There’s a different experience of writing longhand that yields to a certain kind of brainstorming that I like quite a bit.
I ended up buying a Remarkable 2 which is an e-paper writing tablet. Sort of an expensive impulse purchase, bought off an Instagram ad of all things. I love it and carry it with me all the time.
The software is fine, not great but it works. The writing experience is excellent though, it’s as close to the UX of actually writing in a notebook as I can imagine and I definitely am happy with the purchase.
A few people have said they use a Remarkable 2 tablet in this thread. I had seen it mentioned multiple times on HN and ended up getting one a few weeks ago, and I absolutely love it. The writing experience is great, especially for technical sketches which is the main type of writing I do with it. I wish it did a bit more like automatically OCR documents with indexing, but what it ships with is already more than I expected.
It is possible to convert handwritten notes to text[1], but it requires a paid subscription to Connect. I imagine you already knew that, so perhaps you meant something else?
While we're at it, what pen did you get? If you got the black one, how useful is the eraser? These comments about it piqued my interest.
Sorry I'm only seeing this question 4 days later, so I hope you'll eventually see this answer.
I did get the black pen, but I don't actually use the eraser that's at the back. Just based on the time it takes to flip the pen, it's not really worth it.
Instead, I often leave my non-dominant hand by the side bar where I can quickly tap on the back arrow to erase the last stroke(s), or switch to the lasso eraser with one tap. In that mode, you can draw a shape around the area that you want to remove, and you do this using the more precise pen tip, not the wide eraser at the back. There's a dotted line that appear as you draw this shape, so you can see it in real time instead of wondering where exactly the eraser is being applied.
I can see it being useful in a few cases, but it's far from essential and I'd be just as satisfied without it.
As for the OCR mode, it would be better if it was done by default and kept in the document's metadata as searchable text. Instead, the feature you linked to is for a way to OCR the page and send it by email. If you were writing to someone or sharing notes you might want to do that, but this is not quite the same as having the software be able to search through your notes.
I ended up buying a Remarkable 2 which is an e-paper writing tablet. Sort of an expensive impulse purchase, bought off an Instagram ad of all things. I love it and carry it with me all the time.
The software is fine, not great but it works. The writing experience is excellent though, it’s as close to the UX of actually writing in a notebook as I can imagine and I definitely am happy with the purchase.