Remarkable 2 vs Note Air 3 C!

maybe you've been brought here by a targeted advert from remarkable and you thought to yourself I'll do a little search here and see if there's any other Alternatives too remarkable out there and Google's brought you here well welcome I'm kit and I make content comparing iink tablets among other things and I'm going to show you the main alternative you should be considering to the remarkable two that is the Onyx books note air 3C it's not the only alternative to remarkable and I've got a good few comparison videos where I take you through the full range of eting tablets you can get right now but this the not f3c this is the main one that you should consider before you spend about the same amount or maybe even more on the remarkable I can say for most of you for most use cases it's a no-brainer get the no f3c over the remarkable too however the remarkable 2 is a very straightforward device it's very easy to use and its lack of features is actually marketed as a strength but if you're in any way technologically minded you'll be right at home here on the note a3c and with its relative ly open version of Android you'll be able to do just about anything you might wish to right here on the books no f3c and don't forget there'll be links in the description when you do decide that the note f3c is the way more sensible choice for your ring device I've been sort of expecting an updated device from remarkable anytime soon but maybe the remarkable 3 isn't imminent they've just paid I Justine to call this the new remarkable tune based off what a few basic updates a change to the title font and the pen tools layout and every now and then we get a small change to the UI very little extra functionality it took them a long time to even introduce something so basic as tags and they are not as comprehensive as they could be especially when we compare it to something like the books or even something like the supernote the speed of updates for remarkable is not thick and fast and they talk about you keeping the device for a long time and that's a good thing that's to be applauded but it was a long time before we even found out what those Pogo pins were for and I think the device was about 3 years old when they invented this the keyboard case this video and this comparison is based on my knowledge that I've gained from using both of these devices in a real world professional use case and I have loved using both I've put a great deal of thought and time into testing these devices and I've returned to these devices after updates and see how the platforms have changed and evolved over time so these are opinions that you can trust and which are based on long-term use I'm not sponsored by either of these two companies although it must be said books has sent me this device review I bought my own remarkable to the most obvious difference on starting the two devices up is going to be straight away you're going to notice the books device has color and that clearly is a f as I do get asked about it quite a lot color is new and it's not something that we're used to on IG just yet it's one of my favorites actually and it's not working in a very eink sort of way as it's not actually individual capsules filled with pigments the color is provided by a sort of reflective LCD C layer but it is worth having hopefully color ink will improve to the point where it really does look as good as printed images on the page and you do to get a really good look at color you do have to run the front lights quite high and reasonably cold and that's another comparative point there are no front lights on the remarkable at all the color is really worth having and that being said even the black and white note F3 will still have so many benefits over the remarkable and it will be cheaper than the remarkable and you'll still get the totally not weird or not new feature the idea that you can install all your own apps any app that you could possibly wish for from the Google Play Store just like you can on any Android device ever but which for some reason remarkable wouldn't want you to do that I guess because you'd get distracted because you're not responsible enough you can't be trusted to install your own apps un remarkable the highlighter is colored and these highlights they do show up that color when you view this file on a computer screen when you export this as a PDF or when you view it view the Cloud app and you do get different colors in the ballpoint pen but not in the pencil or the brush and the white can be useful of course because the white will show up as a white Mark rather than a transparent Mark if you export this as a vector and they would also show up as those colors where you just screen share the device via the remarkable app I do want to touch on one and two issues with instability and I hope that this has been from porting the books UI from Android 11 to Android 12 and I do expect books to address that instability issue that I saw in my full review as the user blogs come in and they are mainly from very esoteric things like like for instance recording and typing at the same time or annoyingly when drawing for a very long time making lots of marks with the new Tilt and pressure sensitive brush pen and this is something this pencil tool if I use this for a long time I can repeat this reliably that I will get the device to freeze up but in my actual use case at work I didn't notice this at all and in the latest update books have brought some really Innovative things for instance as that smart scribe feature where I can just scratch out to erase now both are very thin and light with the remarkable just shading it I think there's about half a millimeter in it and the reason why the books cannot be as thin as the remarkable is because it's got that front light and frankly I would rather have the front light and that tiny bit of extra thickness than not even if I am now trying to run everything that I own with a collider free screen with the front lights off as much as possible to conserve battery I would rather