Inksky
The reMarkable Paper Pro is not an e-reader. I need to get that out of the way upfront because if you walk in expecting a Kindle competitor, you’ll be disappointed. It’s a digital notebook that can also display PDFs and EPUBs — and once I accepted that distinction, I fell hard for this device.
I’ve been using the Paper Pro for just over a month, carrying it everywhere: client meetings, coffee shops, my couch at 11pm when I should be sleeping but instead I’m sketching out an idea. The first thing I noticed when I wrote on it was how much friction the surface has. It’s not quite pencil-on-paper — I’d describe it as a really nice ballpoint on a thick legal pad. There’s a soft give to it that my iPad and Apple Pencil never had. Writing on glass now feels genuinely uncomfortable to me.
The latency is basically invisible. reMarkable claims 12ms, and I believe it. I’ve tried to catch the ink lagging behind the Marker tip during fast cursive, and I can’t. The stroke appears exactly where I expect it, when I expect it. That sounds like a small thing, but it’s what keeps me reaching for the Paper Pro instead of a Moleskine.
Then there’s the color. The Paper Pro uses E Ink Gallery 3, which puts actual cyan, magenta, yellow, and white particles inside each capsule. That means you get full 300 ppi color — not the 150 ppi you get from Kaleido 3 panels on color e-readers. The colors are definitely muted next to an iPad screen. Think watercolor rather than neon marker. But for highlighting passages in yellow, blue, and green, it’s genuinely useful and pleasant. I’ve started color-coding my meeting notes and it’s become second nature.
The catch: Gallery 3 refreshes slowly. A full color page refresh takes about a second and a half, with a visible flash. For note-taking, this barely matters — I’m not flipping pages rapidly. But I tried reading a graphic novel on it and the pauses between pages killed the flow. This is not a comic reader.
Speaking of reading: the Paper Pro handles PDFs beautifully. I’ve marked up contracts, annotated research papers, and signed documents directly on the screen. EPUB reading is much more basic — you can adjust font size and margins, but there’s no dictionary, no store, no library integration. I still use my Kindle for novels. The Paper Pro is where I go when I need to think on paper.
The hardware itself is gorgeous. The 11.8-inch screen is the first reMarkable with a front light, and it’s a huge upgrade — I used a reMarkable 2 briefly and not having any light was a dealbreaker for evening work. The Mosaic weave folio is absurdly overpriced at $79 but it looks and feels so good that I bought it anyway and don’t regret it. At 525g and 5.1mm thick, it disappears into my bag. Battery life settles at about two weeks of daily note-taking with the light on.
At $579 with the Marker, this is not a casual purchase. But for the way I work — lots of handwritten notes, document markup, and brainstorming — the Paper Pro has been worth every dollar. It’s a single-purpose device that does that one purpose extraordinarily well. If you’re a student annotating papers, a writer who thinks better with a pen in hand, or a professional who marks up documents all day, this is the best tool I’ve found. Just don’t expect it to replace your Kindle.