You probably don’t need the Remarkable Paper Pro. It’s too luxury. You know those sports cars that look like spaceships but will drive into a streetlamp if you sneeze? That’s the kind of luxury I’m talking about. This is the hypercar of E Ink note-taking devices.

It’s got a front light! It’s got color! It’s got an 11.8-inch display! It’s got the very best keyboard case available today! And it’s got a totally audacious choice of a display. It’s not a device for consuming books or comics (though you can sideload them if you want), but it is for marking up documents and taking notes really, really well. (The operating system is identical to the one for the Remarkable 2.) Starting at $579 (available directly from Remarkable and Best Buy), the Paper Pro is not a practical device for most people, but Remarkable has pushed E Ink displays to their limits here, and by God do I love it for that.

I need to take a minute here to geek the hell out over the display. The company didn’t go with the faded colors of the Kaleido display found in devices from Kobo and Boox. No, Remarkable decided to use the way-less-popular Gallery display technology and then put their own spin on it. (They call it the Canvas Color display.) Gallery is lauded because the color is richer and clearer than Kaleido. Where Kaleido achieves color by applying black and white pigments to a filter, Gallery skips the filter and moves actual color pigment. But moving all that color comes at a cost: Gallery displays have a much, much, much slower refresh rate.

I’m talking unpleasantly slow. The kind of slow that will make you pull your hair out in frustration writing anything. Except on the Remarkable Paper Pro. Writing on this thing is smooth like butter. The experience is just as pleasant as writing on the Remarkable 2. It’s just a hair better than the experience found on the Kindle Scribe or any number of Kobo and Boox devices I’ve tried over the years. Writing in black ink, I am constantly amazed at how perfectly everything seems to work — the knowledge of the Gallery display’s limitations always at war with the impressive reality Remarkable has created.

And then I switch to writing in color ink. There are six colors to choose from: blue, red, green, yellow, cyan, and magenta. Choose any of them and get to doodling. Writing in color is as smooth as writing in black. Pen strokes begin rendering in black, with the chosen color chasing the black away over the course of the stroke. Then, when you stop writing, there’s a pause, and the entire screen refreshes, the new colors now in place. It’s one way Remarkable is getting around Gallery’s atrocious refresh rate.

But is it obnoxious in practice? It kind of is! Especially at first. Yet you pick up the rhythm quickly and the annoyance fades away. I found myself being less bothered in only a couple of minutes. And I also kept asking myself, “Does this really matter?”

The Remarkable Paper Pro isn’t a tool for artists (though it does support layers and shading). You’re not supposed to unlock creativity. You’re using these colors so slide decks and PDFs of business reports look nice as you circle the changes you want made in red. You’re using these colors to faithfully render a book’s art or to add pizzazz to a header you’ve written in a brainstorming notebook. You’re using them to highlight all the numbers you have to remember for that Q4 presentation of profitability. In those cases, a little flash is annoying but not the end times.

And for me, the knowledge of how faithful this whole thing is at rendering color has me forgiving the flash — because hot damn, they put Gallery in a Remarkable and pushed it to the limits! That’s some concept car wildness from a note-taking device company.

But I am surprised that the boldness that inspired the display choice didn’t carry over to the front light. It’s… fine. It’s dimmer than what others offer, and you can’t control the color temperature of the light, which is annoying in 2024. Remarkable ostensibly went with a less powerful and flexible front light because of the demands of the Paper Pro’s design. The front light has to be extraordinarily thin so there’s no distracting gap between the glass you’re writing on and the E Ink display beneath. And there isn’t! But I also haven’t found that gap as distracting as one would expect in a Boox or the Kindle Scribe. So while I respect Remarkable’s commitment to minding the gap, I would prefer a better front light.

Thankfully, Remarkable’s panache for design reveals one other winner: this company now makes the absolute best keyboard case you can get. The $229 Type Folio puts every other keyboard case I’ve ever used, for tablets and computers alike, to shame. It’s so thin and light, I keep finding myself surprised at the exceptional keyboard packed inside. It’s also got great stability when open on your knees and a clever way of keeping the pen out of your way. More than even the bold colors of the Remarkable Paper Pro, it’s the keyboard case that grabs people’s eyes. This is what every keyboard case should be like. It’s really that good.

Like the rest of the Remarkable Paper Pro, the Type Folio feels like the company showing off at the expense of price. Like a hypercar, it doesn’t feel necessary for most people to own, and it’s probably too expensive, but it’s showing off the future, and that future is a lot faster and more colorful than you’d think.

