time.
Type Folio
reMarkable has launched a new Type Folio for the Paper Pro, which is about 1.1 inches wider and deeper than its predecessor. That extra space affords you a palm rest and a bigger margin around the outside of the keyboard, but nothing too dramatic in terms of changes to the keys. You do now get an Escape key, which exits a document and goes back to the homepage. There’s also a new Icon Toggle, which when activated will remove the icons from the screen to further reduce distractions.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
Now, I’m a big fan of the old Type Folio, finding that it made the right compromises for a travel keyboard. Its main keys were properly sized and spaced so my muscle memory carried over from my regular keyboard to this one and back again. The compromises, like the half-height function row and narrow non-character keys, were the right ones to make. Given the Paper Pro’s bigger size, its Type Folio can spread those extra keys out a little further to give the whole thing room to breathe. It’s better than it was before, but what we had before was no slouch.
Price and availability
The reMarkable Paper Pro is available to order today, priced at $579 with the standard Marker and $629 if you want the Marker Plus. You can add a case from $89, but a full leather version will set you back $179. If you want to add the Type Folio, which I’d say is a key way of making the reMarkable truly useful, you’ll need to pay an additional $229.
The company has, however, decided to keep the reMarkable 2 around as a lower-cost option, selling it for $379 with a standard Marker. Given the reMarkable 2 has topped our e-ink tablet buyer’s guide for several years, it’s still a solid choice if the Paper Pro is too rich for your blood.
The competition
There are a decent number of e-paper tablets floating around the market right now, with the majority of them offering monochrome screens. In our e-ink tablet Buyer’s Guide, we named the reMarkable 2 the best option for most people. If you’re looking for a slate with a color display, your options are the Paper Pro, or the Kobo Libra Color and the elegantly named Onyx Book Tablet Note Air 3 C.
Kobo’s device is much more portable than the Paper Pro, but that’s because the Kobo is primarily designed to be an ereader. Its smaller seven-inch screen is squarely in ereader territory, and while there’s a notebooks feature that allows you to write freehand as much as you want, it’s never going to be able to compete with the Paper Pro’s 11.8-inch screen on that front. The Libra Color will be a better option for those who primarily want to take notes in and mark up ebooks — Kobo’s library is nearly as robust as Amazon’s Kindle library, and you can digitally mark up any book you buy from Kobo without restriction.
Onyx’s Boox Note Air 3 C is more akin to the Paper Pro in size, but it’s decidedly not suitable if you want to work in a more distraction-free environment. The Note Air 3 C, like most other Boox devices, are full Android tablets with E Ink screens, so nothing’s stopping you from going online or even attempting to watch a YouTube video. Even if distractions aren’t an issue for you, the Paper Pro’s streamlined interface makes it much easier to use — for both newbies and those familiar with these devices. Boox devices will appeal more to tinkerers and the most tech-savvy among us because there are a lot of settings you can play around with to make a device like the Note Air 3 C as capable as you need it to be. The Paper Pro keeps things relatively simple, making it more approachable overall.
Wrap-up
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
Look, you just know that there are some folks who’ll look at the Paper Pro’s price and spec list, compare that to a base-model iPad and laugh themselves into a coma. The point is that this isn’t a generic tablet but a device that’s been consciously designed to do fewer things better. So, we’re going to judge this thing on and by its own merits, rather than as a typical tablet.
I’m a big fan of reMarkable’s devices because they offer a way for me to focus in a way that my ADHD brain struggles to do otherwise. If I’m feeling overwhelmed and need to eliminate distractions, then stealing myself away with a device like this really can help. There’s no easy way for me to swipe away from my work to check Reddit or YouTube, helping me stay on track. And given how popular these devices are, I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way.
If, however, you’d still like to dip a toe into this water but don’t want to spend that much, then there is good news. reMarkable is keeping the 2 around as an entry-level unit, priced at $379 with the standard marker and because for all of the good things the Paper Pro does, none diminish the long list of good qualities the reMarkable 2 has.
