reMarkable Paper Pro (11.8-inch Color Canvas Display)

The reMarkable Paper Pro is the company's big-screen, colour flagship, launched in late 2024 and built around a single idea: make a digital device that feels like paper and refuses to do anything else. At 11.8 inches it's genuinely full-page, with an adjustable reading light that the earlier monochrome slates lacked, and a textured E Ink Gallery 3 panel that keeps the ink less than a millimetre from the pen tip. That last detail sounds like marketing trivia, but it's the whole pitch — it's what stops writing from feeling like drawing on glass.

Who is it for? Fairly narrowly: people who write, annotate and think on paper all day and want that habit digitised without email notifications arriving mid-thought. It reads PDFs and EPUBs shuttled over via reMarkable's app or web service, and that's essentially the extent of its ambitions — there's no third-party app store, no browser habit to fall into. If you were hoping for a cheaper iPad, look elsewhere. If you've ever finished a paper notebook and wished you could search it, this is aimed squarely at you.

It's worth going in clear-eyed about the money. The $629 entry price includes a Marker, but the eraser-equipped Marker Plus is a $50 upgrade, and reMarkable's own bundles climb steeply from there — £599 for a Marker Plus bundle, £729 for the leather Book Folio, £769 with the Type Folio keyboard cover. The box itself contains the tablet and a USB-C cable. That's it.

Judged on what it sets out to do, the Paper Pro is very good. The writing experience is the part reviewers consistently single out for praise, and the specs support why: 229 PPI in both monochrome and colour, a deliberately rough surface for friction, and that sub-millimetre pen-to-ink gap. Around two weeks of battery on mixed use means it behaves like a notebook rather than a gadget you tether to a charger, and 64 GB is far more than a lifetime of handwriting will ever need. A TIME best-inventions nod for 2025 is a fair reflection of the engineering here.

The compromises are real, though, and they're the same ones every reviewer lands on. Colour on Gallery 3 is muted — useful for highlighting, mind-mapping and colour-coding, not for anything you'd call vibrant — so if colour is the reason you're upgrading, temper expectations. The closed OS is a genuine double-edged sword: the focus it enforces is the product's best feature and its hardest limitation, and the restricted file-type support means the reMarkable app becomes an unavoidable middleman. Accessory pricing, frankly, feels opportunistic once you've already spent $629.

Our score sits just below Gear Diary's 4.5. The hardware deserves that kind of praise, but we weigh the total cost of ownership and the ecosystem lock-in more heavily: this is a premium-priced device that does one thing superbly and deliberately refuses to do much else. For the right buyer it's close to perfect; for everyone else it's an expensive lesson in reading the spec sheet carefully.