Hacking on the ReMarkable 2

I bought a ReMarkable 2 a couple of years ago with far higher hopes of hackability than it ultimately ended up supporting. Ended up selling it a few months ago after it just couldn't fit into any of my usecases.

I think ReMarkable is wasting a TON of potential at their price/form factor/ux. A device can be powerful without sacrificing simplicity and singularity of purpose.

I've had a reMarkable 2 since 2020 or so. To be honest, the only area of the device I have ever wanted to be hackable was the sync API. I am completely satisfied with the gestures, e-reader and pretty much everything else. But what I'd love to be able to do is to access my files, stored in the cloud, automatically. My use case in particular would be something that passively converts my scribbled annotations into other things.

The API hacking scene is very much dead. Most API implementations have been unmaintained for years now and no longer work. It's a real shame.

If remarkable's writing experience appeals to you, but you don't want to lock yourself in their walled garden, check out Supernote. They have a much easier file transfer, sync with calendars, and most importantly no subscription. You still have to do some hacking to download certain apps, but overall they are much more tinkering-friendly. Writing feels a bit different, but not in a bad way — it's just a matter of personal preference (I personally like both). There are plenty of reviews online explaining the difference if that's important to you.

I owned a Remarkable 2 and sold it when the Remarkable Paper Pro came out. I now own a Remarkable Paper Pro and a Remarkable Paper Pro Move. I use them for deep work and it really helps me with distractions. I leave the Paper Pro at home and I carry the Paper Pro Move as part of my every day carry.

The one feature I miss is being able to have a split screen so that I could have a document open and be writing in another document. Something like note taking from a book. To overcome this now I have documents open on my laptop to reference as I am writing on the Remarkable.

I started on a RM2 and upgraded to a Pro when it came out.

I knew going in that it was not going to live up to the hype of the marketing around changing your life. But it has proven to be a very useful addition to work where the screen sharing enables me to have a shared whiteboard remotely that I can actually scribble on. The reading experience is also good with a decent sized screen. Being able to annotate books without feeling like you are desecrating a real book is a game changer.

To anyone from the Remarkable team is reading this: for a device priced at a premium, there sure are lots of corners that feel like they were cut.

1. Would it really have killed you to put a faster SoC on the device? Pressing the wake button to the screen responding can sometimes be 5 seconds. Opening a large PDF can take upwards of 30 seconds.

2. The backlight controls seem to be detached from real life use. The maximum setting produces enough light to be readable in a semi-low light environment(think dusk), but even one notch lower than that is useless. What is the point of having 5 levels of brightness if I only ever get to use 5 or 0

3. I would love to have palette controls. The display supports lots of color but all my writing tools only support 6 preset colors. There is a nice use case of them around paper games like variant Sudoku that require using color to keep track of the solve and having only a small preset color range is very limiting.

This laundry list only exists because the potential of this device is high. If none of these issues are fixed but they release a RMPro 2 with better battery like, I’d still buy it.

I would be so into the ReMarkable if it has an "app store", if I could write an RSS client.

Thank you very much for this writeup!

I've had my rM2 since 2020 and enjoyed the hacking community a lot. I've since lost track - at some point I updated the firmware because I wanted the automatic shapes feature from upstream and couldn't use the framebuffer anymore.

You've summed up a lot of findings that I've made again and again trying to pick up where I left but it's become very confusing.

Looking forward to your next update! No pressure, though :)

I've just remembered: Check out KOreader if you haven't. I think it doesn't rely on QT and it runs on rM2 tablets with recent firmware if you launch it via ssh after stopping xochitl.

[dead]

Remarkable means subscription. And I *DO NOT* want that. If this could support self hosted stuff like Nextcloud or something? Or a simple shared folder?

RSS or Pocket client?

But no, nothing, just the subscription stuff. So it's a no from me.