I work part-time for my university's help desk and I was both impressed and disappointed the first time I came across one of these--one the one hand, its highly customizable and supports SSH access. On the other hand, there is shockingly no way to get the MAC address without connecting via SSH, even though this is popular among academics who often need to get onto MAC filtered networks.
In hindsight, we probably could have connected it to the guest network, gotten its IP and then had the networking group look up its MAC on their logs. What we wound up doing is telling the user to go home and check their own router for the MAC, which is obviously less than ideal service.
The reMarkable is surprisingly good for its primary purpose. Everything else it does... is limited. They things they did do are done well given how they are implemented. The epub/pdf experience sucks because it doesn't have a real pdf reader. It just renders the epub to pdf and then throw the pdf into the note-taking app.
Arguably, none of the functionality is half-assed. It works very well as a writing tablet. It absolutely sucks as a general purpose device because everything except the very core experience is flat-out missing.
There isn't a good general purpose eInk tablet and the reMarkable is the closest thing we have. :(
The Onyx Boox series is really good. The writing experience is almost as good as a Remarkable. The reading experience is excellent, and it's runs Android.
> and it's runs Android
I apologize for the snark, but I refuse to see how this is a plus over "it runs vanilla linux".
vanilla linux doesn't have any good ereader apps