I started writing on the reMarkable a few years ago. At the time I had serious doubt that writing by hand would be more efficient than typing. The idea that I could be as productive and efficient going" backwards" and "old school" when speech-to-text is already replacing the act of typing seemed counter to rational thinking.
My first home computer was my roommates Macintosh 512. I did data entry and used a large scale computer at my job at Cement Electronics but had nothing at home. when I read, it was a physical book. When I wrote, it was with a pen and a pad of graph paper, often in corresponder managed through the postal service, in an era where 3 day delays removed the expectation of any immediate responses, "read" receipts or automated follow up reminders. I would spend an hour or two each week with a cup of coffee or a freshly brewed sun-tea and a pad of paper alongside a simple Bic pen, and write.
it turns out that this old school approach makes for far more focused thoughts and ideas. I recently tried another device or two, a bluetooth keyboard on my iPhone, a chromebook, but each has their own inherent flaws and compromises.
I went back, mentally, to the patio in the backyard this morning, while deciding to return the latest contender for a solution back to the manufacturer. I recalled those days of graph paper, pen, handwritten thoughts in a distraction free space. And all of this is what made the reMarkable such a good fit.
The nitpicks and nuances, the constraints and complications, they are minor manageable compromises I can and for the most part have worked around.
A Beta SW release over a year ago broke the retention of paragraphs when converting pages to text. It scatters it all into a chaotic mess. The device does not support downgrading to a prior version. That made things challenging, until today, when I took advantage of a local seller with an un-updated model for sale. I now have two. I can resume productive writing with one while using the other to test future GM updates for that paragraph fix.
As a side note of even more geeky details, the new-used-unupdated device had issues syncing and connecting to their cloud. It took a few hours of triage and attempts to research and work around the issue. The battery had drained from non-use to the point at which the internal date/time data was out of sync and prevented connections to their servers. Attaching it by USB to a computer was supposed to resolve the dilemma, but was not. After about an hour's time with no success I realized that the cable I was using might not have been the "right "cable. Cables can be for power and data but not always for both. At that thought, I swapped it out for a know "OEM" cable. Boom. It immediately resolved the problem.