reMarkable Paper Pure Review: A Notebook, Not a Tablet

Paper and pen are still hard to beat as writing tools. Notes appear quickly, sketches come intuitively and thoughts can be captured without distraction. Tablets bring order to all of that, but they also pull attention away from the actual work with apps and notifications. This is where the reMarkable Paper Pure comes in. Instead of offering as many functions as possible, the E Ink device concentrates on writing, reading and organising documents.

Does that really need a dedicated E Ink device? Notes can be made just as well on an iPad or an Android tablet with a stylus, after all. The difference becomes apparent within a few minutes.

The 10.3-inch E Ink Carta display offers a resolution of 1,872x1,404 pixels and a pixel density of 226 ppi. Unlike LCD or OLED panels, e-paper uses the ambient light falling on it to form the image. The effect is closer to printed paper, it uses little energy and it produces high contrast. Even outdoors the display stays easy to read.

Its greatest strength, though, is the writing feel. The lightly textured glass surface provides just the right amount of resistance, so the pen feels surprisingly close to paper. Combined with input that is almost free of lag, writing feels remarkably natural.

For handwritten notes the resolution is entirely sufficient. When reading longer PDF documents or e-books, however, smaller type does not look quite as fine as it does on current e-readers with 300 ppi. The bigger shortcoming is the absence of a front light, which means an additional light source is needed in poor lighting conditions.

Setting the device up is simple and takes only a few minutes. After the first power-on, a setup assistant guides you through the remaining steps. The Linux-based reMarkable OS does without an app store and puts notes and documents at the centre instead. Numerous templates, from lined and squared pages through dot grids to weekly planners, make it easy to get started. PDFs can be annotated directly and marked up in handwriting.

For notes, the pen tools on offer include a pencil, a ballpoint, a fountain pen, a marker and a calligraphy pen, and stroke widths can be adjusted depending on the tool. In the test it was above all the pencil and the ballpoint that convinced, while the calligraphy pen is better suited to headings or sketches.

One curiosity: although the Paper Pure has only a black-and-white display, different colours can be selected. On the device itself they appear merely as shades of grey. The colours actually chosen only become visible after exporting the notes, or when they are opened on a computer or smartphone.

The interface feels tidy overall. Notebooks can be created quickly and documents organised clearly. The working pace suits the device too. Inside, a dual-core Cortex-A55 processor runs at up to 1.7 GHz. Together with 2 GB of memory it delivers fluid menus, short loading times and responsive operation in general. Page changes feel a little more sluggish than on a tablet, but that is inherent to E Ink technology and is barely noticeable after a short period of adjustment.

Handwriting recognition also left a good impression. Even notes that were not written entirely cleanly were converted into digital text by the Paper Pure with few errors in most cases. This worked more reliably with the pencil and ballpoint than with the calligraphy pen. Handwriting of the kind associated with a doctor's prescription is still best avoided. A practical touch: when the marker is not needed, it attaches magnetically to the side of the device.

One weak point is that the device supports EPUB files only without copy protection, so DRM-protected e-books are left out. Some cloud functions and services, such as Google Calendar and Outlook for Microsoft 365, are also reserved for users of the Connect subscription. Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive can be integrated without a Connect subscription, but only one service at a time.

The reMarkable Paper Pure is not meant to be a tablet, and the specification shows it. There is no browser, no streaming service and no app store. Instead the device concentrates entirely on productive work.

Internal storage holds 32 GB, which leaves plenty of room for notes and PDF documents. Despite the 10.3-inch display, the housing stays pleasantly compact. At 23x19 cm, with a build height of only 6 mm and a weight of around 360 g, the Paper Pure fits into almost any bag without difficulty. The textured glass surface feels high quality and contributes substantially to the natural writing feel. Despite the plastic back, the housing feels stable and resistant to twisting.

Battery life was not part of the test. According to the manufacturer, the Paper Pure should last up to three weeks with normal use, meaning around an hour a day, which is not an unrealistic figure given the frugal nature of E Ink technology. Charging is over USB-C, and synchronisation happens wirelessly over Wi-Fi.

A standard marker is included in the box. The practical eraser function, by contrast, is reserved exclusively for the Marker Plus, which is sold separately. With the standard pen the eraser tool has to be selected first, whereas the Marker Plus rubs out simply by turning the pen over. Protective covers are also sold separately by reMarkable. Anyone who wants the better pen is best off going straight for the Paper Pure bundle, which adds the Marker Plus and a protective cover to the device.