This new tablet brings the effortless feeling of writing on paper to the digital world

According to Magnus Wanberg, there are two types of people in the world: Those who do everything digitally, and "paper people" — those who prefer reading actual books or writing in notebooks. 

It's the latter group that inspired Wanberg and his team to create the reMarkable tablet, a device that looks, feels, and acts like paper. 

"We just had this idea that we fell in love with: A device that could take the paper experience but add digital power on top, because paper is so limited," Wanberg, the founder and CEO of reMarkable, told Business Insider. 

So Wanberg started asking around, trying to see if anyone else felt the same way he did. 

"We found a resounding ‘yes.’ This was an unsolved problem," he said.

Wanberg and his team in Oslo, Norway, set out to build the tablet, eliciting the help of Japanese company E Ink, the leading creators of electronic ink for ebooks.

Four years later, reMarkable is debuting its tablet for paper people, a device designed to do three things: Read, write, and sketch. The device costs $529, with the accompanying pen retailing for $79.

Take a look. 

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In the past, tablets like the reMarkable have struggled with one problem: lag. While others have tried to create a tablet for drawing and writing, the display has typically been too slow — your drawing will end up chasing your pen rather than appearing as soon as your pen touches the screen. But reMarkable figured out a way to solve that problem.

When the reMarkable team first got in touch with E Ink, the company said what they wanted to do wasn't possible. But Wanberg didn't listen. 

"We were young and dumb and thought, ‘Alright, let’s have a crack at this. We’re engineers, we can maybe solve this,’" Wanberg said. "At the same time, we assumed also quite arrogantly that we would solve this. So we started on some product development in parallel tracks from early 2014."

By 2015, the team came up with a solution for the lag problem and took it back to Taiwan to show E Ink. 

"Their jaw just hit the floor," Wanberg said. 

And because they'd already been working on product development on the hardware side, the reMarkable team was able to fast-track production of their tablet. 

What resulted from their efforts is a thin, lightweight tablet and accompanying pen that writes and draws instantly. I had the chance to try reMarkable's 7th generation prototype, and was immediately impressed by how quick it was and how effortlessly the pen glided across the screen. It felt a lot like, well, paper.

reMarkable offers a variety of brushes — like a felt tip pen or a pencil — that you can change on the screen. There are also tools like an eraser, a clone tool, and the ability to create layers, all with the intention that the tablet should be able to replace a sketch pad.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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