On one hand, you have a device that’s whip-fast, eminently capable at the things that it can do and now has a bigger screen that renders colors. On the other, I cannot pretend that it’s not a pricey piece of kit, especially when you bundle in the Type Folio. Naturally, if your budget can stretch to that sort of cash and you really do need a way to work without distractions, I think it’s worth it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/remarkable-paper-pro-review-writing-in-color-is-nice-but-itll-cost-you-173024590.html?src=rss
The 3S seems like a smart idea, since cost remains the second biggest barrier to getting VR/AR gear into people’s homes. The first, of course, being there’s still not a truly killer use case to convince the vast majority of people.
The other big news to come out of the show is the announcement of the Orion Smart Glasses, Meta’s new prototype AR wearable. These, the company admits, aren’t ready to go on sale yet, but it’s working with developers to refine the technology for some unspecified future release.
I’ll be honest: I’m forever skeptical about the potential for AR to be as smart and useful as I’d need it to be. I’m not going to invest until it’s at least as useful as Jeeves — from PG Wodehouse, not the search engine — even if it’s never going to be able to fold my laundry.
Nathan Ingraham was lucky enough to play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and is happy to share his thoughts. It’s a throwback top-down Zelda title, albeit with you playing as the title character for the first time. Rather than engaging in combat directly, Zelda must use her magic to defeat enemies and solve puzzles. Nathan’s a fan but, much like Tears of the Kingdom, found the sheer breadth and depth of tools available to be frustrating to marshal and organize.
Meta’s annual VR / AR shindig kicks off a few hours after this newsletter hits your inboxes. As usual, it’ll lay down the direction of travel for the next year of strapping stuff to your face. So, before the awkward stage banter begins, it’s worth reading up on what’s to come. We’ve prepared our usual roundup of all the rumors, scuttlebutt and leaks about what we’ll see.
That includes Orion, a pair of Buddy Holly glasses offering augmented reality in a more user friendly package. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already hinted about its potential, but he added we’ll only see the prototype today. We can also expect a cheaper version of the Quest 3 and some more AI doodads to come to the Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Once you’ve studied up, you can follow our coverage of Meta Connect 2024 live to get a blow-by-blow of the show the minute it happens. Everything kicks off at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, but the color commentary will start long before then.
TikTok has announced TikTok Music, the company’s streaming service to rival Spotify and Apple Music, is closing down. The platform announced it’ll cease operations on November 28 and delete all user data and login information soon after. It has advised subscribers to reach out to their payment platforms of choice to get refunds before that date. Don’t worry though, I’m a technology journalist and even I didn’t know TikTok had its own standalone streaming service.
At some point, we’ve all encountered someone who just doesn’t get boundaries. They get too deep into our personal space, oblivious — or all too aware — of our discomfort. This problem is magnified online where there’s instant access to someone’s broader digital footprint, which can be a vector for abuse. It’s why most platforms have some sort of block feature, enabling people to limit some user’s access to their lives.
Elon Musk announced a change to X’s policies to enable users you’ve blocked to see your posts. They won’t be able to interact with you, but they will see what you’re posting to the platform. Musk has railed against the block feature before, saying users could already get around this by switching to a non-blocked account. Which is true, in the sort of tell-on-yourself way that suggests he’s got form not respecting someone’s boundaries.
Obviously, the reasons this is a terrible, dreadful, no-good and generally bad idea are so long we’d be here forever trying to list them. But it’s a good reminder that X is a place that thinks trust and safety are four-letter words.
If events in the last few years have felt like a higher power playing Mad Libs with our lives, then it looks as if it’s running out of options. “SpaceX,” you imagine it pulling out “gets sued by…” and then the sounds of paper rustling until it says, “Cards Against Humanity.” Turns out the silly game jokesters own an acre of land near to SpaceX’s facility in Texas, which the latter has been using for its own purposes.
If the higher power in question wants some help with some suggestions, it could do worse than suggesting Engadget’s humble newsletter writers win a billion pounds each on the same day in completely different competitions.
Now, I’m not mad the plant is being reactivated, since nuclear offers safe, clean and abundant energy. TMI reactor one remained in operation from 1985 until 2019, so it’s got a healthy track record too. But I am mad at the reason Microsoft’s cutting the check: to power its AI data centers!
