It doesn't transform sketches into diagrams, or understand natural-language instructions, either written or spoken. It doesn't attempt to turn your handwriting into text on the fly: that's an optional later step. And like the Palm Pilot, it's done this by ditching almost all the Newton's smarts. The reMarkable is to the iPad what the Palm Pilot was to the Newton: smaller, slimmer, lighter, and more practical.
#REMARKABLE 2 FOLIO ALTERNATIVE MAC OS#
A decade and a half after the Newton, the iPad delivered on most of the Newton's promise… but with a much less ambitious OS based on 1970s tech – iOS, derived from Mac OS X, that is, Unix – and a simpler text input method: QWERTY.īut an iPad is too heavy to hold in one hand and write on for a long time. The Newton was amazing, but flawed and handicapped by mid-1990s technology. It's slimmer, lighter, highly connected, and it ditches handwriting recognition. Its author also opened up this very closed device and added a microSD card slot.)Īs the Reg commented a few months after the first iPad went on sale, the Apple tablet is in a way the 21st century Newton. (Which, incidentally, there also is for the reMarkable: Parabola-rM. Yes, it runs an old version of Android, but there are good reasons why it wasn't updated, and there are alternative OSes. I bought one, in so doing backing my first ever kickstarter campaign, and it's great and very useful. Well, it arrived in the same year, as the Planet Computers Gemini. I felt vaguely guilty, but much as I loved the potential of the Newton, and although the Psions did much less, they were far more practical.īack in 2014, I asked Where's my 21st century Psion?. Launched in 1996, was a smash hit, arising from the ashes of the "pen computing" hype of the early 1990s. And they were expensive: I only bought second-hand Newtons, and I didn't use them in real life. Its abilities were profoundly constrained by having no wireless networking: to place a phone call, you held the device to the handset and it emitted DTMF tones. The early versions were sluggish, and the late ones bulky and heavy. The 2100's NewtonOS 2.1 was able to read both cursive and printed handwriting, turn scribbled sketches into geometrically perfect diagrams, and interpret and act upon instructions in English like a completely standalone handwriting-driven Siri.īut it was too early, and the tech wasn't ready. Although the Newton OS that shipped was a pale shadow of the rich, Lisp-based environment the company originally planned, it was amazing, next-generation stuff. It had a much faster StrongARM CPU, making it fast and responsive. The last version delivered on much of the device's promise: it had twin PCMCIA slots, for expandable storage and even networking.
The bigger burst of cognitive dissonance, though, is more complex.īack in the 1990s, your correspondent owned two Apple Newtons, both an original MessagePad 100, and the final 2100. One of this vulture's friends bought a reMarkable 2, so I had a chance for a hands-on play with the device, which led to the first of many conflicting feelings that the gadget inspires. Some criticized the first version for being occasionally slow, so the version two is much faster. The reMarkable devices have won many rave reviews. The company also makes money from an optional $2.99-a-month online subscription called Connect. Both run a proprietary Linux-based OS called Codex. It's slightly heavier due to an aluminum chassis, but now sells for $299. It's thinner (just under 5mm), has a slightly larger (10.3 inch) screen, and has a dual-core Arm CPU and twice the RAM at 1GB. The current reMarkable 2 was announced in 2020 and launched in 2022 at $399.
This was an A5-sized (10.1 inch diagonal), 7mm thick tablet with a 1872×1404 touch-sensitive e-ink screen, Wi-Fi and microUSB connections, and a batteryless stylus.
In 2017 it crowdfunded the launch of the $499 reMarkable 1. Founder Magnus Wanberg, whose site describes him as "a true paper person," set the company up a decade ago, to make a thin, light device for taking handwriting and drawing notes and synchronizing them wirelessly to the cloud.
ReMarkable is a small Norwegian company with a single product range: an e-ink tablet, aimed at people who prefer handwriting notes on paper. It is interesting because it significantly widens the appeal for the reMarkable 2 itself, although the move takes it into a significantly more crowded and competitive market. The new Type Folio is a $199 (£165) keyboard cover for the reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet.
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