The ReMarkable Paper Pro Move gives you e-ink in a pocketable package – but it's not without fault

E-ink tablets are finally having their moment, with several businesses now competing to produce the best devices for focused work. Tech history is full of first-movers who later lost their crown, but reMarkable is not one of them.

Having snatched the e-ink tablet hype from Amazon with the launch of the reMarkable 1 in 2017, the firm has since embedded itself as the leading brand for productivity-focused tablets that minimize distractions and provide a lifelike paper experience.

First marketed at enthusiasts, e-ink tablets are now firmly seen as business devices. But they've long been relegated to folio-sized devices that take up lots of space on a desk.

The ReMarkable Paper Pro Move aims to solve these issues as efficiently as possible. Just larger than a pro smartphone, approximately the size of a journalist's notebook at 7.3 inches, this is a seriously compact offering that promises to deliver the switched-off productivity gains of reMarkable's other products without forcing owners to make room for an entire tablet in their bag.

ReMarkable told ITPro this is a device aimed at users who want to take notes when they're on the go, small enough to hold in one hand, and capable of acting as the first reMarkable device a user may have purchased. With a near spotless record to date, how does it fit into the reMarkable lineup?

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move: Display and stylus

The most noticeable aspect of the Paper Pro Move is its diminutive size, clocking in at 19.56 x 10.78 cm. It's hard to deny that this is a far more portable e-ink tablet than any other we've tested – when taking it back and forth from the office, it took up far less space in this reviewer's backpack and can even fit in a single jacket pocket.

If that's what's been holding you back from embracing e-ink, this may well be the device for you. On the other hand, if you're the type of person who loves to fill a page with sweeping scribbles and notes, it could be a tad cramped to use, and a more traditional tablet from the likes of reMarkable or others could be more your speed.

Of course, e-ink tablets succeed or fail almost entirely on their display and pen feel, rather than just size. ReMarkable has spent a lot of time and money trying to get the look and feel of the Paper Pro Move to mimic paper as closely as possible: the company told ITPro it ran over 100,000 tests before settling on its current approach of imprinting the texture of paper on the monitor's glass sheet display.

In practice, this appears to have been a success. The reMarkable Paper Pro Move has the most realistic paper feel of any e-ink device we've used, with the nib and weight of the marker only adding to this experience.

Indeed, the marker sits nicely in the hand, feeling somewhere between a tablet stylus and a real pen, clipping securely onto the side of the device through built-in magnets when not in use. For ITPro's unit of the Paper Pro Move, we were provided with the Marker Plus, which comes with an eraser on the back that can be used to remove unwanted marks just like the real deal.

The only thing missing from the pen experience on the Paper Pro Move – much like the Supernote pen options – is customizable function buttons to undo, activate tools, etc. Given the price of the Marker Plus (£119), it would be a welcome addition and certainly add to reMarkable's 'power user' branding.

An important point to note is that the marker's nib does wear out, much like the Kindle Scribe, and unlike competitors like Supernote. As replacements come in the box, this isn't a concern in the short-to-medium term, but over time users will need to factor in purchasing replacements.

The Paper Pro isn't expandable nor repairable by individual users, though the firm says it was designed with repairability in mind in instances where users send their device back to the manufacturer.

A final flashy note on design is the Paper Pro Move comes with a number of folio covers into which it can clip with very secure magnets. Those made from recycled Mosaic weave are available in either basalt, burgundy, or cobalt, while the premium leather covers can be purchased in either black or brown.

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move: Specs and performance

ReMarkable's goal with the Paper Pro Move was to cram all the dependability of the Paper Pro into a far smaller shell. This meant a redesign of the device's innards, to fit a suitably powerful processor and battery into a 7.3 inch package without compromising its portability.

In practice, the 1.7GHz dual core Cortex-A5 and 2GB of onboard LPDDR4 RAM deliver fairly snappy performance, though there is some noticeable lag in getting e-ink onto the page across its range of standard writing tools. Colors are more taxing for the device: while the actual experience of writing or highlighting in one of the available colors was smooth, the Paper Pro Move could sometimes take a moment to render the actual color by repeatedly refreshing the display.

