reMarkable Paper Pro Review, Judged as a Reader

The Paper Pro reads two formats. EPUB books get font and size settings, PDFs open as fixed pages, and both open inside the same note app, so you can write in the margins of either. reMarkable's ebook page rules out anything with DRM, and that is most of what a typical reader owns: Kindle purchases, most Kobo store books and library loans. There is no bookstore and no way to install one.

That leaves DRM-free EPUBs, academic PDFs, public-domain books and your own documents. Getting them on means a browser upload over USB, the desktop or mobile app, or the cloud. Pocket-lint's reviewer called it one extra step compared with a Kindle, and found the reading itself perfectly usable. Notebookcheck was less patient with the reader software: a few fonts, six font sizes, three line spacings, and parts that felt slow.

Format rules are spreading in the other direction too. Some stores have moved to Readium LCP, a protection scheme the Paper Pro does not support either.

For a reader with a Kindle library, the honest pairing is a Kindle for books and this for papers.

The 11.8-inch Canvas Color panel, reMarkable's version of E Ink's Gallery 3, runs at 2160 x 1620 and 229 ppi, and the resolution holds when color is on screen. Notebookcheck describes the colors as newspaper-like, with blue close to black unless the light is turned up. Engadget's reviewer found that a color stroke first appears in gray and only fills in after the screen refreshes, and that pale colors such as yellow look faint with a thin nib.

None of that hurts the job it does best. Highlighting a PDF in yellow, circling a figure in red, or keeping a diagram in three colors works well on a page this size, close to A4. Comics have "a satisfying pop", in Pocket-lint's words, but a 7-inch color Kindle or Kobo shows a page of a novel more sharply at a higher pixel density.

This is reMarkable's first tablet with a front light, and it is a quiet one. Notebookcheck measured a maximum of about 4 nits with a spectrophotometer, very low against other E Ink readers, and found that it is still enough to read in a dark room. The light has one color temperature, a neutral white, with no warm setting for late-night reading. Engadget called it gentle even at full strength.

Notebookcheck found no PWM flicker, so the light does not pulse. As a bedside reader, though, it trails every recent Kindle and Kobo, which reach far higher brightness and offer a warm tone.

At 525 g and 5.1 mm, the Paper Pro is thin but not light. Pocket-lint found it heavier and more unwieldy than a Kindle Scribe for reading in bed. A folio adds more weight, so it is a tablet you rest on a desk or your knees, not one you hold up in one hand.

reMarkable rates the 5,030 mAh battery at up to two weeks, and says USB-C charging fills most of it in an hour and a half. Notebookcheck's reading test lasted about 20 hours, with Wi-Fi on, the light at minimum and regular page turns. So two weeks means roughly an hour and a half a day. A full charge took just over two hours in the same test. Engadget's tablet was barely half drained after a week of daily writing.

There are no speakers and no Bluetooth, so audiobooks and text-to-speech are out.

Writing, reading, handwriting conversion, screen sharing, the desktop and phone apps for viewing notes, and Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive access all work without a subscription, according to reMarkable's plans page. Every new tablet gets a 50-day Connect trial.

The catch is in the sync. Without Connect, cloud sync is limited, and a file left unedited for that long stops syncing to the apps, though it stays on the tablet. Connect adds unlimited sync, handwriting search, editing notes in the apps, meeting notes from your calendar and the AI tools. reMarkable raised the Connect price in March 2026, the first rise since 2022.

On updates, Notebookcheck reports a promise of five years of software support after reMarkable stops selling the model in its own store, which is longer than most Android E Ink makers state. Our report on the 3.28 capture tool shows what a recent update added.