ReMarkable Paper Pure review: A more affordable tablet, but will it solve the brand's problems?

How do you dig yourself out of a hole? Well, in ReMarkable's case, it looks like it's hoping the answer is "by improving affordability".

After years during which its writing tablets have been distinctly high-end propositions – but ones fans love, including us – it's now entering a slightly lower-priced part of the market with the ReMarkable Paper Pure.

That word "slightly" is key, though. This isn't a mass-market device by a long shot, and it doesn't add any features that completely change the ReMarkable offering. Rather, it's more price-approachable by some degree.

It'll be interesting to see whether that prospect changes ReMarkable's fortunes (given it has laid off hundreds of employees, including its CEO, in recent weeks). I've been using the Paper Pure to see whether it's the ReMarkable that's been missing.

Price and availability

The ReMarkable Paper Pure is available to pre-order today, direct from the maker, and it'll start to trickle through to other storefronts pretty imminently, too, ahead of shipping in June.

It's priced at £359 / $399 and comes with a ReMarkable Marker as standard (since a stylus is totally essential to the experience).

The extant ReMarkable Paper Pro sits at £599, while the older Paper 2 is £389 – and almost certainly superseded by the Paper Pure as a result.

You can also opt to upgrade and pay £399 for a bundle that includes an undeniably lovely folio slipcase (which I've tested but won't include in this review, since it's not a default inclusion) and a slightly fancier Marker Plus that also works to erase content when flipped around.

Design and Features

Take a turn around the ReMarkable Paper Pure, and it's hard not to admire the R&D work that's gone into it. It's a super-slim slab that rests on a surface atop four subtle rubberised feet that keep it rock-solid under your hands.

The tablet itself is finished on the back and sides in a nicely textured greyish plastic, but if that sounds unsatisfying, I'll defend it – this is a well-made piece of hardware, without too much flex, and a premium feeling to its materials.

Along the 6mm-thin edge of the tablet, you'll find only a couple of interruptions. One is a power and wake button, while the other is a USB-C port for charging. That lack of other buttons (since none are needed) makes it feel like the distraction-free device that ReMarkable is claiming.

The front of the tablet, meanwhile, is where the real action happens. It has a uniform white bezel on three sides, while one of the long edges sees this deepen so that you can grip it there without touching the screen. I'm a little torn on this, despite it being a feature of most ReMarkable tablets – would a universal bezel be that much worse for usability, despite its more satisfying looks?

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Still, the overall look is a really satisfying one, and it's clearly an elegant addition to your workflow, weighing in at just 360g to ensure that it's no burden when in a backpack. The display itself is 10.3-inches on the diagonal, and the tablet is just under 23cm tall in portrait mode.

ReMarkable says that the Paper Pure has its "third-generation Canvas display", and the key thing here is that it's both black-and-white and not backlit. Those cuts are what mainly differentiate it from the more expensive Paper Pro, but they're not quite the end of that list.

The Paper Pure also has 32GB of internal storage, rather than 64GB, a 1.7 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor rather than a higher-spec version, older LPDDR3 RAM instead of LPDDR4, and a smaller 3,820 mAh battery (down from just over 5,000mAh).

Crucially, though, it's compatible with all the same file types and systems, so there's no difference in how you'll actually use the Paper Pure – it just might be a tad slower in some moments, and will require ambient light to be legible.

The included stylus attaches via a decently strong magnet along one long side of the tablet to charge wirelessly, and the folio case allows space for this, making it easier to keep track of your all-important writing implement.

ReMarkable is expanding some of the second-screen and cloud upload tools that its tablets can use, and debuting some of these with the Paper Pure, but it's worth knowing, as always, that plenty of these tools are paywalled behind its monthly subscription.

For £2.99 per month or £29 per year ($3.99/month or $39/year in the US) you get access to integrations with Slack and Miro, file conversion built into the share system, the ability to search handwritten files, and unlimited cloud storage rather than a cap on files older than 50 days. It's a canny offer that is likely to be required if your aims are professional, and that makes this tablet less affordable in the long run.

