The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024
reMarkable's Paper Pro adds color the way paper does — soft inks, no glowing backlight
The 2024 Paper Pro colors reMarkable's distraction-free tablet with a Canvas Color display — ink particles move inside the screen; nine writable colors.
reMarkable
What it had to solve
reMarkable had built its brand on a black-and-white e-paper tablet that removes distractions; for its third generation the challenge was to add color — the most-requested feature — without turning the device into another glowing screen or betraying its focus-first design.
How it works
On 4 September 2024, reMarkable unveiled Paper Pro, the third generation of its paper tablet and its first in color. The headline innovation was the custom "Canvas Color" display stack: colored ink particles inside the screen physically move to render what you write and read, instead of a color filter laid over a black-and-white panel. The result is deliberately muted — reMarkable compares it to a printed newspaper page, not a phone screen.
The design choices all served the company's focus-first ethos. Writing supports nine colors that can be blended and layered — blue pen for contracts, red ink for markups, yellow highlights — while reading shows thousands. An adjustable front light softly illuminates the display in dark rooms rather than shining through it. At 5.1 mm, reMarkable called it the thinnest device of its kind, with latency as low as 12 ms and up to two weeks of battery.
Chief design officer Mats Herding Solberg said the device recreates "the feeling of putting pen to paper," and CEO Phil Hess framed color as "just enough technology... without getting in your brain's way." Wired's launch coverage noted the same tension — the tablet industry's bright screens versus reMarkable's bet that focus, not features, is the product.
Why it lands
- It answered the most-requested feature (color) in the form that preserved the brand: soft, reflective, paper-like — not a backlit screen.
- The Canvas Color display made the color experience itself the innovation, not a spec upgrade.
- Front lighting, 12ms latency and a 5.1mm body targeted the paper-writing feel rather than chasing tablet performance.
- Launching at $579 alongside a cheaper reMarkable 2 kept the distraction-free entry point intact.
What it did
At launch it was billed as the world's thinnest paper tablet with a color display; it was an early eNote built on E Ink Gallery 3 color technology, and coverage from Wired and others framed it as color without the distraction trade-off.
What you can take
When users ask for a feature that threatens your product's identity, add it in the form that preserves the identity: color, but paper-like — the constraint is the brand.
Since then
Paper Pro stayed at the top of reMarkable's line, sold alongside reMarkable 2, and the company continued its focus-first positioning with later products such as the Paper Pure and integrations like "Send to Miro." The category reMarkable created — a tablet that subtracts instead of adding — kept attracting users who wanted writing without notifications, and its choice to do color "the way paper does" became the reference point for the e-paper tablet wave that followed.
Sources
- reMarkable unveils reMarkable Paper Pro, the world's thinnest paper tablet with a color display
- ReMarkable Brings a Color Screen to Its Focus-Friendly Tablet Lineup
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