I’m a longtime lover of pen and paper, so E Ink tablets have been intriguing to me ever since they started becoming more widely available. After having hundreds of half-filled notebooks over the years, I, at some point, turned to digital tools instead because it was just easier to store everything on my phone or laptop so I always had my most important information at my fingertips.
E-Ink tablets seem to provide the best of both worlds: the tactile satisfaction of regular notebooks with many of the conveniences found in digital tools, plus easy-on-the-eyes E-Ink screens. These devices have come a long way in recent years — now you can find them in multiple sizes, some have color E Ink screens and others double as full-blow ereaders with access to ebook stores and your local library’s offerings. I’ve tested out close to a dozen E Ink tablets over the past year or two to see how well they work, how convenient they really are and which are the best tablets using E Ink screens available today.
Table of contents
Best E Ink tablets for 2026
reMarkable Best E Ink tablet for most people reMarkable 2 Screen size: 10.3-inch | Battery life: Two weeks | Network connectivity: Wi-Fi | Capacity: 8GB | Included stylus: No, extra cost | Supported file types: PDF, EPUB The latest reMarkable tablet isn’t topping our list because it’s the most full-featured or even most interesting writing tablet we tested. Rather, it provides the best mix of features people will find useful in an e-paper device like this. We’ll get into them all, but first, it’s worth mentioning build quality. The reMarkable 2 weighs less than one pound and is one of the sleekest E Ink tablets we tried. It has a 10.3-inch monochrome digital paper display that’s surrounded by beige-colored bezels, with the chunkiest portion at the bottom edge where you’d naturally grip it. There’s a slim silver bezel on the left side, which attaches to accessories like the folio case and the new Type Folio keyboard. Hats off to reMarkable for making an E Ink tablet that feels right at home with all of your other fancy gadgets. Let’s start with the writing and reading experiences on the reMarkable 2, both of which are great. From the get go, scribbling, doodling and writing was a breeze. I tested out the Marker Plus, which has a built-in eraser, but both it and the standard Marker are tilt- and pressure sensitive pens, and require no batteries or charging. I observed basically no lag between my pressing down onto the reMarkable 2’s screen and lines showing up. The latency was so low that it felt the closest to actual pen-and-paper. But I will say that this is not unique among our top picks in this guide – almost all of the E Ink tablets I tested got this very crucial feature right. When it comes to reading, the reMarkable 2 supports PDFs and ePUBs, and you can add files to the device by logging into your reMarkable account on desktop or via the companion mobile app on your phone. You can also pair your Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox account with your reMarkable account and access files that way as well. That should be good enough for anyone who, say, reads a lot of academic papers or reviews many documents for work. It’ll be harder for people who purchase their ebooks from online marketplaces like the Kindle or Kobo stores, but there are other options for those. Another fun way to get documents onto the reMarkable 2 is via the Read with reMarkable extension for Google Chrome. After installing it and pairing your reMarkable account, you’ll be able to send articles you find online directly to your reMarkable 2 so you can check them out later. You can even customize these files to be sent as text only, which will let you change their format directly on your reMarkable, or as a PDF file. Regardless of which you choose, you’ll be able to mark up these articles as you would any other file on the E Ink tablet. I used this extension a lot and I enjoyed reading longform articles on the reMarkable 2 more than on my iPhone. Being able to underline, highlight and otherwise mark up those stories was more of a bonus than a necessity for me, but for others who glean sources from online materials will be better off for it. Overall, it’s pretty easy to get files onto the reMarkable 2 and it is possible to access them elsewhere when you may not be able to whip out the E Ink tablet. Those with a reMarkable Connect subscription will have the best experience, and it’s a nice perk that you get a one-year membership when you buy one. The $3-per-month (or $30-per-year) subscription provides the ability to edit existing notes and take new ones from anywhere using the desktop and mobile apps, plus unlimited cloud storage and syncing. That said, I kept most of my testing local on the reMarkable 2 itself and was impressed by its ability to be a digital notebook without a steep learning curve. You can create different notebooks and “quick sheets” to organize your handwritten notes, and folders to make sense of imported files. You’ll find eight different brush types with which to mark up documents and take notes, along with customizable line thicknesses and “colors” (which just show up as shades on the tablet itself). You can even type wherever you want in a doc, and the reMarkable 2 can translate handwritten notes into machine-readable text with surprising accuracy. It was no shock that the reMarkable 2 ended up having the best mix of features, along with a relatively low learning curve. The company was one of the first on the scene with a truly viable E Ink tablet back in 2017, and they’ve been refining the experience ever since. But that comes at a cost – the reMarkable 2 isn’t the most expensive E Ink tablet we tested, but it’s not cheap either. The tablet will set you back $399 with the standard Marker, or $449 for a bundle with the Marker Plus. You could get a 10th-gen iPad and the USB-C Apple Pencil for around the same price and you’d have a more flexible duo, purely based on the capabilities of iOS. But you’re probably not considering an iPad for a specific reason, whether that’s your love for E Ink or the feeling of pen-to-paper writing, or you simply want a more distraction-free experience. If you’re looking for an E Ink tablet that will not take ages to get used to, offers a stellar writing experience and makes it relatively simple to access notes elsewhere, the reMarkable 2 is your best bet. Pros Great reading and writing experience
Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox support
Easy to use Cons Marker costs extra
Expensive
Unlimited cloud storage comes with a subscription cost $399 at reMarkable
... continue reading