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-spacex-gets-a-surprising-new-enemy-111503179.html?src=rss
iFixit embodies the spirit of “screw it, I’ll just do it myself” that has always been a trait of some tech enthusiasts. As one of the Right to Repair movement's proponents, the company is now flexing its muscles with an electronics product of its very own. FixHub is a USB-C powered soldering iron designed to help fix whatever's on your workbench (and be easily fixable itself). The iron is joined by a 55Wh battery pack which acts as a stand and temperature control, ensuring you can fix things wherever you go.
Founder Kyle Wiens explained FixHub was born of frustration with soldering irons, and their limits. He was annoyed that he had to drag an extension cord out on the street to fix his car stereo. So the iFixit team set about looking for a way to improve what has traditionally been an unsophisticated tool. That includes making it smarter, more flexible and easily repairable.
The 100 watt iron can reach your desired soldering temperature in just five seconds. Nestled inside the iron’s body is an accelerometer which can detect if the iron is idle and in its holder. If it does, it will automatically set it to cool down — hopefully wringing extra life out of the tip of the iron. And if the iron falls out of your hand it’ll cut power to hopefully prevent any nasty accidents. There’s also an LED ring on the body that’ll tell you when the iron is cool enough to touch, warming up, or ready to go.
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
You can use the iron with any USB-C power source that can output 20W, but it’ll stay set at the factory default temperature of 660f/350c. For more control (and portability), you’ll need to grab the FixHub Power Station, the company’s new 55Wh battery pack. It’ll output up to 100W at once, with enough juice to run two irons simultaneously, or one iron while recharging another USB-C device. Up front, you’ll get a display and a turn dial to let you control the iron’s temperature should you need to tweak it.
This being iFixit, both products are modular and repairable, with the usual commitment to ensuring easy serviceability. The packaging even contains an iFixit screwdriver that will let you disassemble both products as and when required. The hope is that you’ll still be fixing your electronics with one of these in hand for decades to come.
iFixit will begin shipping its FixHub products on October 15 in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. The Smart Soldering Iron will set you back $80, while the Soldering Station, which includes the soldering iron and the battery pack, costs $250. You can also pick up the Soldering Toolkit for $300, which will include the above, plus lots of accessories and materials.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ifixit-wants-to-fix-the-soldering-iron-130040690.html?src=rss
There’s a meme that comes around when people are urged to see a movie on the biggest screen as the filmmaker intended. People then mock up images of them watching it on the worst, least-immersive devices possible, from iPods to Game Boys. It came to mind during the iPhones 16 launch event, Apple said its new models have CPUs that can challenge “even high-end desktop PCs” and “desktop-class GPU architecture.” And it made me wonder if anyone is actually playing AAA games on a 6-inch smartphone for any real length of time?
Look, we all know this is just Apple flexing the power of its homegrown silicon, given even its A-Series SOCs run almost as fast as a flagship Intel CPU. We also all know that if you tried to run your iPhone with the same load as you could put on a desktop, you’d quickly burn it out. (Case in point, Resident Evil Village caused GamesHub’s iPhone 15 Pro to run “uncomfortably hot” and burned through 30 percent of its battery life in an hour.) All of that power is great for the sort of tasks an iPhone needs to do which are only demanding in short bursts. Processing audio and video, or the odd blast of generative AI (when it arrives) that Apple is understandably proud of being able to do on-device.
But this emphasis on raw power suggests the company has lost sight of what the iPhone is for, and what its limitations are. Yes, I’m sure some people love playing Death Stranding on the bus into school, or work. I’m sure there are some people who will try and use the Notes app to write their term papers, and one or two filmmakers who will use the iPhone instead of a Red, but those can’t be massive constituencies of the overall user base.
It’s hard to see people using their iPhone to get the sort of Serious Work done that you’d need a better user interface to achieve. iPhones are great for photography, social media, communication, casual gaming, but they can’t be a comprehensive replacement for a laptop or games console. Well, you can use them for those purposes, but I’m not sure anyone should.
