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

[@SheriCarthan-MinistryHelp]

Awesome review! I was surprised by your final recommendation of getting the iPad before the rM2. But this is what made me appreciate the review even more. You weren’t influenced by companies, but gave your personal professional opinion. Thank you!

[@UHStudio]

Thanks! Appreciate the kind words! I might need to do an update soon though, because the note-taking system with the Remarkable seems to be getting better and better.

[@emmanuelfleurot6880]

Thanks for the review. I was wondering what could be not nice on this device. You answered these questions. Nice job !

[@UHStudio]

Thanks for watching!

[@kerrin6633]

I really like the way you structured your video and your attentiveness and thoughtfulness to your review. I agree with your summary. Thanks for that. I think your conscientious comes through the screen. It's kept me watching. Thanks for your video posting!

[@UHStudio]

Thanks so much for the kind words! Gives me encouragement :)

[@TheMaxbw]

Big part of this is it is taking away blue light which is giving us all the well needed break from screen time! I love this device. I'd love to see a tools pallet with basic shapes, lines making it easier to draw certain things but this is just an update away if enough of us ask ;)

[@UHStudio]

Yes, it's great to have a screen that is not actually an illuminating display but a changing and dynamic surface

[@johnfraney3893]

Thanks for your review. I enjoyed it. You have good presentation and delivery. I wish I were an architect. I'm a software engineer. My diagrams don't have hard constraints. Width and height have no meaning. But I can appreciate the perspective of real world architecutre. I enjoyed your presentation. I felt that you enjoyed it too. Thanks.

[@UHStudio]

Thanks so much for the kind words 🙌

[@ch3ckm8]

you're right about the remarkable 1 battery life. Good thing I bought it used for just $100. It really does only last 2-3 days of use for something that doesn't do a lot of heavy processing is quite unacceptable.

[@UHStudio]

Yes, so unfortunate. I use the RM 1 for piano sheet music for my child and the buttons are so much better for children on the first gen

[@shaun4787]

I'm an Industrial Designer, very much closer to your profession. I also use iPad Pro + Procreate. But the use cases for RM2 for me is quick sketching and ideation. I don't need the fancy brush strokes, colorization, adjustments in iPad/Procreate. Your use case of turning down a PDF opacity and marking annotation doesn't apply to me. I found doing a pencil sketch on a product idea on an iPad/Procreate is just not natural. RM2 fill that gap nicely. As a matter of fact I don't even use iPad/Procreate that much except for painting digital art. But taking a photo with my paper and pencil sketch and put it in my presentation still dreading over the shaded paper background is a pain for me. I love paper/pencil sketches if they're only stay in their respective medium(paper). The moment you digitize them and use them in some other digital format, it's a pain. RM2 pencil sketches can have PNG transparent background, also they can be turned into a vector based artwork is a joy for me. So back to your comment: depends on what you want to do with it. EXACTLY. RM2 might just be the thing I'm looking for. You might want to cover some other use cases why RM2 is way better than iPad. Battery comparison is night and day. Plus, I don't need to charge RM2 stylus, same can't be said about Apple Pencil. Really, iPad and RM2 are two different beasts, apples and oranges. Can't really compare.

[@UHStudio]

Thanks for your thoughts 🙌

[@loumarcellino17Q19]

This was a great review. It made me further appreciate how important it is to find the device best suited to our individual needs. Thank you sir!

[@UHStudio]

Cheers! Glad it you've found it helpful :)

[@jadebaker123]

Thanks for the great review! Very honest and covered all my queries. Cheers👍

[@UHStudio]

Cheers! Glad you've found it useful!

[@DayaMcCarthy]

Thank you for this video. The background music was a bit distracting and loud other than that fantastic video.

[@ghoyarbide]

excelente como siempre. disfruto la excelencia de tus videos. aun no comence el curso, pero supongo que este es el año.

[@UHStudio]

Thank you!