ReMarkable says the Paper Pro Move lasts two weeks on a single charge. In conversation with reMarkable, ITPro clarified that this applies if the device is used for roughly 1-2 hours per day in a given week.

In our week of hands-on use with the Paper Pro Move, it showed a dependable battery life, dropping to 10% charge after a rigorous week of use and charging quickly when needed, with 10 minutes plugged in providing approximately an additional two hours of charge.

It's worth noting that the front-light on the device, which illuminates the screen to one of four possible brightness levels, tends to chew through the battery. We noticed significantly faster drain when using the device at night over during the day, so power users may want to plan accordingly (for example, if looking to use the Paper Pro Move on a red-eye flight).

Unfortunately, toward the end of nearly two weeks of hands-on testing ITPro experienced a repeat issue with the review device in which it would become frozen in its sleeping state. The only fix in these circumstances appeared to be a hard restart of the device, which took a minimum of five to ten minutes each time it froze.

This is a frustrating experience for users, particularly if it coincides with an important work meeting, and a software issue that will need to be resolved in the days and weeks after launch.

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move: Features

The reMarkable Paper Pro Move comes with a large range of templates for documents, encompassing most paper patterns, planners, and creative sheets including one with perspective line and others for storyboarding and music notation.

These can all be used in either portrait or landscape, which can be helpful for beating any feeling cramped with the device. Another way reMarkable gets around this is by encouraging users to scroll down with notes rather than sideways, essentially turning each page into an endlessly long canvas.

As with the Paper Pro, this is a color e-ink tablet, and users can make use of this capability by drawing in blue, red, green, yellow, cyan, and magenta with the pens, pencils, and paintbrushes. Highlighters for annotating either handwritten notes or

Users can also add typed text to a note, available in a few sizes and formats, to which annotations can be added. Once drawn on – for example if highlighted or underlined – text retains these attributes even if it is later reformatted. In practice, this means users don't have to worry about losing annotations if they add new lines between text, a handy feature absent from competing devices.

In the near future, reMarkable will allow users to send webpages to their tablets via a Chrome extension, which uses an LLM to convert web text to a custom reMarkable file type.

Of course, you can also use optical image recognition on the device itself to convert handwritten notes into text which can be shared as a PDF, PNG, or via email as inline text – a standard offering on e-ink devices.

Additional features add to the quality of life using the Paper Pro Move, such as gestures to undo, redo, and select written text, layers to separate marks from one another, and the ability to draw precise lines and shapes by holding the marker down on the screen after drawing a rough sketch.

While reMarkable's e-ink tablets are intended to mimic paper notebooks and journals as closely as possible, they also come with a range of ways to connect with the rest of the world such as when a user wants to back up notes to the cloud or share them with colleagues.

In the case of the Paper Pro Move, users can back up their notes and annotated documents to Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. Subscribers to reMarkable's cloud storage plan Connect can also send documents directly to colleagues in Slack, including a plaintext translation of handwriting where available.

Beyond these integrations, however, there's no way to load eBook apps onto the device nor access the web. It's hard to call this a downside – it's the centerpiece of reMarkable's 'distraction free' branding – but it's still something buyers will have to weigh up.

Connect subscribers can also add more note types via RM Methods, a platform for reMarkable community members to share custom templates they've made across a variety of use cases.

A final note for the travel keen: like every other e-ink tablet this comes with no water resistance, so avoid digital nomad work from a beach and make sure the jacket it's tucked into is ready for whatever the day throws at you.

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move: Is it worth it?

Overall, this is a sturdy entry into reMarkable's lineup and one that could be enough to finally convince some businesspeople to foray into the world of e-ink.

As ever with e-ink, unlocking the best of analog and digital notetaking comes with a chunky price tag. For £399 ($449), users get the device bundled with a marker – those seeking the Marker Plus we used when reviewing this device can instead pay £439 ($499) to unlock that device bundle.

Given some of its shortcomings and its rather niche target audience, this perhaps feels more like an enthusiast device than its intended crowd-pleaser. With some software updates and the promised integrations, the reMarkable Paper Pro Move could be a real game-changer.

ReMarkable Paper Pro Move specifications