THE REMARKABLE PAPER PRO TABLET
A distraction-free tablet that transcribes your handwriting into legible type
On his first day of work, in 1977, your columnist began what would become a lifetime habit of using a letter-size legal pad for everything from to-do lists to phone-interview notes to notes to self. These notepads were never thrown away and would accumulate at a rate of about two per month. Every now and then, there would be a frantic scrabbling through the pile for a particular note or phone number.
The system was efficient, but it became unwieldy as the notepad-mountain grew. By the end of the last decade, there were the better part of a thousand of these jotters hunkering down in a storage unit. Locating a vital note from 10—or was it 20?—years ago became a morning’s work. The invention of the iPad briefly seemed to offer hope of a neater technological solution, but even when the iPad Pencil was launched in 2015, it just wasn’t suitable. Writing on a glassy iPad screen was too awkward.
Early in 2017, however, a Norwegian start-up announced on a crowd-funding platform what seemed to be the perfect product—an e-ink notepad with a paper-like feel and almost infinite capacity, which would ultimately even sync with your computer and phone so you could access and add to your notepad from anywhere. Additionally, the notes would be searchable. The product seemed almost too good to be true, and I pre-ordered it within seconds. When the first version of the reMarkable arrived from Oslo at the end of 2017, it was no disappointment. In fact, it was close to life-changing.
Writing on it provided the right level of scratchy friction, just like a pencil on paper, as advertised. The reMarkable software was a little cranky for the first couple of years, but now, thanks to the near-perfect eco-system made possible by occasional software updates, I can instantly access every reMarkable note I have ever written on all my devices, from a 2017 to-do list written in a coffee shop in Brooklyn to notes for a putative novel scribbled on a flight, to desk notes made just five minutes ago.
Maybe it’s a Scandinavian-design thing, but the guys in Norway pre-empted every flaw that might occur to the growing army of reMarkable users. Erasing something you’d written was clumsy in the first iteration, so in 2020, when they released the second, thinner, faster reMarkable 2, there was an option for a pen with an eraser built in, just like a pencil eraser. They also introduced a keyboard to turn your reMarkable into a super-thin offline (hence distraction-free) laptop, for writing and drawing only. The ever improving handwriting-to-type feature is impeccable, despite this writer’s execrable scrawl.
The last version left me with only a couple of thoughts on how to improve it. The whole thing could have been bigger, for instance. The six-by-eight-inch reMarkable screen fell well short of the 8.5-by-11-inch legal pad. And a backlight would have been superb for writing notes on a night flight or in a similarly dark environment.
No surprise, then, that the new reMarkable Paper Pro, just released and in heavy demand across the world, fulfills my wish list in two respects, being both bigger at 10.8 by 7.8 inches and with an excellent backlight that doesn’t seem to impact the two-week-per-charge battery life all that much. It’s also fractionally thinner, which is appreciated, if not essential.
But in the tradition of Steve Jobs, who maintained that the genius of consumer electronics was to give people not what they want but what they didn’t know they want, the new reMarkable has one quite extraordinary and unexpected new feature: you can write in nine different colors. The colors aren’t vivid—in fact, they’re quite milky. But they’re colors nonetheless, and that’s both technically accomplished and potentially really useful. Even though it’s not something many reMarkable fans were dreaming of, it turns out to be like discovering a new dimension.
Because the Paper Pro only just arrived, I have yet to work out how I’ll color-code my notes going forward, but color-coded they assuredly will be. In PDF-reader mode, by the way, the Paper Pro display is in full color. And if you’re left-handed and worried you’ll be left out of the fun, there is, fortunately, a left-hander mode.
THE SMEG COUNTERTOP COMBI steam OVEN
Cooking in a small apartment is a cinch with this 10-in-1 steam oven
Italy’s redoubtable kitchen-appliance maker, Smeg, has an exceptional new oven range in Europe, the Galileo Omnichef. Omnichef cooks using a combination of traditional, microwave, and steam cooking, and it can produce restaurant-quality roasts in 30 percent of the time required by a traditional oven. AIR MAIL has witnessed an Omnichef roast a medium-size Thanksgiving turkey in well under an hour. And delicious it was, too.