On the topic of its subscription, though, it's impossible to ignore the fact that ReMarkable just announced hundreds of layoffs and a change of CEO – if long-term guarantees of service are your thing, that might leave you feeling a little leery.

Performance

The whole point of a ReMarkable tablet, arguably, is to have the sort of subscription anxiety and specs-listing from the prior section fade away as you use it to spark ideas and free thinking. From that point of view, it's hard to see the Paper Pure as anything other than another solid piece of hardware from a brand that's increasingly experienced in this area.

The biggest variables here are how intuitive the Paper Pure is to use, and how it feels to write and jot on it. In both cases, I've been impressed. ReMarkable's interface is simple and clean, to start with, with a homescreen that make it really easy to start a new note or get back into one.

New integrations mean that you can go deeper into having notes associated with calendar events, which is a great idea, but it's also true that many of those integrations are fairly obviously aimed at enterprise-level use. Whether ReMarkable succeeds in seeding the Paper Pure to creative businesses could have a big say on the company's future, it would seem.

For personal use, though, I've found it smooth sailing, with the various ways to share documents ultimately coming up trumps. My partner found it a great place to design a linocut, for example, and being able to send a JPEG of the file to print off for cutting said lino was a really straightforward job.

The actual writing experience, meanwhile, remains best in class. I've used the Kindle Scribe plenty, and while it has a decent enough pencil-feeling, it's not in the same bracket as ReMarkable. The Paper Pure authentically just feels like paper when you're writing on it, in an intangible but actually very tangible way.

This is clearly the result of a lot of work and design choices over the years, right down to the fact that its pens' tips actually do degrade over time, since there's that much friction with the screen. Thankfully, you get plenty of replacements in the box. The handwriting feel that you get with the Paper Pure is every bit as satisfying as you could want, in short.

While doing that writing or drawing, you also have plenty of tools to use for custom controls, too. That might mean thinner lines or thicker, highlighters or marker-style lines, but all of them have been easy to find and use in my experience. Obviously, the lack of colour does mean that its use for illustration has a ceiling, but for sketching it's fairly reliable (caveat: I'm no artist).

It's easy to imagine the Paper Pure on an architect's desk waiting to be taken to a meeting, and ready for sketches screen-shared to a meeting room for notes, and in that context, it's a winning device. That said, with a fairly narrow set of uses, the Paper Pure is therefore by necessity a really niche option.

I asked ReMarkable recently whether e-reader capabilities were on the cards, as an example of how it could broaden the appeal, and it was clear the idea isn't a new one to it – but while that sort of addition remains remote, the Paper Pure's utility outside of a meeting room or personal workflow will similarly stay somewhat variable.

Verdict

The Paper Pure accomplishes one big thing for ReMarkable – it brings a lower price point for people looking to get a premium paper-like writing tablet. That's obviously also a fairly narrow purview, but I can't fault the hardware I've tested much, and I enjoyed my time trying to take more handwritten notes.

Whether you need a separate device for meetings and notes, of course, will be a totally personal question, and if you're in the market for one then I suspect the Paper Pure is a super strong option for you. I didn't miss the colour screen or extra battery of the Paper Pro, as all the utility you could want is present and correct on the Paper Pure.

It feels superb to write on and has an elegance of design that will likely see it become a favourite among ReMarkable die-hards. That said, a still-steep price means I can't see it becoming the breakout hit that the brand likely craves.

Also consider

The Paper Pro is the obvious step-up model if you want more features and a colour screen to make your notes and designs pop out more. It's also a good chunk more expensive, so your mileage may vary on that front.

The obvious competitor (and massively the bigger seller, according to third-party estimates) is the Amazon Kindle Scribe, and we'll be testing the newest model imminently. Even the 2024 version was very solid, though, and what it lacks in simplicity of purpose compared to a ReMarkable it makes up for by variety, with Kindle e-reading being the huge, obvious advantage. Plus, of course, it's cheaper.