reMarkable Paper Pure review: Great hardware held back by bad philosophy

There's a lot riding on reMarkable's Paper Pure, a device that has to be a lot of things to a lot of people. It's got to be a worthy replacement to 2020's reMarkable 2, the e-paper slate that made the company a household name. It needs to be a truly mass market device, or at least as mass market as a device like this can be. And it needs to woo big businesses looking for a tool it can get into the hands of hundreds or thousands of employees.

I wrote the above a full week before news broke reMarkable was slashing its workforce and firing CEO Phil Hess. According to Norway's E24, reMarkable has faced dwindling demand and rising costs thanks to the current global milieu. The Paper Pure doesn't have a lot, but in fact everything riding on its back as it makes its global debut today. Let's just hope the company's overtures toward big business don't conflict with the needs of ordinary users.

reMarkable has spent the last few years building out its high end line with the Paper Pro and Move. It's never said anything, but I get the sense both were far pricier than the company planned thanks to everything else going on right now. The flagship Paper Pro, after all, costs more than the higher-end MacBook Neo. The reMarkable Paper Pure sees the company taking what it learned from the high end and bringing it down to the rest of us.

The Paper Pure is a monochrome e-paper writing slate with a 10.3-inch display, built and priced to tempt newbies. But, the company has also got one and a half eyes on cornering the enterprise market. It measures 7.4 x 8.9 x 0.2 inches and weighs 0.79 pounds, with the left side bezel thick enough that the slate will rest comfortably in your hand. And while it's ostensibly the cheaper device, it carries the same visual design language as found on the Paper Pro line.

Inside is a 1.7GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A55, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage and a 3,820mAh battery. reMarkable says the device will last for three weeks on a charge, based on using the slate for an hour a day, every day. The 10.3-inch "Canvas" display is a customized version of E Ink's Carta 1300, which is whiter and has better contrast than the reMarkable 2.

A surprising carry over is the new Marker, which was a passive stylus on the first two reMarkable slates. They were redesigned for the Paper Pro and Move as active units, talking to their respective tablets to reduce writing latency. And, like the Pro models, the Marker wirelessly charges when magnetically connected to the right side of the slate. The textured top layer is here too, ensuring a consistent, paper-like writing expe