have it for those darkened rooms or for those times when I really want the colors to pop when I'm looking at certain types of books and look at the difference between the two screens with the front light completely off here on the not f3c and there being no front light at all on the remarkable you can see that that's a clear win for the remarkable well it's a clear win for the black and white earing screen over the cido screen it is a lot whiter however this screen is a 227 pixels per inch screen and the book screen is a 300 pixels per inch screen in black and white you can really close see that there is some slight pixelation there which you can see less of here on the book screen but you can perhaps also see that graininess given by the color layer which is always present at all times on the screen so the blacks do give you really crisp text here but you do lose that nice clear white background and to match them up you need to go pretty high on the front light there that being said with the ink choose to seek out times where you can read next to open Windows and enjoy natural light and then there's no issue whatsoever with the darkness of this screen it looks perfectly fine should you choose that you would prefer this screen then you can get a note f3c with essentially the same screen and you'll save $100 which will definitely put it as cheaper than the remarkable to with all its accessories and of course that's only if the screen darkness is a real deal breaker for you and I can assure you that it really hasn't been in my use case and so you've got that choice in the and so you've got that choice in the books line now the note air3 for a much brighter screen with incidentally a much better battery performance because it doesn't have the book super refresh technology or you can get the full in in color experience with book super refresh which I must say is excellent for being able to use all of the different apps that you might like to use on an Android device and that is something to come back to is the battery life on the remarkable 2 is fabulous compared to the battery on the Note f3c color the note f3c itself will have a better battery performance than the color version but nowhere near as good as the remarkable the remarkable reliably will last for 2 weeks using it for note taking every day whereas a full day using productivity apps on here might be pushing it for the note f3c I personally get around 3 days generally and that's for occasional notes in PDFs also I use the PDF reader as my notetaker at work and I do quite a bit of browsing and use web apps and things like that and of course on the remarkable you can't do much more than that you can read and you can take notes on the remarkable to and they sell that as a benefit they sell that as a distraction free device now I'm not convinced of that however there are plenty of people that that suits and users of remarkable they frequently report they like the fact that remarkable doesn't try to be more than an e Inc notebook and that's a thing commentators frequently point that out to me there's no point they say in comparing the remarkable to with an iPad and I have that video they're just intended for different purposes well in that same way so are these two devices and perhaps it would make more sense to compare the not a 3C with an iPad in which case there might even be a case for you to own both of these two devices I am currently using both of them the remarkable two just lives on my desk and it's for my little desk notes just things that I need to get done whenever I'm sitting at my computer desk and this is a device that I take with me to work and use all of those things well that comparison with the note FC and an iPad that will come soon so I'll just bring up irritable doom on both the devices oh I can't do that of course on the remarkable so I'll just bring up eable on the not a3c and bring up the comparison charts and look even if I send this web page to the remarkable which is pretty good use case where you can actually take any website at all and send it directly to the remarkable you should be able to see it's probably not as easy to read on this device without the color ink it's not coming through at all so that was a little bit more hassle than I expected it to be I wanted to use the excellent sent a remarkable button here on the browser and you can send anywhere page directly to the remarkable comes through very rapidly unfortunately it only comes through with text and it won't even send those tables so good for reading an article but it hasn't even brought in the titles of the web page at all there so I've sent it through as a PDF I've sort of screenshotted part of it just to give you the comparison there and okay that was just drag and drop across to the web app there but you can see hopefully that the clarity is much better here it's much easier to read the different color kind of things and understand well you've got this red red for no and green for yes it's just a much better experience of reading web pages on the color in display and distinguishing any charts which are kind of designed to be displayed in color is going to be easier here so if you see yourself reading anything with lots of color with charts of graphs anything like that then do a on the side of the color ink screen now color ink is more than just a nice to have now so although I like the center remarkable feature and it's really nice way to read things that you find on the internet just one click and very quickly that is there on your remarkable it's much better to be able to view the life web page and interact with it a good feature of it that I do enjoy though is that you can now annotate on this because it has become a remarkable notebook rather than a PDF and of course you can't annotate on this web page I could of course save this as a PDF and then I could annotate away there I'd rather have the live web page it does do a good job of filtering out the adverts though but you never get any of the figures tables or otherwise when when you sent to