An Architect's Review of the Remarkable 2 tablet. True sketchbook alternative or a gimmick?

the remarkable 2 tablet has now been out for more than two years and this is a long-term review for somebody that has been using remarkable tablets since 2018. so this is the remarkable tablet useful for Architects designers creatives or anybody else out there that needs to sketch or Draw digitally in a notebook or Sketchbook format yes and no it really depends exactly what it is that you're looking after now I got the remarkable 2018 to study for my architectural exams which consisted of a lot of PDFs I I stupidly try to reformat those big PDF textbooks to fit on the Kindle and that was a very horrible experience so then the play note PDFs were excellent to read here on the remarkable one and the great thing about PDS is that we can sketch on them I did pass all my exams and now I'm a fully registered architect thank you for studying these are excellent devices because you have access to PDFs and your notes and on PDFs you can take notes so after I was done with my exams I started using the remarkable one as a Sketchbook because I didn't want this thing to just sit in my drawer Gathering dust when I go through sketchbooks fairly quickly about four months for one and I do everything in there write my to-do list notes lots of sketches detail and Concepts and so on so I was trying to exclusively do it on the remarkable device but there was one big issue with remarkable one that was the battery it was a pretty good notebook and sketching experience but the battery and this thing only lasted the battery isn't just bad on the remarkable one it is horrible I don't know how they can't fix that through a software update but the remarkable one even while I was testing it for this video again it died in its sleep it just needless to say when they announced the remarkable 2 with much better battery life I definitely jumped on ship pre-ordered it and I have been using it since 2020. now it has a more standard two-week battery life so before as a backup I would always carry a Sketchbook in addition to that but now this thing actually lasts pretty good so for digital sketchbooks and notebooks it's a definitely really good device especially since you can hold especially since you can hold that many different notebooks and sketchbooks all inside of here so notebook experience is really good you can write you have different pens different pencils markers different thicknesses and the stylus has a lot of levels and it has also tilt support the experience of writing on this with the stylus and the micro textured surface is really good it's almost like writing on paper but the software is not quite at that level what I mean by that so when you press on the pen you have to press a little bit more so it doesn't pick up maybe the first 10 percent of from light to starting to pick up heavy and then the lines are more or less the same even if you're using a fine liner which is what I would typically write with in my traditional sketchbooks with this a fine liner has just one line it doesn't vary then the pencil 2 is quite interesting as well because we have an upright position and we have an angled position and we have that with the same pencil tool but it's not quite like real paper it's still digitized with that I mean going from an upright position to an angled position there is a a very kind of hard switch which happens at around maybe 45 degrees where the software then realizes okay now it should be angled before that it should be upright so it's not as a smooth grade that this one would expect coming from using regular pencils it's not a hundred percent like pen and paper but maybe it shouldn't be because it is digital it would be great if someday it is but for now it isn't yet in its current form it is still very useful for sketching and for drawing so besides the weight issues is this way so much less than a stack of sketchbooks and notebooks what other reasons might there be to use this sharing is actually a big one so you can share parts of notes it has handwritten recognition so it's actually quite good for sharing but Fair these days everybody's gotten used to getting emails with a photo of a Sketchbook so even the sharing is not that special compared to having sketchbooks in my previous office I would always get emails from my team leader who would send me sketches from his notebooks taken with the phone and that's become a fairly standard and normal practice within architecture of course it would look much better having a sketch from here because it doesn't look like an ugly photograph there is something that's actually much better for the remarkable to compared to regular notebooks and sketchbooks and that is that there are some primitive tools to copy an area and then paste it somewhere else so you can draw just one simple area and then paste it multiples of times and you can also rescale things as well so you can select a lot of things and then rescale them and make them a little bit bigger or a little bit larger and in version 3.0 there's another new feature which is unlimited scroll vertical scroll for pages so you could just write something and then if you run out of space you can continue to write further down the page so far it only works vertically it does work horizontally so it's not an unlimited canvas just yet and the interface is a little bit laggy with two fingers naturally it hasn't been optimized for touch so much as he has for the stylus so don't text expected to work as seamlessly as you might experience it on your phone or on a tablet device like the iPad I almost thought I was done but I can I can be done without mentioning this other great feature so there are loads and loads of background templates to choose from which connect in the design process that's a really nice and Nifty feature again that is not typically included on sketchbooks if you buy a Sketchbook it typically has just one type of grid so you can't really change that but here you can and that's amazing sometimes you might want a regular grid sometimes you might want to use an action metric Grid or just lies or dots there are even perspective grids what else makes this a bit more unique well it's got apps for desktop and for mobile devices as the software matures those apps are getting a little bit more useful prior you could just open a notebook and you couldn't export even a single page but now you can export a