[@StephenCoorlas]

Looks really nice to write/draw on, might need to give this a try 🤘

[@CleanTactix]

Appreciate the review. I am debating buying the remarkable to do my rough sketches while designing furniture. Most of the time it involves photos of a sketchbook for my clients. Once selected, I fully design in Sketchup on PC prior to building. Ipad didnt seem to great with SketchUp. I think based on your review, it would be a good way to digitize my notebooks and share with clients. Im curious how well the svg files would load into SketchUp with extensions too. Do you have any experience using Sketchup with the remarkable?

[@dabonai]

cool review, yeaph .. every device has its scope in functionaly for end users.

[@UHStudio]

Cheers, yes, indeed

[@ArtScienceWonder]

I hope the new CMYK e-readers that will be coming out in 2023 and 2024 hurry up and realize they could really market to architects and artists and get to making software for us!

[@UHStudio]

That would be fantastic! Maybe soon, we have e-ink computer displays for those of us that spend all day staring at baiscally a light

[@gemininimeg]

​@UHStudio there's e-ink monsters, just look up "best e-ink monsters".

[@falklumo]

Like an eReader, the reMarkable OF COURSE is meant as a secondary tablet. I guess everybody understands that already. But it can't hurt to emphasize. BTW, I am expecting Apple to buy reMarkable (or a similiar company) at some point and make the back side of iPads eInk readers / sketch books :)

[@crappyslappy]

i think if they added an opacity bar for the pens that would be enough for sketching for me!

[@UHStudio]

Yes having done sort of transparency setting would go a great deal into making this a more useful device! Especially in layers

[@goboldly5700]

I'm an IT Engineer and I take a lot of mtg notes, notes as I'm debugging something (I have tons of post-it notes) that clutter a white board, and need to frequently draw illustrations, flow diagrams and other IT related hand drawn charts, graphs and diagrams on the fly. I've been considering the RM2 for some time but still not sure if it's right for me. I hate the iPad and Apple pencil for note taking due to the slickness of the glass surface, the glare on the eyes, and having to keep the pencil charged. The RM2 sounds like maybe a tool that would help eliminate some of the documentation taking and organization headache. If I consider the RM2 mostly as a note taking input and reading device for reference PDFs, maybe it would be a good fit. Having the ability to centrally manage my doc from the PC is essential. Does RM2 have ability to access Dropbox? Google Drive?

[@UHStudio]

Remarkable have a service called Connect, which is free for the first year and then along the lines of 3 $ £ € per month. There are apps for PCs and mobile devices, onto which, they are slowly starting to add editing functionalities. Along with connect, you can access PDFs from cloud drives like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Onedrive.

[@demotics2005]

The same question I have right now and also the answer I needed

[@Outlinescommunications]

One problem with saying "sync" with DropBox etc, is that they don't actually "sync" unless it's with Connect's servers. A few YT videos talk about it. If you "sync" with Dropbox, it just sends a pdf copy there that's not editable. If you update the note on your device and "sync" with Dropbox again, it uploads a second copy of the same file. It doesn't actually overwrite it with the same name.

[@UHStudio]

Thanks for your comment.

[@juancanas8811]

Hi everyone and thanks for the video UH. Does the iPad cause a lot of eye strain? If remarkable is less fatiguing, would it still be worth buying an iPAD?

[@UHStudio]

iPads tend to have quite bright screens, but they are smaller than laptop displays, so should cause less strain. The exception is if you are using an iPad 6 inches (15cm) from your face, as that would cause a lot of strain. Clearly, the Remarkable being eink, the tech is quite different and much better for the eyes as we are not staring at light the whole time. But the remarkable is not as capable as the ipad, so it really depends what you need to do. For example, for studying by reading PDFs and writing notes, remarkable is a clear winner. Basic sketching also. But everything else, the iPad probably does better, but with eye strain and distractions ;)

[@sinespag3807]

Hi, the video is great, and you covered many really useful points. I do have a crucial question that is essential for me, and I couldn't find any content creator discussing it. Since I see you responding to comments, I'll go ahead and ask, hoping the video isn't too old: Is it possible to have unlimited canva? I work with a lot of diagrams, and being restricted to a single page (currently using paper) is a significant issue for me. So, do the note-taking features offered by the Remarkable 2 provide this type of template?