Another telling example was the demo showing a person using Voice Notes to record a new vocal over a backing track they’d previously recorded. It’s a great way to show the iPhones 16’s ability to isolate audio even when the sources are so close together. Apple added the feature to Voice Notes because it has seen user feedback that it’s become a valuable tool in a musician’s arsenal. But it’s also something of an own-goal given Apple’s own multi-track recording platform, Garageband, has been left (deservedly) ignored and unloved for the last decade.
I suspect all of this points to the fact that Apple, with its key strengths of merging hardware and software, has run out of worlds to conquer in the former. After all, as glorious as the new iPhone is, the upgrades have been incremental for a long while now. As fancy and high-tech as the new camera shutter button is, it’s not as if adding a dedicated button for capture is groundbreaking — I had one of those on my Sony Ericsson K750i. I’m also curious how many iPhone users actually harness those extra camera features (like adjusting the focal length, or shooting in RAW) when they’re snapping clips for TikTok. And if you, like me, don’t really value Apple Intelligence, or just think those features aren’t really compelling, then there’s little reason to rush out and upgrade.
It doesn’t help that I was also reminded of what Steve Jobs said in 2010, describing personal computers as “trucks” whose prominence would fall as people switched to the “cars” of phones and tablets. Trucks were go-anywhere, do-anything tools that were vital a century or more ago but were phased out when people started using more specific tools suited to their needs. The iPhone 16 launch event, however, felt like Apple showing everyone that it’d managed to cram a Big Rig engine into a Porsche.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-needs-to-remember-what-the-iphone-16-is-for-134535338.html?src=rss
Apple is bringing sleep apnea detection to some Watch models as it tries to position its wearable as a one stop shop for all things health. At the iPhone 16 launch event, the company announced the new Watch Series 10, highlighting the new feature. If you wear your watch to bed, you’ll get an alert pushed to your phone in the morning if it detects disturbances in your breathing. You will also be urged to visit your clinician, and can show them Watch data. All of this information will be collated in the Health app on iPhone.
Rather than using oxygen saturation, which would be the logical approach, Apple says it’s using motion tracking. This is likely tied to Apple’s longstanding patent row with Masimo that has seen the company hurriedly offer workarounds for its blood oxygenation sensor. Your Apple Watch will look for “small movements at the wrist” that are indicative of “interruptions to normal respiratory patterns during sleep.” The company added its work has been validated by a sleep study of “unprecedented” size.
Apnea detection is also coming to both the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, and Apple says it expects the FDA and other regulatory agencies to give their blessings in the coming days. It says the feature will be available in more than 150 countries and regions later this month. The feature had been rumored for a while but there were hints suggesting Apple had struggled to make its workaround as effective as required. Samsung, meanwhile, already has FDA approval for a similar feature on the Galaxy Watch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/apple-brings-sleep-apnea-detection-to-the-watch-series-10-172316987.html?src=rss
If you remember the reMarkable 2 when it was announced in March 2020, you'll be excited to hear about its successor: the reMarkable Paper Pro. This new distraction-free writing slate comes with a nicer chassis, faster internals, a bigger display and most importantly, a color screen.
If you’re unfamiliar, reMarkable is the standard bearer for those devices standing in the delta between high and low tech. It’s an e-paper slate with a stylus (or keyboard) for reading, writing or editing your own documents, or annotating PDFs. The focus is giving you a calmer space to get some Serious Work(™) done, free from the distractions a “proper” computer or tablet would harbor. The company has always maintained that its devices offer you a way to feel like you’re working on paper, without actually having to work on paper. Despite its age, the reMarkable 2 has been a mainstay in our E Ink tablets guide as the pick that's the best option for most people. The only other products currently in the conversation are the Kobo Libra Colour and Onyx Book Tablet Note Air 3 C. Those models also boast color screens and stylus compatibility, but both have smaller displays — 7 inches diagonally on the former and 10.3 inches on the latter.
The Paper Pro is a little more than an inch taller and a quarter inch wider than its predecessor but has been able to cram in a lot more stuff. The rM2 had a 10.3-inch monochrome display while the Paper Pro’s stretched to 11.8-inches. reMarkable’s Chief Design Officer Mats Solberg explained his team worked to reduce the size of the bezels and chin to accommodate the bigger display.
