Kindle Scribe: Review
I bought myself a new toy and it is so much fun!
I’ve been thinking for the past few years about buying a Remarkable 2 tablet. It’s an e-ink electronic writing tablet and it’s gotten really good reviews. It’s been recommended by David Gaughran and other authors I know, but once you add in the better stylus and a case it’s over $600! (If you just get the tablet it’s $300.) That’s a lot of money for a writing tablet. When Amazon came out with a competitor, the Kindle Scribe, I took a look at that, but all the reviews said it was good — for a first generation try, but it was lacking a lot of the essential features of the Remarkable (the most important for me was converting handwriting to text).
Well, along came Prime Day (just this past week) and unsurprisingly the Scribe was on sale for 25% off. I re-read the reviews and many of them said it was so much better now that you could export your handwritten notes as text and they were still updating the software and adding features.
Now, that was my game changer. I decided to take a chance and bought it.
Wow, do I love this thing!
I am having so much fun writing on this tablet. It’s not a smooth glass surface like writing on an iPad (which I tried and hated) or a computer screen (I have a Yoga PC, which I bought to write on but can’t really because you have to write in a tiny little box at the bottom of the screen). The surface of the Scribe has texture, like the Remarkable, that makes it feel almost like writing on paper (it even makes a nice little scritching sound).
Unlike the Remarkable, the Scribe is backlit so you can write on it in any light (I’ve even switched it to dark mode to write in the dark).
There aren’t as many “pens” or sizes of tip as in the Remarkable, but certainly enough for me. You can write in “pen”, “fountain pen”, “marker” or “pencil” and there are five widths of each. The available “paper” you have to choose from covers everything you might need — different widths of lined “paper”, dots, plain, a monthly calendar, a daily calendar, a couple different styles of lists, and even one with musical staffs. Aside from those, you can also upload your own templates in the form of a PDF.
Speaking of uploading, you can also upload Word documents, images, and a few other formats. Sadly, it treats word docs like books so you can’t cross out text, but you can write in the margins and add “sticky notes,” which, by the way you can also do with any book you might upload or buy in the Amazon store (this is a Kindle, after all). And while you can, of course, draw on it, my daughter (the artist) hated it because the stylus isn’t pressure sensitive. (But, apparently, you can use another stylus on it. We haven’t tried this yet.)
The one thing the Remarkable can do which the Scribe cannot is connect to Dropbox or OneDrive. You need to either email your Amazon account what you want to upload or there’s an app you can download to your computer called “Send to Kindle” which does basically the same thing.
All in all, I am loving my new toy. Because I love writing by hand, this is the perfect way for me to be able to do so, and then be able to edit on my computer and even upload to my blog — yup! I wrote this on my new scribe. Here’s what it looked like before I moved it to my computer. (I’m very strange and frequently switch from printing to cursive, but it got everything I wrote.)
So, if you love to write by hand, I highly recommend the Scribe. And, of course, it’s a great e-reader too.
For those who own either a Scribe or a Remarkable 2, I’ve created a Novel Pack which you can download to your tablet. It’s filled with all of the worksheets in my worksheet packs on Etsy.