[@UHStudio]

They have recently added an unlimited vertical scroll. But there is no unlimited horizontal scroll. However the performance of panning around is subpar as it is not designer for that. I actually ignore this feature as I like to think of it much more as a digital notebook with pages than anything else. As I haven't played with that feature enough, I don't even know how one would tell if a page has more to it than what's shown at 100% zoom initially. I imagine though that the remarkable support pages may show this functionality in more detail.

[@Geologist_Mike]

I like the idea for using plans outdoors, but everything I can find says to use it only below 95 degrees F. That's not good for onsite use.

[@UHStudio]

That's probably for direct sunlight?

[@johnfraney3893]

"Died in its sleep...!' LOL

[@UHStudio]

yep, well, the best way to go if you ask me 😂

[@mylesnmore]

I think if you are easily distracted then the remarkable would help break your habit and focus on writing.

[@feliciaburton7105]

How did you use the reMarkable while studying for the ARE? I have one test left.

[@UHStudio]

PDFs of Ballast books, and the the rest of the sources - reading through them and highlighting important information. Good Luck!

[@ReesesPieces634]

can you redo this without the odd background music? Its not helping me understand you. Thanks

[@DavidLee-xj4sz]

One of the First Principles of Design for this device is the elimination of distractions from getting your thoughts and ideas onto 'paper' with focus (to counter @chaosordeal294's point, it's a feature not a bug...) so perhaps you are a great candidate for the reMarkable, haha...🤪

[@nosuchthing8]

It's too loud

[@yorinov2001]

I end up turning the volume off and use closed captions

[@luke9911]

I don’t understand why it needs all these background noises it’s actually unwatchable

[@CorentinHarbelot]

for me, nothing can beat procreate on ipad pro, I only sees cons with this, but it's only for my usage, great video otherwise!

[@UHStudio]

Thanks. Yes, as mentioned in the video, the Remarkable is probably not for everyone, and likely it is better to first have an iPad and then try the remarkable as a supplementary device. Who knows, eink colour is being introduced so if there is a colour version, it might be a bit different

[@gemininimeg]

The Remarkable, SuperNote, Kindle Scribe, Onyx Boox and other e-ink are for those that want that more paper to pad fill, not that glass to pad fill like Apply or Samsung or Tablets in general.

[@jolu1621]

Can you use it in dark environment ?

[@UHStudio]

Not without an external lamp, as it doesn't have it's own illumination. Remarkable claim, this is to keep the display assembly thinner

[@MicheleFiascaris]

Can you create geometrical shapes on the Remarkable 2? Example: circle, square, rectangle, etc ? (not hand-drawn I mean)

[@UHStudio]

No, it's all just hand drawn

[@Chris-rx5ce]

For me, this is its biggest weakness. It needs a drawing app. Notability has good basic drawing with snapping objects. Add layers to that and it would be great.

[@maximiliansonnenfeld8651]

do not buy it, there are far better options. even data transferring/syncing cost you with the monthly subscription. and even if they "gift" you the subscription for free for a year, you cannot use it, if you do not have a credit card, which most continental europeans do not have. they dont even offer PayPal etc

[@chaosordeal294]

This is an ultra-portable with literally 100% of the functionality stripped out, at the same price. Copy-and-flip?!!?! Are you from the future of 1982?

[@UHStudio]

I would say about 95% of the functionality. You should look at their pitch. That's what they advertise indeed. Focus device instead of do-it-all device on which many end up doing nothing but doom scrolling or doom watching. But, I take your point, not for everyone indeed.

[@chaosordeal294]

@@UHStudio A "do-it-all" device sounds a lot better than "focus," which is just a marketing way to say "feature-poor," let's face it.

[@carlosmazongodoy147]

Great informative video! I liked the music a lot. Reminded me of @ColdFusion (great tech channel, btw) as he also has great soundtracks to his videos :) Edit: Instead of "Ipad" I would recommend any of the many Android based tablets... much less of a hussle to transfer files if you are not into the apple ecosystem. I own a Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra and even if a bit pricey, it is a great tablet

[@UHStudio]

Much appreciated Carlos! The trouble with Android tablets are the apps. Concepts is is not quite the same and Procreate doesn't exist. With iPads, cloud drives work well, and the iPad can now use flash drives for transfers.