Amazing as Omnichef is, we check with Smeg every few months for news of a U.S. release, and the answer is always “Soon.” We hope to carry a full review accordingly, “soon.”
In the meantime, for North Americans in need of Smeg inventiveness—especially North Americans living in smaller city apartments—there’s the new COF01 countertop combi steam oven, which is still a prodigious multi-mode machine, using most elements of the Galileo technology. The COF01 also has mouthwateringly stylish looks that the quite boring-looking Omnichef range can’t boast.
The COF01, which has been widely released in the U.S. this week after an exclusive launch with Crate & Barrel, will handle 10 different cooking modes, from regular oven cooking and steaming to pizza-making and air-frying. Mixed modes, such as grill plus steam, mean you can cook something like pork chops without drying them out.
The COF01 looks compact, but it has a 30-liter capacity, which means you’ll be able to fit a good-size chicken with a tray of roast potatoes and some vegetables too.
THE TESLONG ENDOSCOPE
It’s difficult to say exactly how this will be useful, but we promise it will be
It should no longer be a matter of amazement that the China we once called Red China, which produced nothing technological beyond some tinny but inadvertently stylish Seagull cameras and Red Lantern radios, now makes fascinating, advanced products in outrageously large quantities for laughably low prices.
Your columnist recently found on the crazy online marketplace Temu a product he needed (a bright, battery-powered task light to use in a storage unit with no electrical outlets, in case you must know). The excellent light cost a few dollars, including shipping in three days from China. The kicker was that the light needed a $70 battery from a slightly more reliable source.
But at some point in the arcane ordering process, the light became cheaper if you also bought another product. I chose an iPhone endoscope attachment—a miniature video camera with five built-in lights on a several-foot-long flexible tube. The official price was $8, but bundling it with the light meant I was effectively getting paid $2 for receiving it.
There was no obvious need, beyond curiosity, to have an endoscope. I had no plans for a self-administered gastroscopy. But there was always the possibility of needing it one day to, say, locate some lost object caught behind drywall.
Anyway, the unbranded endoscope arrived, and it works perfectly (with an excellent app). Although it falls in the category of a solution in search of a problem, a use has already arrived in the form of a rampaging mouse under the floor of the 200-year-old house Landing Gear calls home. The endoscope will be deployed to get video to help the pest-control people.
It’s hard to say if Temu’s no-price instrument is the very apex of iPhone endoscopes, so I’m recommending a branded and relatively costly Teslong from among dozens of others carried by Amazon. It probably doesn’t matter which you go for, as according to ChatGPT they all come from the “endoscope capital” of China, Tonglu, in Zhejiang Province.
If only for the tech curious, I accordingly commend a smartphone endoscope. Just be careful to specify whether you need one with an Apple Lightning connector or the more modern USB-C.
THE SEGWAY ZT3 PRO ekickSCOOTER
The key to making scooters more tolerable? Taking them off the streets
It’s possible to have varying views on adults who travel around cities on what appear to be kiddie scooters. It’s not so much the aesthetic that can irritate as the zooming around on the sidewalk. On second thought, perhaps it’s the aesthetic, too.
Whatever, this new release from Segway—the unfortunate U.S. personal-transportation pioneer that didn’t quite make it as an American start-up but has found new life and success in Beijing—is an all-terrain scooter for the great outdoors, and that’s arguably a better place for this mode of getting around.
The Segway ZT3 Pro scooter looks impressive, in this column’s opinion. And so long as they don’t end up littering the wilderness in the same way that shareable e-scooters are scattered across city sidewalks, they could be a lot of fun for users and not too obtrusive for hikers. It also makes a highly viable city scooter.
The ZT3 Pro has an unheard-of six inches of ground clearance and runs on 11-inch tubeless tires. It has a 43-mile range on a charge and can scoot at a terrifying 24 m.p.h. The scooter is packed with tech, from smoothing suspension to traction control, Bluetooth locking, and Apple Find My compatibility for when you lose it. The price of the ZT3 won’t be announced until the week after next, but it’s likely to be just into four figures.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
