The Remarkable Paper Pro is as outrageous as it is luxurious

You probably don’t need the Remarkable Paper Pro. It’s too luxury. You know those sports cars that look like spaceships but will drive into a streetlamp if you sneeze? That’s the kind of luxury I’m talking about. This is the hypercar of E-Ink note-taking devices.

It’s got a front light! It’s got color! It’s got a 11.8-inch display! It’s got the very best keyboard case available today! And it’s got a totally audacious choice of a display. It’s not a device for consuming books or comics (though you can sideload them if you want), but for marking up documents and taking notes really, really well. (The operating system is identical to the one for the Remarkable 2.) Starting at $579, the Paper Pro is not a practical device for most people, but Remarkable has pushed E Ink displays to their limits here, and by God do I love it for that.

I need to take a minute here to geek the hell out over the display. The company didn’t go with the faded colors of the Kaleido display found in devices from Kobo and Boox. No, Remarkable decided to use the way less popular Gallery display technology and then put their own spin on it (they call it the CANVAS Color display). Gallery is lauded because the color is richer and clearer than Kaleido. Where Kaleido achieves color by applying black and white pigments to a filter, Gallery skips the filter and moves actual color pigment. But moving all that color comes at a cost: Gallery displays have a much, much, much slower refresh rate.

I’m talking unpleasantly slow. The kind of slow that will make you pull your hair out in frustration writing anything. Except on the Remarkable Paper Pro. Writing on this thing is smooth like butter. The experience is just as pleasant as writing on the Remarkable 2. Its just a hair better than the experience found on the Kindle Scribe, or any number of Kobo and Boox devices I’ve tried over the years. Writing in black ink, I am constantly amazed at how perfectly everything seems to work — the knowledge of the Gallery display’s limitations always at war with the impressive reality Remarkable has created.

And then I switch to writing in color ink. There are six colors to choose from: blue, red, green, yellow, cyan, and magenta. Choose any of them and get to doodling. Writing in color is as smooth as writing in black. Pen strokes begin rendering in black, with the chosen color chasing the black away over the course of the stroke. Then when you stop writing, there’s a pause, and the entire screen refreshes, the new colors now in place. It’s one way Remarkable is getting around Gallery’s atrocious refresh rate.

But is it obnoxious in practice? It kind of is! Especially at first. Yet you pick up the rhythm quickly and the annoyance fades away. I found myself being less bothered in only a couple of minutes. And I also kept asking myself, “does this really matter?”

Because the Remarkable Paper Pro isn’t a tool for artists (though it does support layers and shading). You’re not supposed to unlock creativity. You’re using these colors so slide decks and PDFs of business reports look nice as you circle the changes you want made in red. You’re using these colors to faithfully render a book’s art or add pizzazz to a header you’ve written in a brainstorming notebook. You’re using them to highlight all the numbers you have to remember for that Q4 presentation of profitability. In those cases a little flash is annoying, but not the end times.

And for me the knowledge of how faithful this whole thing is at rendering color has me forgiving the flash — because hot damn, they put Gallery in a Remarkable and pushed it to the limits! That’s some concept-car wildness from a note-taking device company.

But I am surprise that the boldness that inspired the display choice didn’t carry over to the front light. It’s…fine. Its dimmer than what others offer, and you can’t control the color temperature of the light, which is annoying in 2024. Remarkable ostensibly went with a less powerful and flexible front light because of the demands of the Paper Pro’s design. The front light has to be extraordinarily thin so there’s no distracting gap between the glass you’re writing on and the E Ink display beneath. And there isn’t! But I also haven’t found that gap as distracting as one would expect in a Boox or the Kindle Scribe. So while I respect Remarkable’s commitment to minding the gap, I would prefer a better front light.

Thankfully Remarkable’s panache for design reveals one other winner: this company now makes the absolute best keyboard case you can get. The $229 Type Folio puts every other keyboard case I’ve ever used, for tablets and computers alike, to shame. It’s so thin and light I keep finding myself surprised at the exceptional keyboard packed inside. It’s also got great stability when open on your knees and a clever way of keeping the pen out of your way. More than even the bold colors of the Remarkable Paper Pro, it’s the keyboard case that grabs peoples’ eyes. This is what every keyboard case should be like. It’s really that good.

And like the rest of the Remarkable Paper Pro, the Type Folio feels like the company showing off at the expense of price. Like a hypercar, it doesn’t feel necessary for most people to own, and it’s probably too expensive, but it’s showing off the future, and that future is a lot faster and more colorful than you think.