Impressions of the Supernote Nomad Tablet

So, I got some new toys this summer. Alongside the BOOX Palma e-ink phone, I also upgraded my e-ink tablet—from the Remarkable 2 my primary notetaking device since COVID, to the Supernote A6 X2 Nomad tablet released earlier this year.

I’ve lamented the slow development speed of e-ink technology in the past. That’s still the case, but there have been some incremental improvements to the tech within the past 4 years that make enthusiasts like me consider upgrading anyway. In this case, it’s the e-ink Carta 1200 display: a 300 dpi screen that supports faster and cleaner refresh rates compared to their last-gen hardware. It’s good enough that pretty much all consumer e-ink devices now use the Carta 1200 as standard.

But the biggest upgrade here is in the software support. The Remarkable team has proven itself slow in product development, and they’ve only made small improvements to add a few pen types, or tweak minor functionalities and interface components. Instead, they’ve spent their time shoehorning subscription services onto their custom OS1, and building out support for typing in conjunction with their new keyboard folio2. It’s a strange addition, given that Remarkable’s original claim to fame was its ability to mimic the feel of writing on paper—a feature that no other tablet, e-ink or otherwise, has been able to fully match even now.

Onto the Supernote Nomad.

Rotta, the company behind the Supernote brand of e-ink tablets, keeps itself to a focused and tiny lineup: as I’m writing this, they have only released their A5 and A6 models, mapping roughly to their named paper dimensions3, and even there they’re only selling the second-generation A6 X2 tablet right now with the A5 X2 under hardware development. The A6 X2 is codenamed the Nomad, since it’s about the size of an iPad Mini—or perhaps a classic Moleskine notebook—and is designed to be carried around.

Ratta’s tagline is “For those who write,” and they’ve been singularly focused on getting the feel of writing on their tablet to be enjoyable. Their pen-and-paper emulation solution consists of:

• High-end pens, both first- and third-party, that provide solid weight and construction and feel great to hold;
• Ceramic nibs, closer in hardness to ballpoint pens;
• A self-recovery soft film on the screen that acts as both a screen protector and a writing surface that’s supposed to mimic paper fibers.

In practice, the combination of technologies and materials here makes the tablet feel closest to writing with a pen, with the caveat that the soft film can sometimes feel like it’s sticking too heavily on the pen tip, particularly initially out of the box. Other solutions, like what the Remarkable or the Kindle Scribe offer4, feel closer to writing with an old-school lead pencil. Whichever surface feels better to write on is a matter of personal preference.

The Nomad does deserve credit for its unique solution. Ceramic nibs do improve on the miscalibration that occurs when plastic nibs wear down; when the tip of the pen doesn’t align fully with the capacitive core in the pen’s body, drawn lines drift a pixel or 2 off from where the nib touches the page. Also, there’s a flight shimmer that comes off the soft film when you depress it that looks a bit like how a pen’s ink is wet for an instant on the paper before it dries. The net effect is subtle but appreciated for the attention to detail.

As to the software, the Nomad runs a custom version of Android, but is mostly locked down and limited to literally 2 apps in Supernote’s own app store. The OS is heavy on swipe gestures—the tablet even has 2 vertical strips on the side bezels to direct finger movements—which contributes a lot to the high learning curve of these devices. The system is centered around folders and files, and gives users the ability to sync files either through their cloud service or the standard Dropbox/Google Drive cloud syncs. They’ve included an email client and a monthly calendar with space for scribbling5, and there’s some light integration with optical character recognition (OCR) that can be manually triggered on enabled documents.

I have grown fond of the Supernote Nomad. The form factor is a bit smaller and thus more cramped for lengthy notetaking, but writing notes by hand is already an intentional constraint to enforce brevity and concision, so at least it’s directionally congruent, and the portability is much appreciated. I went with the Heart of Metal Pen 2, which reminds me a lot of my Baron Fig Squire pen and is fun to fiddle with. I’m hoping that over time, Ratta will live up to their tagline and continue to build on their products on both the hardware and software sides, but what I’ve seen so far is quite promising, in this niche-of-a-niche of e-ink, digital-writing tablets.