single page and the nice thing about the remarkable is that it is all Vector based so you can export the PDF or an SVG and you can even use that as a base for drawing further or zooming in into a great big detail but for me this does not replace an iPad for architects in sketching in any way whatsoever first off we have PDF markups that is something that Architects have to do all the time I constantly find myself marking up drawings from colleagues or from the client or from consultants and the trouble is that within the remarkable there's no way to turn the opacity down of a page when I'm doing this on the iPad I take a screenshot of a PDF page that I want and then I bring it into either procreate or concepts turn the opacity down to 20 and then sketch on top of that page so then the actual sketch is legible instead of the PDF underneath it so the remarkable doesn't have that so you can sketch on PDFs but you're pretty much limited to the pages as they are and you're sketching on top of it so if it's a heavy drawing and you're sketching a heavy line it becomes a little bit difficult to distinguish you can still do it with a very thick pen but nothing a bit more precise because it just becomes undistinguishable so that's one way I use the iPad the second way is the refining drawings or sketches or even photographs of sites and Designs a little bit more so again it starts with the bass and then bringing that bass into procreate or concepts and then drawing on top of that base a little bit more then all the typical tools that come in a drawing app like more layer support different opacities different kinds of mixings become quite useful this doesn't have that and that's definitely not a replacement I do wish though that it could have opacity being turned down because then it would be much more useful too for marking up PDFs for architecture and design so this is very Niche product we have to understand that and you have to be the kind of person that's wishing to use that because it does replace notebooks but that's about it it does not replace an iPad but it could potentially replace a part of an iPad that's important for people like myself who travel for work internationally because then you can just grab this device and leave all your sketchbooks or your iPads maybe even a computer at home still need your mobile phone there's no way around that now the remarkable team is actually really good at providing solid updates to the software version 3 introduced the possibility to type notes either on the remarkable device or or on the apps that's great it's still a little primitive you can't really position it too well and there's no spell check but that's a very interesting progression they also have a feature to tag your notes so I'm really hoping that this becomes a very strong ecosystem of note-taking that's combined between all the different devices so I'm hoping this becomes the Evernote of 2023 if you remember it back when it was good maybe in 2009 2010 before they started bloating it up it did something that no other no taking software did then which was sync your notes and put tags on them now this can sync your notes you can put tags on it and it has a really beautiful device for handwriting on their website they also mentioned that sketching and writing is going to come as an update to the maps so then it really is starting to become this quite useful ecosystem now you do have to pay for Cloud sync their services called connect but it's also most important to say that most functions work without connect for example you can sync files with OneDrive Google Drive and Dropbox you can email and it also has handwriting recognition connect will make a lot more sense once there's this whole ecosystem because then it becomes a service that you pay for for the syncing features so would I recommend is device for Architects and designers yes but the sketching experience is not as good as hand sketching with fine line pens pencils or anything else for regular notebook though it's great they have different kinds of templates if you're the kind of person that writes more notes and less sketches that might be excellent for you or if you're the kind of person that has a lot of notes and likes to sketch quite a bit then this is also quite useful device for you if you reference PDFs a lot or read them or you need to mark them up it's good as long as you're aware that there's no way to turn down the opacity to sketch over a line or have a red pen because the device is black and white who knows maybe there remarkable tree will have color we just have to wait and see now there's one thing that I really don't like about the way that they sell the product and that is the price on paper it looks very cheap but then you have to add the marker and the folio and then the marker is I think the base one is like 79 pounds euros dollars and this one is 120. it's quite a lot it's like 79 is the cheapest of course you can get cheaper ones on Amazon but then you add all that up and that's around the price of an iPad but it does not replace the iPad so then the question is is it that much needed like are you going to be reading that many PDFs are you going to be sketching that much to have something on there or do you prefer to have all your sketchbooks and notebooks in one place where you can easily email them these are questions all for you let me know what you think about it in the comments and see you guys next time looking back at my recommendations I want to make him super clear to you if you're debating whether to get the remarkable or an iPad definitely get an iPad I would recommend getting the remarkable only if you already have an iPad for Architects getting the remarkable but not an iPad doesn't make sense especially in many of the cases where you need to do PDF markups or sketching on top of images if you're really thinking about having a digital notebook then definitely have the remarkable but I would say in most cases the remarkable has to be a second device after you have an iPad the one situation where I would definitely recommend the remarkable even if you don't have an iPad is for studying purposes or for referencing a lot of PDFs the remarkable gives a great distraction free pdf reading experience and you can mark up your PDFs quite easily

Channel: UH Studio Design Academy

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Id: sry6sBJKD50

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023