Friends, I have sad news. My beloved reMarkable 2 tablet has been lost.

I believe I had taken it to the office on the one day a week that I am expected to be there. During that day, I spent the morning cleaning out my desk, which involved collecting a lot of garbage that had accumulated throughout my 20 or so years there. This included a whole lot of paper and notebooks and things that look a lot like the reMarkable. It’s entirely possible that I inadvertently tossed my tablet out with the trash. The alternative explaination could be that I simply left the tablet on the desk at the end of the day. This was a week before the Holiday break which, between the normal holiday laxness and scheduled time off, meant that I wouldn’t return to the office for a good three weeks. I searched the office upon my return but was unable to find the tablet anywhere. If I had left it on the desk, there’s a good chance someone may have taken it, but I cannot be certain.

With this tablet-shaped hole in my heart, I have no choice but to return to the solution that had pushed me towards a dedicated e-ink tablet in the first place: my iPad and Apple Pencil. As a general-purpose tablet, the iPad excels, but when I need to take notes, I don’t need the distraction of the bells and whistles that some app designer believes that a 21st century digital notebook should offer. I want a tablet that is as close to plain paper as I can get, but without the forest-destroying waste of actual paper.

To that end, I am on the hunt for a decent note taking app that does note taking well, but little else. I do not need to embed video. I do not need to be limited by what the app developer believes should suit a note-taker. I do not want some clever translation of a moleskein notebook in digital form, complete with page-turning animations and simulated rubber-band closure. I want to take notes, organize notes, find notes, and, if it’s not asking too much, export notes outside of the Apple ecosystem.

In the next series of posts, I’ll be going over several that I’ve downloaded from the App Store, all freemium (as is the rule of the Apple App Store), so the overviews will only be concerning what one can get for free. Here’s the list of apps I’ll be looking at, and I’ll hyperlink them once the post becomes available.

• Penbook – User Camp
• Pieces of Paper – Tsuyoshi Nakajima
• AJournal – WonderApps AB
• Notability – Ginger Labs
• Nebo – MyScript
• Craft – Luki Labs Limited
• Notes Writer – Kairoos Solutions SL
• Noteful – Noteful Technologies Limited
• Whiteboard – Microsoft
• GoodNotes 5 – Time Base Technology Limited
• OneNote – Microsoft
• Notion – Notion Labs, Inc