In search of a few good men tablets

For the past few years I have been on the lookout for a good tablet to use for active reading and writing. Specifically with a focus on reading for comprehension and writing with intent. Reading for comprehension, to me, involves actively engaging with the text while reading. This includes taking notes, jotting down thoughts, and actively making connections. So clearly the writing aspect is an important consideration here.

I am also way past the “oh its fun to dabble and fuck around with these tools” phase of my life and I really just want the shit that I work with to disappear and get out of my way. My time, energy, and attention are unfortunately in short supply and I have to be more judicious than I would like about where I spend them.

So with that primary use case in mind, these are some of the assessment dimensions and requirements that I was looking for to measure how well the current market of devices would fit my needs.

1. It should be awesome to use for reading. e-Ink screens are awesome for reading, especially in daylight, so this should probably have an e-Ink screen.
2. It should be awesome to write on.
3. We are living in the future. It’s 2025 so if I’m writing something down I want my chicken scratch to be OCR’d into machine text.
4. It has to be small enough that I can throw it in my pocket or at least easily carry it to and fro like a notebook with little thought. It doesn’t do me any good to get a tablet for reading and writing but not be able to use it since I didn’t bring it with me.
5. Islands are cool to visit, but not super great for sharing things. I have to somehow get books onto this bad boy and my notes off of it and don’t want this device to be a completely isolated island.
6. Less important, but certainly a consideration: Help save me from myself and stop me from getting distracted by being single purpose or as disconnected as possible. But still be connected enough to achieve point 5.

iPads (of varying sizes, names, and vintages) are always a strong contender. But they are by their nature generalist devices that are more geared towards casual consumption of media than anything. I could probably make it work for me, but do I want to just “make it work” for a >$1k device that I don’t strictly need in the first place? Not really. And besides, writing on glass is a trash writing experience.

I’ll be honest, I was stoked for the ReMarkable tablet a few years ago and almost pulled the trigger on it. But one of my coworkers at the time gave me the down-low and it had more rough edges and drawbacks than I was willing to plunk down the money for. I came to the same conclusion about the ReMarkable2 as well.

So when I saw the ReMarkable Paper Pro Move (wow the name really rolls of the tongue now, doesn’t it?) on HackerNews I was seriously amped! At first glance it looked like it fit all my criteria and then went over and above with the partial color e-ink screen. That excitement got me doing the whole “let’s do one last pass over the other available options before I buy this” thing when I stumbled on the SuperNote Nomad.

Long story short, I bought the Nomad and I am so glad that I did. To be clear that’s not a knock on the ReMarkable, I’m sure it’s a great device. But the company ethos of SuperNote resonates with me and I have sincerely enjoyed nearly all my interactions with the Nomad.

I’ve included my main takeaways below.

The good

In person the aesthetics of the transparent design are pure “chef’s kiss”. I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.

After briefly marking up a few books and writing a few notes in the Supernote Nomad, I posit that this device successfully bridges the digital and analog divide. I can easily bring multiple technical books with me, read them without distraction, and effortlessly engage with the material, actively marking them up with my thoughts and notes.

I can’t say the same for my physical books and notepad. Or my laptop. Or my phone. Or even my Kindle, for that matter.

The feel of writing on the Nomad is sublime. The SuperNote team clearly cares about recreating the feeling of a physical pen on paper experience. There is just enough surface give and resistance that sometimes I forget I’m not writing on a paper notebook. The feel is that similar.

My biggest technical concern with eInk – screen latency while writing – is thankfully a non-issue as the screen refresh rate is imperceptibly fast. Technology FTW. The first week I had the Nomad I took it with me to a conference where I took 50 pages of hastily scrawled notes and diagrams with no issues. While the Nomad is physically larger than I thought it would be, after writing for a few minutes it’s clear that if the screen was any smaller it would sacrifice too much utility.

As a side-note, I have personally used a hefty metal pen as a daily driver for years, and I am confident this decision contributes to how I experience writing. The “Heart of Metal” pen has enough weight in it that it feels like a pen instead of a stylus and adds to recreating that pen on paper experience for me.

I also recently discovered that since the Nomad has a local web server that streams the screen to browser, I can use the Nomad as a live sketch pad during Zoom work meetings. Now I get to share my quickly and poorly drawn flow and sequence diagrams in realtime, which has actually proven to be quite helpful. A picture being worth a thousand words and all that really being true when you’re trying to align mental models for yet another migration.

The bad less good

Now, if you’re still following along while it may not seem like it I really am trying to be objective here. Arguably nothing in life is perfect, and that is certainly true for the Nomad as well. There are a few tradeoffs and drawbacks that are worth mentioning.

First off, apparently I do a lot of reading in low light conditions. And in order to optimize for the writing experience, the SuperNote team has made the (arguably correct, given how goddamn enjoyable the writing experience truly is) choice to abstain from adding a backlight to the screen. This bums me out a bit when I have to move to a well-lit room to read. Which is an absurd thing to say, so then I get over it and move on with my day.

Second, ePub books are where the Nomad and the Chauvet OS really shine. PDFs are a distant second with regards to functionality, and I cannot comment on the experience with Word docs since I don’t use them and actively run from anyone who does.

Which leaves an interesting elephant in the room in the form of Kindle books. While you can read Kindle books on the Nomad with the included Kindle Android app, that app is entirely siloed from the rest of the Nomad’s Chauvet OS and annotation functionality. Handwriting recognition doesn’t work in the app, and any annotations are stuck in the Kindle app and inaccessible from the rest of the device. I heavily doubt that Amazon, a multi-trillion dollar company with a directly competing product, is incentivized in the least to help the SuperNote team improve their user’s experience if they are even aware of it. That’s not the SuperNote team’s fault, it just is what it is. Capitalism at work, baby!

Honestly I was surprised and low-key pleased that I even could access my Kindle books on the Nomad! So as far as I’m concerned, the fact there there is a Kindle experience at all is worth another ten points for Gryffindor SuperNote and that it’s suboptimal is worth minus ten points for Slytherin Amazon.

Now, with the exception of any casual fiction (which in my opinion does not warrant actively engaging with the text) I am now regretting most of my previous book purchases through Amazon. So I’ve been sent on an odyssey to find and re-purchase much of my library wherever I can find those books available in ePub format. It’s my own fault for optimizing for purchasing convenience, and now I am quite literally paying for that convenience. It’s worth calling out that Humble Bundle has been an excellent, if by its nature inconsistent, source for technical ePub books.

Unfortunately, in some cases those books just aren’t available in ePub at all and are only sold on Amazon. Walled garden Capitalism strikes again!

Disclaimers

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking that this is an advertisement and that I have either been comped a free Nomad by SuperNote or am making money on the side through affiliate links or some jazz.

Well, you’re wrong there.

I promise that I have not received anything from anyone in return for writing this, and none of these links have trackers. I simply want to share my gratitude for excellent craftsmanship when I come across it. I will, however, freely admit that based on my experience thus far I want the Nomad and the SuperNote team to succeed and sincerely hope that they do.

If you are reading this and feel compelled to send someone a gift, by all means, send the reader, writer, or student in your life a Nomad (or it’s big brother the Manta!) and spread the joy around.