Image by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
Whereas the older model stuck to a rigid notion of post-iPad design language, the new Paper Pro gets a more austere look and feel. The edge band is sharper, if still comfortable to hold, and Solberg emphasized the grooves etched into the sides. He explained they both evoke the idea you’re holding a sheaf of paper, and to add some much-needed grip to a device this thin.
There’s dramatic changes on the inside, with a new 1.8Ghz quad-core Cortex A53 paired with 2GB RAM and 64GB storage. For comparison, the rM2 had a 1.2GHz dual-core chip, 1GB RAM and just 8GB storage. As soon as you turn the Paper Pro on, you’ll see the benefits of the new silicon, with far faster response times. You even get proper animations during the setup process.
But the real showstopper here is the display, which uses a modified version of E Ink’s Gallery 3 technology dubbed “Canvas Color.” It means the display holds a series of ink particles inside each pixel — a White, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow — as in most regular printers. reMarkable says the display is similar to newsprint and it’s an apt analogy with clear, if muted, colors on show.
Image by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
The technology can also dither colors, mixing each ink particle to produce up to 20,000 other colors, and the colors can also be layered. It means you can highlight sections of text in the same way you’d use a highlighter on paper, the more layers you draw, the darker the color. Of course, the benefit of using a digital device is that you can highlight it as many times as you want without anything becoming soggy.
As usual, reMarkable has leveraged a limit and turned it into a benefit, offering you colors with a heavy dose of restraint. And you don’t really need your retinas to be burned inside out if you’re trying to organize your thoughts ahead of a big meeting. Although, having been spoiled by so many well-made displays of late, I do wish the colors popped a little bit more than they do.
The Paper Pro is the first reMarkable with a frontlight, finally letting you get some work done in dark environments. Solberg explained the frontlight was one of the hardest challenges to build without harming the distance between the stylus tip and the display itself. He said the team was determined to keep the gap between the pen and the display to under one millimeter, and succeeded.
The last two slates had active displays but passive styluses, but the Paper Pro gets an Apple Pencil-esque active stylus as well. It’ll charge while magnetically connected to the side of the bezel and the new components help improve accuracy and latency. Solberg said the reMarkable 2 had an input latency of 22ms, and he had targeted 15ms for this model. He was proud to say that the team smashed that target, with the Paper Pro’s latency down to just 12ms.
And yet, for all the headline changes, it’s the added responsiveness that’s the really compelling feature. The rM2 was no laggard, but the faster input really does help sell the idea you’re sketching out ideas on paper. You can always credit the company for sweating the details, too, like the fact you can add a highlight or handwritten annotation to typed text that will follow the text around as you edit it.
I’m also impressed with reMarkable’s commitment to making the Paper Pro easier to repair and refurbish than older models. Solberg explained that the Paper Pro is far more modular under the hood, with easily-swappable components. He ruled out end-user repairs, but said that the only adhesive used in the chassis are two replaceable glue strips to keep the battery in place. Repairs would likely need to take place at reMarkable HQ or a partner distributor, but the fact it’s been designed with an eye on long-term repair at all is laudable.
reMarkable Paper Pro is available to order today from reMarkable’s website and Best Buy, priced at $579 with the standard Marker and $629 for the Marker Plus. If you want to add a case, and I heartily recommend you do, it’ll cost you between $89 and $179, depending on your material choice. And if you want to add the Type Folio, you’ll need to cough up an additional $229. The reMarkable 2 is remaining around as a lower-cost option (unsurprisingly, as it’s a really good piece of kit) and will now be available with the standard Marker for $379.
Of course, you and your wallet will have to decide if that’s the sort of sum you can bear to part with, especially in these tightened times. With a product like this, the intentional choices and limits made means it’ll always stack badly in a head-to-head with a similarly-priced iPad. The trick is to work out if you’ll be more productive with less mental and physical clutter in your computing environment, and go forward from there. I’ve found, when I’ve got a lot of work to do and need to focus, it’s a better way to hammer out first drafts than other devices I could name.
Update, September 6, 4:43PM ET: This story was updated after its original publication to include a comparison to competing writing tablets with color screens.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/the-new-remarkable-paper-pro-adds-a-color-display-120059067.html?src=rss