Using the reMarkable 2 as an A-level Student
The reMarkable 2 is an E-ink tablet that you can use for taking handwritten notes on as an alternative to paper. I bought it in January 2022 so that I could use it for note-taking in the final part of my A-levels.
General Thoughts
Workflow
Things that weren’t intuitive to learn
To get to a view where you can see all documents
The Good
The Bad
Cloud Support
Sharing from a phone
I’ve had a pretty poor experience with the syncing to the cloud using a Connect subscription, especially when uploading large documents.
In a perfect world, I’d be able to hit this share button on my phone
and the PDF would end up on the tablet straight away (or at least as fast as the internet would let it). This would be super useful for downloading homework sheets or past papers offline.
In practice, I hit the button, get confused as to why it hasn’t shown up on the tablet, go onto the app to see what’s going on, see a bunch of black lines telling me that it’s syncing documents it should’ve synced a while ago, get a flashing “unable to sync” message come up a couple times before it disappears and then maybe I’ll be surprised in about 10 minutes if the document shows up on the tablet.
This might just be my stupidity; maybe it’s necessary to leave the app open for longer or I’m missing something crucial that’s not letting it sync properly. But even so, it’s not the best user experience.
Sharing from a computer
Okay, so maybe sharing from my phone isn’t too much fun. At least there’s a nice drag-and-drop web interface that tells me what I’m doing wrong that I can access on my PC?
There might be, for Windows and Mac. The only issue is that I run Linux and so there’s no official client that I can use. And even worse, there’s no official web app. There’s a few unofficial Linux clients but I’ve struggled getting them to work and to top it all off, reMarkable have shut down a third-party online app that would be the last glimmer of hope in the whole situation.
That means that if I want to share a PDF document from my computer to the tablet, I have to message it to myself on Signal, download it from my phone and then upload it using the intermittently-working share button.
However, the process of sharing web pages is a little easier. There’s this nice Chrome extension (and an unofficial port for Firefox) that’s actually nice to use, where you can just click it on any web page and it will upload it straight to the tablet.
Update: reading the reviews of the Chrome extension, you can share PDF documents from a computer by going to print the PDF and then selecting “Read on Remarkable” as the destination.
No inserting in PDFs
One feature that really stops it being useful for doing schoolwork is that it lacks the ability to insert pages into PDFs. You can annotate them, but you can’t insert extra sections in-between pages or at the end of the documents. If you have a textbook that you’re trying to understand, then you have to straddle between two separate documents.
One reason I thought it would be useful is that I could generate a PDF of Sergeant questions ( [[Sergeant, applying spaced application to A-levels]]B) so that I wouldn’t have to look at my phone or computer while revising. Because you can’t insert pages in-between PDFs, the only solution is to generate a PDF that has loads of extra pages so that there’s space for all the working out. And because of the issues sharing from a phone or a computer, this isn’t particularly fun to load anyway.
Features that would be nice
These aren’t really major issues, but just things that would make it a marginally easier to use.
Exporting or indexing highlights in documents
I mark something as needing to be turned into a flashcard when taking notes by scribbling over it with the highlighter tool.
When I’m actually making flashcards, it’s a pain to have to remember vaguely where I highlighted things. It would be nice to have a page I could go to that indexed everything I’d highlighted.