The reMarkable Paper Pro hardware is genuinely hard to argue with. The display is close enough to real paper that the comparison doesn’t feel like marketing anymore. The stylus latency is low enough to stop being a conscious thought after about ten minutes. The build - aluminum, thin, serious - feels like something made by people who wanted to use it themselves.
Then you try to get a document off it.
The Software Is Doing Everything Wrong
reMarkable’s desktop and mobile apps exist primarily to keep you inside reMarkable’s ecosystem, not to make your files accessible. Exporting a notebook as a PDF works, but it’s slow and requires going through their cloud. There is no local-only workflow that doesn’t feel like you’re fighting the product. The folder structure inside the app is a flat mess that becomes genuinely difficult to navigate once you’ve used the device for a few months.
The company has leaned into a subscription model - reMarkable Connect - for features like cloud storage and integrations with Google Drive and Dropbox. Those integrations exist, but they’re slow, one-directional in practice, and don’t behave the way anyone who uses cloud sync regularly would expect.
For a device sold entirely on the premise of focused, distraction-free work, an unreasonable amount of mental energy goes into file management.
What Makes This Particularly Frustrating
The Paper Pro costs significantly more than a Kobo or Kindle. It’s priced against the iPad mini in some configurations. At that price point, the software gap between reMarkable and Apple - or even Boox, which runs Android and lets you install whatever you want - becomes very difficult to justify.
Boox devices are fussier hardware. The E Ink color on the Go Color 7 is muddier than reMarkable’s display. The build quality doesn’t match. But you can run Obsidian on it. You can use any app that handles your notes the way you want.
reMarkable made a deliberate choice to lock the OS down, and the reasoning isn’t hard to guess - they want the subscription revenue, they want control over the experience. That’s a legitimate business decision. But it means the device is asking you to trust that reMarkable will keep improving software that has, by most accounts, moved slowly for years.
The hardware deserves better software. It’s probably not going to get it.