e-paper devices

 I don't know about you, but every time I look at Facebook I get adverts for the remarkable-2 an e-paper tablet that lets you take notes, save them as pdf's to a range of cloud services, and even does handwriting recognition on them. (Given I have the handwriting of a drunken ape, I have my doubts about the latter.)

I've never played with one of them, but I did see a colleague's yesterday and it looks like a pretty good device. Does what it says and does it well. 

It's also horrendously expensive.

If I was still going to meetings and able to claim tax offsets for work related items I might crack and jump for it, but I'm retired, don't go to meetings that much, so I can't really justify the cost at around $500.

There are other devices out there that do similar things, but they are all pretty pricy. I'm sure they're good but I can't afford them.

On the other hand at the bottom end of the market, there are a whole range of electronic memo pads that don't talk to anything useful, like the XiaoMi Mija electronic writing pad. Basically it's a slate.

It doesn't talk to anything, and you can't really store content on it. If you need to get content off it you'll need to take a picture, just as you do with a white board.

It's fairly difficult to see a use case for it, and $50 will buy you around 20 A4 recycled paper notepads from one of the big box stores, which is equivalent to something between 1500 and 2000 pages of notes.

However, the one use case I can see is for work in progress notes. 

When I dug out my old palm pilot and put it back into use, one of the use cases was for work in progress notes - these scribbled post its and marginal notes that everyone makes.

And for that I can see a use for a basic electronic scribble pad, because, even though some basic connectivity would be nice, the notes are only there to remind you to do something - they have only transient value.

My real complication is being able to write on something while wearing examination gloves - the palm pilot's hunt and peck keyboard does work well, but it's slow, and you can't do diagrams or special symbols.

So I guess I'm looking like for a poor mans remarkable ...