remarkable this way so let's have a look if there are any other major differences that haven't kind of covered already within this comparison table it does say that the remarkable was cheaper but of course that's without all of the additions like the folio case or the pen the premium pen itself is 120 OD kit quid they Chuck in perfectly usable books pen plus and the case for the £500 for this device obviously the remarkable doesn't have the color and doesn't have a front line the books not f3c doesn't have a keyboard folio and the remarkable too does so I am going to put that in the positive pile for the remarkable too that's one of the very few things hardware-wise where the remarkable comes out on top you can see double the speed quadruple the cuse on the books device much more storage you need that for apps here and RAM no speakers no microphone no g sensor no Bluetooth no fingerprint scanner no SD card slot No cameras or anything like that on either of them of course and the weight actually the not f3c is slightly heavier but the weight is pretty similar this is running Linux so it's its own proprietary thing you can't even load on your own apps yourself I would say one thing here the tools actually on the remarkable are excellent and the pencil tool for example is one of the best P you see the range of different marks I can get out of that pencil tool it is excellent all the different file formats you can actually read on here remarkable does have screen share though but it's not in the same way it doesn't have mirror cast so yeah looking down that just generally the hardware wise the books is way ahead so objectively this not a3c is the far better tablet it's streets ahead but there is something which is a subjective element there's something about all of these eing tablets that are aiming to give you that same kind of tactile quality as paper so you can't get away with that subjective part of your decision making and there is something lovely about the remarkable but there is also something lovely about the books device and I would say that pretty much every single books device is a little bit behind the remarkable two in terms of that aesthetic way that it feels to actually use the device not so far that you would want to kick out all of those other massively objective benefits and they aren't far behind maybe the writing feel is a little bit less pleasing on the books than on the remarkable there's that tiny bit thinner but of course that thinness is completely gone if you go ahead and you use it in the keyboard case of course the keyboard case is one of the absolute standout features of the remarkable 2 now but it's an odd feature because why for something which is all about that marker it is the remarkable now they've turned into something which clearly is designed for writers and I don't mean necessarily people who are publishing their writing into magazines or books but for people who need to write their information and write in this way it's expanded the use cases but it has also made it less clear the focus and the specific use cases of the remarkable platform so it's a very interesting change I look forward to seeing what they do later as they develop their line of product and there may be some of you maybe many of you actually who the joy of using an aesthetically pleasing device outweigh weighs all of these other benefits that we've discussed today and maybe some of you the look of the remarkable will just shade it for you but the not air fre seat is a really beautiful piece of technology it is a really lovely piece of design and I would encourage you not to disregard it not to see it as being the less attractive neighbor and just pick the remarkable based on that early Nots weren't my favorite design but now they've really grown on me as they've toned down these colors they're really attractive and their cases are really good quality and a real pleasure to use as well so for many of you have maybe seen a lot of the marketing materials a lot of the really attractive advertisements that they make about how remarkable can fit into your professional life I would really encourage you to consider in the cold light of day whether books would actually be the more suitable device for you I'm sure it is for most people you've got to decide for yourself of course the remarkable was the very first of its type with this specific design language and it has been imitated quite a lot but just like apple once all the other tablets and phones start to look like the iPad and the iPhone it's time that they make a design change themselves Apple changes the way that their phone phon look and all of a sudden everyone wants the latest Apple device and it takes a while for everyone to catch up not just with the technology but with the design aesthetic as well and we're very much due that with remarkable now we're very much due a change in the design aesthetic of this device and then there's the price for an objectively worst device well for the package you're going to be paying around 500 quid depending on whether you go for the very premium folio depending whether you go for the marker Plus or the ordinary marker you can though and I'd encourage you to look at you can can get the device itself for £300 and only spend around 30 quid on a case and about 40 quid on a third party stylus and then you'd be around sort of £370 the whole device case and pen for the note f3c is £500 now typing is a real strength for both of these devices and sure I think if you can commit to using just one device and all of your written notes and words within the remarkable platform and cloud services you could get away with that sure you could also consider the supernote and you could do those things on there but if you have to access and also to be able to edit your documents anywhere on any device then you need something that's going to let you access the cloud services and that's going to be the books in the eink world I can type directly into any word document I have in the cloud on either mine or my work profile app I