The HoverAir X1 may have popularized easy-to-use selfie drones, but it’s DJI’s new $199 Neo we’ve been testing that looks set to dominate sales. It’s launching globally today and does almost everything the $350 X1 can do and so much more.

Like the X1, DJI’s new Neo is a drone you primarily buy to record yourself doing things for social media. It flies itself, no controller necessary — you simply push a button on the drone to cycle through a list of predefined flights like follow, hover in place, orbit overhead, and zoom in and out. It launches in seconds, begins recording, and then returns to land in the palm of your hand without requiring previous flying experience.

The Neo can and will crash if you fly it near obstacles, but like the X1, its flexible frame can survive a beating.

Unlike the X1, the Neo has return-to-home (RTH) capabilities, and if you add a controller, it can fly much farther away given its dual antennas (one transmitter, two receivers), which offer a maximum video transmission distance of 10km (six miles). It can be paired with DJI’s $129 RC-N3 Remote Controller to capture sweeping panorama shots with confidence that it’ll return when the battery is low. It can also pair with DJI’s $499 Goggles 3 and the company’s latest motion controller or FPV controller to perform acrobatic stunts in an immersive first-person view. Just don’t expect the Neo to compete with DJI’s more powerful and capable drones that feature obstacle avoidance, better stabilization, and improved optics. 

My colleague Sean Hollister and I have been testing the Neo in a variety of scenarios over the last few weeks. While the folding X1 remains more pocketable, seems to keep a lock on its subject better, and is generally less buggy and easier to use, the Neo has proven to be a very capable challenger, which is expected from the world’s leading maker of drones. It’s also easy to forgive the Neo’s faults given its price, but we’ll issue a final verdict when we publish a review in the coming weeks.

One major shortcoming of the Neo for use as a selfie drone is its lack of portrait video mode. When asked why the feature was omitted, DJI’s European spokesperson Matt Bailey said that the company “will consider user feedback on this.” Weird. 

DJI’s Neo does, however, shoot in 4K at 30fps, which is something the X1 can’t do (but newer, even more expensive HoverAir drones can). Its half-inch sensor shoots video in a 16:9 aspect ratio with the option to record at 60fps in 1080p mode. It can also capture 12-megapixel stills in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios and features the bare minimum of single-axis mechanical gimbal stabilization alongside some software stabilization tricks. DJI says it’ll also shoot video in 4:3, but that option wasn’t available in the firmware we tested.

The Neo has 20GB of onboard storage and — like the X1 — lacks any expansion option, but that doesn’t seem to present any issues, as the 4K videos usually only last between 10 and 30 seconds. DJI’s battery lasts longer at up to 18 minutes, but that also helps to make it slightly heavier than the X1. Still, at 135g, it’s well below the all-important 250g threshold, making it exempt from the most onerous of drone licensing requirements.

The Neo is also sold in a very attractive $289 combo bundle that includes three batteries and a USB-C charging hub. The two-way charging hub will charge all three batteries simultaneously in about an hour when used with a 45W charger. The Neo has a built-in USB-C port that also lets you charge its removable battery in about 50 minutes from a 15W charger, though we’ve seen this stop working a few times in our prerelease firmware.

The Neo does not offer any gesture controls, but it can be controlled with voice commands after saying “Hey! Fly!” It can also be controlled from the DJI Fly app on a phone over a direct Wi-Fi connection. And like the HoverAir X1, the Neo can record audio from your phone’s built-in mic, which DJI will automatically overlay onto your recorded video without any swarming bee propeller sounds. The Neo can also record audio through DJI’s Mic 2 when paired over Bluetooth. 4K video files, ranging from 80MB to 200MB, transfer quickly to phones over a direct Wi-Fi connection or to laptops over a USB-C cable. 

DJI’s Neo looks like a direct response to the HoverAir X1 that’s overtaken social media over the last year — at least, according to my own recommendation algorithms. Let’s see if Zero Zero Robotics lowers its HoverAir prices in response. Regardless, at $199 in the US, the Neo stands a very good chance of turning selfie drones into a mainstream gadget, for better or worse.

In Europe, DJI’s Neo is priced at a tax-inclusive £169 / €199. There’s also a £299 / €349 Neo Fly More Combo that bundles the Neo drone with DJI’s RC-N3 Remote Controller, three batteries and a charging hub, and spare parts. 

DJI is not bundling any controllers in the US, and the Neo is unfortunately not compatible with DJI’s older sets of goggles or motion controllers for FPV flight, only the latest ones. For FPV flight, that means DJI’s Avata Explorer Combo is currently a better deal; in Sean’s early tests, it also offers a more stable first-person flying experience than the Neo.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge