Remarkable Paper Pro: My Reaction

Time to React! hello there welcome to the channel you know uh just this morning remarkable had a major press release um I've been thinking about it all day and I've got some thoughts so I thought maybe for the first time I would do a reaction video um because I think a lot of the things I'm thinking about now won't end up in any of my future reviews and I did purchase the device so I will be doing a full Suite of reviews on this device but I just had some thoughts I wanted to get out there while they're fresh um and hopefully have kind of some fun with this uh and see how it goes but uh my first reaction video so let's let's get into it so first off uh let's talk about The Announcement the device itself and actually wait just before we get to that just to set the stage for those that don't know um there was an announcement a few days ago maybe even just two days ago I can't quite remember that uh that this formal announcement would be made this morning from remarkable and immediately you know uh Reddit was a buzz and for the most part people were looking for the remarkable three I mean there were definitely certain things people were looking for um but everyone was hoping for a new device and they thought that it was going to be the remarkable three turns out not quite now a lot of the things people were hoping for did show up there was a new device announced um but it was called the remarkable paper Pro I believe or I'm just calling it The remarkable Pro um so not really a remarkable three but kind of the the remarkable two will continue to be sold so it's not like that's going away it's this new larger device um that's checking some of the boxes that that people were looking for so so while not a remarkable three I think the general feeling so far in the wake of the announcement is kind of this wave of of Highlights of the Device positivity so a lot of people were pretty happy about the announcement um at least that was the case when I looked at readed it shortly after so let's talk a little bit about the device itself and talk a little bit about like what I think are some of the highlights and we're going to start start unusual here but this is from my perspective I think that the Marquee item is the fact that it's a 12in screen and technically it's 11.8 but we'll call it 12 now the reason why I say that is I haven't talked much in my videos about this but devices right now generally come in either 10.3 or the larger size then jumps to 13.3 and most of the devices that sell well in this market are the 10.3 variety and those are the devices I mainly review um and I don't mention this in the reviews but you know that sometimes while I love the portability and I generally like the screen size of the 10-in models I do sometimes feel a little cramped even then or or was longing for a slightly larger screen and I have tried a 13-in device before and I found it to be like totally clunky uh not what I thought it would be and all the benefits I'd H to get weren't that great and there were a lot of negatives that came with it in terms of it being much larger much heavier and I could just keep going on so for me a 13-in isn't a good option so what's exciting to me about this is this is the first device that I'm aware of that sits in the middle right in the middle between these 10 and 13in devices um so that's kind of exciting for me and I just can't wait to kind of actually try it out and see do I do I really want something bigger or will I find much like I found with a 13in device maybe 10 is a sweet spot after all so I'm super curious about that now my number two thing that I've note about this device and this is probably most people's number one is the fact that it has a color screen I mean that's probably the Marquee for most people so there's a little bit of background here so for those of you that don't know maybe you're just kind of cluing in in to the eote taking space u for the first time or or having I've only gotten like you maybe you've only had the remarkable in the past so you may not be aware that the dominant color in in technology right now is known as Kido 3 so the way Kido 3 works is it's these little micro capsules that are you know that's your black and white that's just like a normal a in screen that you'd have say on a Kindle or what have you um but then there's this color layer that's on top of those micro capsules and that's what regulates the color the downside of that is because you have this layer you end up with a darker screen but even beyond that there's other limitations to Kido 3 you only have 4,000 color so you don't get great color accuracy um the color density it maxes out at 150 uh PPI where we're starting to get used to screens that have as much as 300 PPI for black and white so it's notably less than that um and there's other like limitations as well so a lot of people really don't like Kido 3 it's been very divisive I myself I'm actually uh I like it quite a bit but having said that um I remember one poster and I can't remember if this was on my videos or if this was something I read on Reddit but they made the statement of you know eventually we're going to look back when we have this the Next Generation color technology and wonder why we even bothered with Kido 3 and I actually agree with that sentiment my only push back to that is wake me up when we get there it's taken 15 years to get to Kido 3 I think given that history I'm really impressed by Kido 3 but I totally agree at some point something else is going to come around um and it's going to be better and we're going to ditch our Kido 3 devices at that time so um so that's a little bit of background and the reason why I'm mentioning that to you is this device is not CID of 3 this device is actually based on the gallery 3 technology also known as advanced color paper if if I remember AC c p um and that's different so instead of having your black and white micro capsules with a color layer you've got four different colors of micro capsules which include white cyan yellow and magenta in fact right uh near my feet I have a laser printer and those are the exact colors it uses except it swaps the white for black now on paper gallery 3 is way better than Kido 3 right so think about this gallery 3 promised when it was announced 300 PPI both black and white and color you would have the ability to either go in black and white or have color so you could actually switch between the two uh you could have up to I think it was 50,000 colors uh and all sorts of things on paper gallery 3 was the answer and Kido 3 uh was the inferior product now interestingly enough they were both released or announced about a month from apart from each other and then it took both about a year roughly to finally make it to Market since then there's only been one gallery 3 device and everything else has been Kido 3 so gallery 3 as it turns out is a hot mess uh a terrible technology and all those benefits I talked about most of them anyway were never realized I did a few videos on this um but it things like it didn't really have have a white background which is one of the hopes you know so instead of a dark layer like you have with cido You' hope to have a white background well mine was like pink on the device that I had uh that's the big me galy the only device until now that's been released with gallery 3 um you know it was slow it was cumbersome the writing was weird the way that it rendered colors black was great writing in Black was pristine but Runing the other colors exhibited Strange Behaviors depending on the color sometimes you'd write a color and it would show up in one tone and then the screen would refresh and it would be a different color as it rendered I just very weird and very sluggish and the battery drain was terrible I mean everything about gallery 3 was a complete disaster in the big Meek alley and so nobody else touched it so for the remarkable uh Pro to say we've got color using gallery 3 um it it brings a lot of interesting questions I mean one hand great it's not Kido 3 we're maybe we're finally moving on and there's a lot of uh evidence based on what remarkable talked about that they've done a lot of work with the technology to kind of cover up or improve upon some of its limitations um but we'll see how well did they do that there's some sense that there's still some rendering issues uh with the color uh you know what does that mean in terms of battery life I mean there's just a lot of open questions but a lot of the renderers that they put on the screen looked really good and so I think a lot of people and quite rightly are excited about the aspect of color and excited about the fact that they decided to go to gallery 3 and and what can remarkable do that big me couldn't do previously and that's that's kind of the what's going on there another interesting thing um and it was very uh hardly touched upon but if you go through the purchasing process it's mentioned that the stylus from the original remarkable or or rather the remarkable 2 won't work on the remarkable Pro they've designed a separate stylist that works specifically for the pro it's not a CH stylus um so why won't uh other styluses work or presumably it's because they're using a different technology than waycom um I don't know we'll we'll learn more about that later but that was another curiosity um you know just beyond that I won't go into all the other specifications but uh the storage was pretty good I think it was 64 GB I might be wrong on that but certainly way more than the 8 GB of the remarkable 2 the RAM and the processor were not particularly impressive but honestly if you can hone your software you don't need a great processor or a lot of ram so it's possible that won't be an issue um although some initial reviews um are kind of questioning that so so I'm a little concerned about that aspect but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a problem so we'll see what it what it looks like when it comes out Whoo boy, It’s Expensive the big issue and the most obvious one and the unequivocal issue is the price so uh the cheapest combination you can get right so this is um this is meaning you buy the device you buy a stylus and you buy the cheapest cover is just like I think $20 or $30 short of 700 um and of course you have combinations that can go beyond that and that's that's before taxes so it this is an expensive device and you know as I've watched the market and followed it you know 500 550 is kind of The Sweet Spot and when you start moving beyond that you know you're really getting into a place where your sales drop significantly because it's just kind of outside the range of what people are willing to pay for so an interesting question here is does the remarkable brand transcend that and will they sell a lot of copies I mean it will sell I don't get me wrong it'll be a success because of the remarkable brand but but will it have the staying power um and you know the sales levels that we've seen with the remarkable to or or at least in the neighborhood of that um and we'll see we we'll we'll see what that looks like um you know most of the presentation was either about the hardware or was about the philosophy of the device they didn't go much that I recall into the software itself it looked like it was pretty much the software as we already know it you know put some comments in if I missed something or forgot something but it was really about the device itself um I the talking about the Thoughts on the Presentation presentation um I remember going about halfway through the presentation and going wow because what they were doing is they were basically talking about how their device positioned in the market but not the market that we think of the eote taking market like they didn't mention anything about that at all they were basically positioning their device they didn't say this uh you expressly but they were basically positioning it against an iPad against other electronic devices out there phones or tablets I mean they were they were really focusing broadly um on their product and how they were presenting it and and the thing that really stuck with me halfway through the presentation is wow they can do that like other companies can't do that maybe a Kindle could uh and Amazon can get away with that because they have a brand reputation that's even greater than remarkables but but no one else besides Amazon and remarkable could basically say here's our product and we're going to Take On The World um and get people to go along with that so I remember thinking how impressive that was and then they kind of turned on me cuz in the second half they made a number of comments where they did actually go after some competitors and I don't remember the exact thing they say except one I remember them going after or saying something to the effect of you know we don't release multiple devices every year a clear slam on books even though books wasn't mentioned by name so they so I had this Epiphany about like how they were taking the high road and how they could get away with it and then the kind of the second half they kind of ditched that philosophy which was kind of which I thought was kind of funny um the other interesting thing is that when you think about remarkable the tagline they tend to go with is the world's thinnest tablet in fact if you do a web search that's what comes up which by the way as an aside just completely drives me nuts um because it's a number of months now since the books go has been released the 10.3 which has is a much thinner well not a much is a thinner tablet than the remarkable too so this idea of remarkable being the world's thinnest tablet isn't true anymore and you can just tweak it right and still kind of make the same marketing point you can say among the world's thinness tablets or whatever something like that but nope they're sticking with the world's thinnest tablet and it doesn't really matter it doesn't really matter right it's just marketing it's kind of like saying you know Nathan's has the world's best hot dog you know it's like we've got the world's thinest tablet you know but but still sometimes those details kind of rub me the wrong way um and but for for most people you shouldn't care but I I find that both annoying and funny at the same time but the theme of this presentation wasn't the thinnest tablet although they certainly touted that this Pro is a thin tablet generally speaking um but it was more about being distraction free so I have some thoughts Distraction Free? about that now I want to say off off the bat that distraction distraction from electronic devices is from my perspective a legitimate thing and I don't think anything embodies this more in my life than Microsoft teams uh Microsoft teams is as many products with Microsoft both brilliant and terrifying at the same time and in this particular case they they have this feature where you can put yourself on do not disturb but if certain people ping you uh that message will go through anyway I mean it's insane so the only way that you can truly be distraction free on teams is to completely shut it off which isn't always practical so so I get on a personal basis what it's like to have messages peeing and to distract you and to take away from Focus so I don't I don't argue that that's not a thing the problem I kind of have and I'd love to hear your comments if you have an alternative view on this but the problem I have is what exactly are we talking about here because can't most devices be distraction free if I turn off notifications like isn't that something that you can actually just select and I can hear the counterargument to that basically being well yeah they do but for some people if you you can you're tempted because you have maybe apps in your device you're tempted to turn that do not disturb off and that and that ruins the the the you know the distraction free environment people can't help themselves and and I kind of get that actually I mean I mean I still kind of get that but then I go to well don't don't these people have phones so if they're willing to turn off uh any like things that prevent distraction so that they will get distracted aren don't they have their phone with them I mean the only way this makes sense is if they're taking their device and they're sequestering themselves in this kind of sealed chamber where you don't have any other electronics um because you either argue that you can turn your devices off in which case there's nothing special about the remarkable at all most devices can do that or you're making the argument that people AR incapable of doing it so the device saves you from that I I don't know I'm probably being a stickler on this and I'm very willing to hear other perspectives on this this is just my opinion on that but I I I really wonder about this distraction free argument again I get it I get there's a there there I'm just not clear about how remarkable is more distraction free than other devices if you can turn them off anyway I've said it I won't say it any further um now if they went with a different tactic and they said remarkable provides you a more focused experience then I'm on board with that because that's what they do they have an interface they don't have a lot of clutter um if you're engaging with the notes there's not a lot of buttons and things cring out the screen so they do a great job of creating this kind of inviting environment in order to interact it's not going to just not going to distract you for lack of a better term so if if they said that I'm more on board with that concept it's the distraction free one that's kind of like hm and that was a huge theme of their uh presentation but I do know that a lot of people believe it so again please please put in the comments where where my thought process is is not right and i' I'd love to hear from them Other Media um so what was interesting in addition to the core presentation was then the follow-up to that uh there were a number of YouTubers that released videos Almost simultaneous with the launch of um the remarkable presentation which of course means that they were uh made aware well in advance that this was coming had their videos prepared probably had a moratorium on releasing and then release those um um you know when when they could once the announcement was made and there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that and I scoured through a few of them uh just to see what folks were saying and and you know found them interesting um one though I just can't help but smile about um and so I I won't mention who it was but but at some point in the video this person just started just just praising remarkable in a in a way that was that struck me as almost over the top like it was I like I felt like this guy was about to to to wax poetry almost at some point and I just I couldn't believe what I was hearing like is this like is this guy saying this it's not that it's not that I necessarily disagreed with what he was saying um I'm not even sure I know what he was saying I was just so distracted by the hyperbole um that that kind of just came out of nowhere I just I just remembered that and I just thought it was hilarious and again I I think about it throughout the day and and it kind of makes me smile um in addition to YouTubers you know there was other media Tom's Hardware notably kind of did a a a a pre-review I guess um of the device and that's where I got a little bit of that feedback that there might be some laggy performance with the color but um but again it wasn't a full review um and that's just one source so so we don't know but yeah it's interesting that there was a lot of coordination and you know that's I guess what you would expect from a pretty notable company um like remarkable and especially one that that doesn't release uh devices very often you know I'm sure they they took time to try to connect with people and really make a media blitz out of this and and they seem to have done a pretty good job with that Are We Better Off? you know in the big picture uh one of the things that really strikes me um and and i' I've noted this first with the books go 10.3 I'm kind of noticing this and you'll see this reflected in my review of the the viws mini uh AI paper and and this as well this device as well even though I haven't reviewed it um it's all pointing towards something I didn't expect so let me just take a quick step back before I I explain or go go to what I'm talking about so every you know few months I do prediction videos and it's just for fun you know my predictions tend to be wrong obviously you know I just kind of know the trends and I try to you know anticipate what's going to happen and every once in a while I get something right but you know I don't have a particular great record but when I looked ahead at this year I I kind of had the sense of that we might see maybe a Slowdown and the type of devices that are coming out that we were starting to kind of reach a maturity stage in the market or that we might start seeing you know different types of devices come out so you'd see a little more um creativity and how ink was being utilized like maybe in a clock you know um and we kind of saw that a little bit with the uh Inc phones from Big me I mean it's not that we had hadn't seen e in phones before but I think they released the first color one um and we hadn't seen those types of phones in a while so there was a little bit of innovation there but what I didn't anticipate and the remarkable uh Pro kind of doubles down on is this just continued stratification of the market so you know if I thought about the books go again going back to that like you know it was it's a great product I recommended it a lot of positive things to say about it but the one thing I noted in my review video is like this doesn't seem to replace anything um you know what I mean it you could argue that it kind of replaced the note air 3 the Black and White Version although the note air 3 is still around and especially if you want front lighting that's what you would go to as opposed to the go so it didn't really replace it you know the viz again I'll get to that review in a couple weeks but you know I'm I've got a grid of 8 in models and I've got like five deic on that grid including thewoods I I can recommend them all um and with remarkable um you know this isn't replacing they remarkable too so it's just we're just seeing more devices that start looking at you know a more Focus cut of the market as opposed to replacing what came before and I didn't see that coming like this is like these are a lot of major devices that just just are you know expanding the market I guess or or they're offering not that but they're offering more choice but can a niche market like this support all that I mean I I guess it can because that's what we're seeing but I did not see this happening I did not see this continued stratification um and that's surprises me you know um you know take for example take you example of the con the Counterpoint to that or not the Counterpoint but the contct to that which is you know hopefully relatively soon we'll hear the announcement of the final release of the supernote a5x right we're all been waiting for it there's some signs hopefully that it's about to be released when that comes out it replaces the a5x right in fact the a5x is pretty much already gone at least in terms of new sales so that's normal but we're not doing that like like all these devices over the last like four or five months have not been replacing things they've just been segmenting the market even further um and it's weird like I don't know what to of it I mean choice is supposed to be good right but to me there's also a point where it's like does it just make it even that much harder to figure out if you're a new person coming in like what's the device for you you know I used to say to to people that you know the device for you is going to depend on your use case so what is you want the device to do and then figure out what device kind of meets that closely I don't think that's true anymore I think it's use case and preferences and that determines what the right device is because there's just so much Choice out there and again in theory not a bad thing but if you have no idea where you stand on things like color or no color 300 PPI versus something less and the pro by the way comes I think in 227 or something around there it wasn't 300 um things like that you know um um I think they say front lighting already front lighting or no front lighting um you know all those aspects you don't know like what and hopefully that's one of the things I try to do in my videos but it just feels like it's getting harder and harder and I don't know let me know too in the comments if you're relatively new do you find this even more confusing or is just are you just on the side of this is great choice and everything's wonderful these are all great devices all those devices I mentioned that's satisfying I can say like well and we don't know yet about the remarkable but but I'm imagining it's probably going to be pretty good because of the source and the care that they're thinking in you know when they release a device the track record's good in other words um yeah just let me know what you think of they're all great devices but but is is this a good thing or not I I'm just I think it is but but I don't know so Wrapping it Up those were pretty much my thoughts uh from the day it was a fun day it's it's always great when you know you get surprised and there's something exciting happening and this is definitely one of those things um I'm again I I bought the device I don't know when it's going to arrive but when it does we'll go through the normal battery I'll unbox it we'll do the visual tour um I'll do battery test results and then you know other miscellaneous things and then we'll see what the final pros and cons are so you know that'll be fun and I'm looking forward to it and hopefully you are too but anyway I hope you enjoyed this video I just wanted to kind of just my thoughts uh as they're fresh and we less than 24 or even gosh it wasn't even that long ago was it's a little over 12 hours I guess since the announcement so um just thought I'd share and hopefully this was fun and look forward to your comments and discussions and until then see you next time