Ever since I’ve been made a project leader at work, reMarkable2 (review) and I were inseparable. A new position requires great organisation skills, tracking the progress of multiple things and having 5 hands and 2 brains and the memory of an elephant. I don’t have multiple brains, my upper limb count stops on two, and my memory is shoddy at best, so reMarkable2 was even more valuable than I initially imagined. Now with Google Drive and Dropbox support, it’s even better.
It’s been a great week for me and reMarkable2 as I also found free and easy tools to add the custom templates and splash screens! If this is what you are after, see this post.
reMarkable2 and GDrive
In my review, I praised the hardware, but remained critical of the software, believing the device is capable of so much more. Over the last few months, reMarkable2 received steady updates bringing new features to the table.
The latest beta firmware brings integration with online services: Google Drive and Microsoft DropBox. It was an unexpected update and I couldn’t be happier. The update allows multiple accounts to be connected to your reMarkable account.
How to enable Google Drive on reMarkable2
I was confused at first, after skimming the release notes, I missed the information that cloud support has to be enabled via my.remarkable.com. After 10 min of looking around for a familiar “sign to Google account” menu on the device itself, I went back to the source (release notes) and authenticated my account properly.
After few moments the familiar icon appeared in the sidebar. You can add up to 5 Gmail and Dropbox accounts so if you use Google Drive for work and pleasure, you don’t have to pick which account to use.
Limitations
Not all files are supported. You will see your directory structure nicely laid out on the reMarkable2 screen, but only supported files will open on your tablet. Luckily, the file support extends beyond PDFs. Remarkable2 will open docs and sheets (with multiple pages) from Google Drive and export them as PDFs on your device.
ReMarkable2 utilises Google Drive API to pull the information about the content stored on your Google account. It loads the previews of the compatible files, but it doesn’t actively synchronize the files between your Google Cloud and the slate.
Files from the cloud, are exported to the tabled as PDFs. Then you can proceed with the usual options and features available for this file format.
In use
In practice, reMarkable2 and Google Drive integration is actually quite handy. Instead of using the reMarkable app, I can save the GMail attachments directly to my Google Drive edit them on my reMarkable2 and upload them back to the cloud.
Ideally, I’d love to have a dedicated folder kept in sync with Google Cloud, but I will take the update. It’s proven to speed up signing online contracts and other things I’m expected to do.
Other release features
This release also brings screen sharing over USB-C. Previously, screen sharing was only possible over the LAN, now you can simply plug the cable in and cast your reMarkable screen to the connected computer.
To make me happy, the reMarkable team needs a couple more features to make their product 100% worth its price:
- Custom Templates
- Ability to draw straght lines and custom shapes
- tags for documents
- the ability to add text lables (printed) instead of hand writing
I realise that some of the options above can be achieved by installing extra packages over SSH, but at the moment I have very little time to tinker about, and my tablet contains a lot of important documents for work, which I use on daily basis. I will revisit custom packages for reMarkable soon. What other features would you like to see on your device? Let me know in this Reddit thread.