can work directly into my Google Cloud into the Google Docs app or download and manipulate things edit things directly within the Google Drive app and there is a real benefit to the note 3C for having this vertical screen Lo it's paired so I can pair a Bluetooth keyboard with it really easily and now I can type directly into a cloud file here in the word app and vertical mode looks really good for vertical documents and that's something that is just not possible to emulate on the remarkable and even so these files are still vertical files and there isn't a kind of edge past here and here so when that same file is rotated now you can see I've got this rather awkward notes that have gone off the edge of that note notbook this vertical mode is just a very natural way to see a written document there's also this issue of having to export things from the cloud Source on the remarkable so you get the great remarkable desktop app and I'm sorry this is the 20s now and really having to copy out of a desktop app like this and then either email it to yourself or copy and paste it into the document you want to type in it is a clunky workaround rather than working directly into the cloud sources I am pleased to say that at least in the desktop app they've got rid of this funny little symbol that used to be at the end of every single line but that's still there on the phone app last time I tried so you actually have to go through and delete these funny symbols that you get which just mean line break in whatever the code is written for this remarkable type so having to copy and paste into different apps for editing formatting publishing from where you first made the text and the remarkable that is a work around that I'm just not willing to accept today I want to write directly into the app that I'm eventually going to public publish the work from if it's a Word document saved on my work Cloud I want to work into that word doc and I want to have all the changes saved automatically when I access that later on my work laptop if it's a Google doc which lives in my Google Drive and which I can edit anywhere on any browser or any app and then I can just import it straight into another app like my teleprompt app for instance and I don't want to have to get the text there by emailing to myself or any other kind of work around I might have to do un remarkable I want to be directly editing the Cloud copy and although there are Cloud Integrations un remarkable at best they are only one way in other words you can pull things down and you can upload things but you cannot work on live copies of those documents and although the remarkable cloud is pretty good it has a phone app a desktop app and a web app if you could only live in that one bespoke Cloud space then you'd be absolutely fine but most of us use more than that most of us are now used to accessing and editing our files from multiple locations you can also Al screen share to the desktop app but you can only do that within a desktop app which is signed into your account so you couldn't do that on a shared computer for instance it works pretty quickly it's quite cool because you could share that to a meeting now in any case you do need to be subscribed to the connect Services which is about £3 a month for the privilege of sharing to a desktop like that there are just so many more ways you can share your screen on the books you can do it directly through the screen via mirrorcast which is what most mod screens will accept directly sharing to or you can share over your IP on things like space desk or you can log into teams or zoom and share your screen through the meeting app or even on our whiteboards at school that have a proprietary screen share app I can download and install their app on the device and screen share that way I would go as far as to say the remarkable cloud is better than the books Cloud however I don't really use the books Cloud because I don't really need to except for syncing my notes and syncing my reading data to the cloud so I can access that via the web app or I can access that on a different books device I don't use the cloud on books very much I use the Google Cloud I work in an app which has its own cloud storage so the remarkable cloud is very good but it pales in comparison with the Google cloud or the Microsoft cloud the other thing to say that for full access to all of those Cloud functions you do need to pay for this connect subscription as well on the remarkable books give you 10 GB of cloud storage for free and for what you can do which is really just store your handwritten notes and a few type bits copy and paste out of that app it's pretty limited really and hopefully you can see that when I do copy out from the remarkable app on my phone I get these ridiculous symbols after every line so who's got the patience to go ahead and delete and put each line onto a new line when you do that on your phone I mean that's just not good enough is it this is the 2020s and Rich Tex format has been around for maybe four decades and it hasn't had those issues I've talked about comparing the remarkable cloud with with the Microsoft cloud but of course the remarkable cloud is £3 a month and Microsoft 365 is about I think it's £75 per year you are getting a massive Suite of apps here as well and I need those Microsoft cloud apps I'm already a paying customer for that I need the Google drive storage I'm already a paying customer for that so having to spend extra for the benefit of using the remarkable that does kind of Sting and the fact that I can't really use the Microsoft cloud or the Google Cloud properly here on the remarkable limits the benefits of this as a digital device so there we have it an objective no-brainer but for some of you you might need to follow your heart and you still might desire a remarkable for most of you though after that comparison I think the choice is crystal clear

Channel: Kit Betts-Masters

Views: 48,845

Keywords: remarkable 2 review, e-ink tablet

Id: dhRxBoIAlT4

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024