It's Not Cheap, But This E-Paper Notebook Is Unexpectedly Delightful

Blame the crowded media landscape, blame the internet, or just blame my demanding cat, but it feels like finding focus is constantly shifting further out of reach. On the one hand, the rise of the do-everything smartphone has put untold flexibility into our pocket, and ousted a whole host of single-purpose devices in the process. With great power, though, comes great distraction.

It's a conundrum companies like reMarkable have promised to address. Its e-paper tablets span the analog-digital divide: very nearly as tactile as a physical notebook, only with the convenience of cloud backup and broad digital sharing. And now, with the arrival of the reMarkable Paper Pro Move, like a reporter's notepad it can all fit into your jacket pocket.

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At a time when bigger is generally seen as better — smartphones with increasingly large displays, and foldable phones that open out into tablets — reMarkable's smaller model could be viewed as going in the wrong direction. It's certainly an about-turn from the company's last debut, the Paper Pro, with its 11.8-inch color e-paper screen (and its hefty price tag).

In contrast, the reMarkable Paper Pro Move has a 7.3 inch display. It uses the same Canvas Color e-paper technology as its bigger sibling, capable of showing — fairly muted, but still distinct — color "ink" and reflective of ambient light to avoid eye-strain. A reading light gently illuminates the e-paper in darker conditions, much like a modern Kindle or Nook.

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Compared to, say, the OLED display on a smartphone, reMarkable's screen is positively subdued. Yet, sitting with the Paper Pro Move in one hand and the Marker digital pen in the other, there's something immediate and charmingly old-school about the experience of notetaking. The textured screen is part of that, with the friction just right to mimic actual paper, but so too is the flow of the digital ink. reMarkable's virtual fountain pen is particularly slick; I found myself looking for excuses to write, just to hear the faint scratch across the e-paper.

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Like with the larger models, the interface keeps things simple. A quick note is a totally blank page; notebooks can be filled with the same, or with templates like ruled lines, grids, or planners. reMarkable has been building out its more advanced templates; if you want to do musical notation, you can, or even architectural-style perspective sketching. There's handwriting-to-text conversion, and the ability to email notes directly from the Paper Pro Move.

Newly added, though, is handwriting search. It's something I remember fondly from OneNote and the days of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition: the ability to hunt down notes regardless of whether you typed or wrote them. I tested a beta of reMarkable's implementation, with mixed success, though my own (fairly atrocious) handwriting probably shares some of that blame.

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As before, you can link your Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive and grab an annotatable copy via the WiFi connection. Sadly you're still limited to opening PDF and EPUB documents; the RTF text files I do most of my writing in refuse to load, and the same goes for Word and Pages files. There's a plugin to send Word or PowerPoint documents to a reMarkable device, but it basically involves making a PDF version.

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At least with a reMarkable Connect subscription — $2.99 per month, or $29.90 annually, with unlimited storage, Send to Slack, and the handwriting search — those annotations are synchronized across anything logged into your account; it supports up to three of the company's devices on one subscription, as well as Windows/Mac and iOS/Android apps. It not so much fixes the compatibility concerns, as works around them. reMarkable's software is pretty slick, but if your digital life is already structured around other formats, there'll be some relearning (and converting) involved.

So far, so reMarkable. Where the Paper Pro Move shines is in its form-factor. With its aluminum and glass body being just 6.5 millimeters thick, and 235 grams, it's less than half the weight of a Paper Pro.

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My biggest hurdle with the reMarkable Paper Pro — and the slightly smaller reMarkable 2 before it — was always the overlapping scale with a laptop. Even with reMarkable's detachable keyboard cover, I couldn't skip the feeling that I'd be better off just reaching for my MacBook. Packing my bag to head out, it was hard to justify taking both laptop and Paper Pro.

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A digital notebook, though, carves out a niche of its own. Similar, in many ways, to what an iPad mini might offer, down to the magnetically-clinging digital stylus, only reMarkable's gadget has much longer battery life — up to two weeks, with USB-C to swiftly recharge — and feels far more focused. No getting distracted by email, or YouTube "research," or inadvertently going down a Bluesky rabbit hole.

Don't expect a considerably slimmer price to go with that narrower focus, mind. An iPad mini, with an Apple Pencil, is at least $578 (or $629 with the Apple Pencil Pro. The reMarkable Paper Pro Move is $449 with the regular Marker stylus, or $499 for the Marker Plus with its "eraser" tip.

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Then expect to pay a little more again, for a magnetically-clinging folio cover (it wakes the Paper Pro Move when you open it, just like pulling off the Marker does, but there's sadly no fingerprint reader so you'll be punching in your PIN each time). That all seems pretty rich, when Office Depot will charge you about twelve bucks for a four-pack of reporter's notebooks.

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I'm being tongue-in-cheek, there, of course. And, while the price differential between this half-scale Paper Pro Move and the $629 Paper Pro doesn't match the diminutive dimensions, the one-handed usefulness of the smaller device, its pocket-friendliness, and its clearer coexistence with a laptop (and even a phone, given most don't offer a stylus and certainly not one with such tactile charm) actually make it easier, to my mind, to justify.