Because its meant as an pen and paper replacement. Nothing more, nothing less.
Besides why would you want to listen to MP3s on such a device? Your smartphone with bluetooth and microphone jack is way better equiped for such a thing.
I miss the hell out of the Asus Eee Note. Black and white screen with a Wacom digitizer built in. Did basically nothing but allow you to read ebooks and write notes.
I used mine for years after having it shipped from China (the only place I found to buy one, which meant I had to learn enough Chinese to order and to navigate the menus to change the language) until the cloud sync shut down and I couldn't be bothered to sync it manually with very outdated sync software.
There's a market for a B+W ereader with a pen. Not a big market, but there is.
-edit: however, that price puts me out of the market for this... the Eee Note cost me $200 which was perfect. $600 puts it just out of iPad Pro territory, which is where I'd personally go for that money. Shame. Hopefully it sells well enough that they can recoup development costs and bring the price down for later adopters.
I own one. I've had mine since last November. I love it. I love it in large part because when I'm working on it, I -can't- read email, browse HN, read blogs, check on a server. The only thing I can do is put thoughts to words and diagrams.
What you want is a tablet, maybe something from Amazon. The ReMarkable is intended for a different audience, people who remember what it's like to be undistracted and want that again.
For $600 it better do more than that. If I wanted something to write on that does nothing else I'd just use a pad of actual paper. And that's the real competition for a device like this -- paper.
I think it would need to come down in price significantly for it to be just what you want it to be.
I have put a few hundred pages of notes through this thing since I've had it. That's a lot of paper I don't really want to carry around. I have old notebooks, binders, loose-leaf collections of everything from letters to myriad projects to random musings.
My notes on this are organized into folders. When I'm at a SAR meeting, I tap "SAR", and there's everything from the last meeting and training notes and anything else I might want to reference.
When I'm at work, I tap "[Job]", and there's the graphs, notes, and complex as hell SQL and database layouts and everything else I've been working on lately.
I don't have to scribble out sentences from pen and paper, instead I can neatly erase them from the screen and rewrite them. It has become my tool of choice for first draft, second draft, third draft, and final draft writing to people I care to write to.
When I'm working out a flow chart or application logic or something else that I'm struggling to get my head around and ordinarily would run to paper for, I use this instead, because when I need to reorganize different bits I can just draw a circle around them and drag them elsewhere on the screen.
And, after doing all of this, I can back all of that up to my laptop.
Go ahead and do that with your pad of actual paper, I'll wait while you find a scanner and fight to get the stupid paper feeder to work.
If the thought of being unplugged and focused on a single thing doesn't exhilarate you, if it terrifies you, that's fine, this isn't the device to you. I'm not going to cheer it on to those folks; frankly, at this point, I hope ReMarkable is able to avoid that audience, because they're going to ask for all the wrong things.
But I don't spend a lot of money and when I first saw this thing I immediately wanted it because it's exactly what I've been wishing for, for a long time now. Ever since the Newton, at least. It's valuable at that price to me and to a lot of other people.
$600 ain't so bad to avoid the hassles of paper. It's basically the cost of an iPad Pro, and I don't use the fancy features of the iPad at work, anyway. An iPad Pro is a nice note-taking machine -- I have one, and use one -- but I'm thinking about getting one of these and relegating the iPad to Lightroom and media/browsing usage at home. The bit where the battery lasts for days is nice, too. And I don't have to plug the stylus into the tablet like the fucking "Pencil" - that alone is worth a few hundred compared to the iPad Pro. That's a ridiculous bit of UX for a note-taking device.
It's an extension of the same thing that defines the iPad Pro line vs the Surface line: the Surface line is a full-on general-purpose PC capable of running a lot of stuff the iPad simply doesn't do, but I'd rather take notes on the iPad. (My iPad replaced my Surface Pro.)
Specialized tools appeal to me. Cost doesn't really matter that much for professional tools - I've burned through a lot of laptops, monitors, keyboards, and smart devices over the years - though I'd like to see one in person or wait for a v2.
> For me it’s because the reMarkable tablet’s writing surface is a night and day experience to writing on the smooth glass of an iPad.
This, from the review, is the entire appeal. Writing on an iPad is odd and awkward still. The less friction (heh) in the process, the more I'll actually take good notes. Sure, it would be better if I was so perfectly disciplined I could just use a convertible laptop for everything, and size/weight/aesthetic/experience factors were irrelevant, but... I'm not.
I hear that a lot of iPad artists put a non-glass screen protector on the iPad (I forget the material, just the standard plastic-y material) and it adds enough friction to the Apple Pencil that it’s a bit more comfortable writing. Have you tried adding a non-glass screen protector and seeing if it makes a difference in the experience?
No, its enough if it just does that, but does it perfectly. Pen and paper are still superior when you are trying to think. If it can just archive/OCR your notes, maybe prettify your diagrams, I for one would pay $600 in an instant.
You are describing a combination of 'perfect is the enemy of good' and feature creep.
Assess the qualities of the product as shipped, assume good faith on behalf of the people doing the build & ship, and determine if the price & features are appropriate for you.
Also you can make an email app with the Qt toolkit they released! It doesn't require super fast refreshes like the drawing app, so you should be able to make it work.
Email can be distracting from studying a document though.
We already have a phone with a decent email app. If "pages" and pdf files can easily be exchanged or synchronized with your phone, you do not need email app.
I have one. You kind of could, you can import PDFs to it. I've considered setting up some kind of automated flow to do that mainly for emails that turn in to larger projects or meetings for easy note-taking.
That said, the only real feature I wish that the device had is a backlight. Other than that it's pretty perfect as it is - just a notebook replacement, nothing more or less.
Otherwise, most other ereaders also have webbrowsers, but you would want to get the ReMarkable for the pen experience (the large one linked above also has a wacom pen, but more latency)
Besides why would you want to listen to MP3s on such a device? Your smartphone with bluetooth and microphone jack is way better equiped for such a thing.