I’m returning my reMarkable Paper Pro Move. It’s a brilliant gadget, but it’s not right for me.

First, the hardware is state-of-the-art and exquisitely well made. And expensive, to be sure, but I could tell it was a premium device from the first moment I picked it up. And to its credit, it works exactly as advertised. It feels like I’m writing on paper with a pen, and there’s no discernible delay between drawing a stroke and seeing it appear on the screen. It’s pretty magical that way.

However, the software has some truly odd design choices for a device costing so much. For instance, many have complained about reMarkable devices being at best mediocre for reading things like PDFs and ePUBs. Especially ardent fans point out that reMarkable advertises the devices as note takers, not ereaders, but that’s nonsense. The hardware is better in every meaningful way than my less-than-half-the-price Kobo Libra 2 reader, but the Kobo’s software is far better at rendering words on the screen than this expensive Move. The flaws are purely due to substandard software, and at this price, there’s no excuse for that.

But since they do describe it as a device for taking notes, it’s fair game to grade it on that scale. The Move is flawless at recording pen strokes as lines on the screen. Truly, it excels. It’s perfect. There’s nothing to improve there. Actually organizing those notes, though? It’s… not good.

There are a couple of primary ways that the reMarkable simulates paper. A “notebook” is a collection of one or more pages that can each be arbitrarily long. When you get to the bottom of the page, you can scroll the page upward to expose more blank lines, or grid squares, or whatever other paper design you’ve chosen. That’s a pleasant way to write, but there’s no organization to speak of. You can’t link from one page to another. You can’t make an index page that jumps directly to page 23 or whatever. It’s easy to flip through them, but if you ended up with a notebook of dozens of pages, like if you have a one-page-per-day monthly journal, it’s slow and painful to get to a specific page in the middle.

Alternatively, you can use a template, which is a PDF that supports arbitrary links in pages. It doesn’t support the “infinite scrolling” option of notebooks, though, and you can’t add your own links. They can only be added through a separate PDF editor app.

Neither of these options lets you add images in any way. I tried everything I could think of, including saving images as PDFs, uploading them to the Move, and attempting to copy pages from those PDFs to my notebooks. Nope. It’s not supported. If you want to add a decorative cover to your notebook, or embed a chart or photo in the middle of a page, too bad.

There’s no automation capability at all. I thought maybe I could tolerate the lack of other features if there were a way to get data out of the device automatically. A while ago, I’d written a whole system for Drafts so that I could take notes in it throughout the day, then have those entries added to my Day One journal, OmniFocus, and my calendar by a nightly scheduled process. I’m far from allergic to Do It Yourself solutions. Alas, that’s not an option here. I could manually copy and paste handwriting recognition text into another app, but there’s not an API, or Shortcuts actions, or automatic file syncing to a location other than ReMarkable’s cloud service. You can’t set the “sleep screen” image you see whenever the app is resting between uses, unless you turn on developer mode, which disables some of its security features. There’s not a dictionary; don’t plan on looking up words or checking your spelling as you work.

With all these bizarre limitations, I’ve decided that this gorgeous, well-made, expensive device doesn’t have any real advantages over a cheap paper notebook. At least the notebook lets me flip between pages quickly, unlike the Move. And if I want to compensate for its many, many limitations with other apps on my computer, the path of least resistance is to look at my notes on my Move and hand-type them into the other app.

This is ridiculous. There’s no reason whatsoever why the Move should be so unbelievably locked down and featureless. I swear that its online fans have the Oslo version of Stockholm Syndrome. Whenever a new user says they wish it were better at reading ebooks, others will rush to ReMarkable’s defense: “it’s a notebook, not a reader!” And while that’s technically true, there’s no compelling reason why it can’t be both. The software is ruined by the maker’s dedication to mediocrity. And that’s a pity, because the hardware is exquisite.

I wanted to love the Move. I bought it with my own money, in spite of its price, because the device seemed like it was tailor-made for me. But after a month of trying to overlook its long list of usability papercuts, I gave up. I think I understand some of the more, ahem, devoted supporters. After voluntarily spending so very much on a gadget, it’s hard to admit that it isn’t worth the hassle. I’m luckily still inside their generous 100-day window, and I’m using that before I begin to convince myself that the problem is with me, not the Move.

I still like the idea of the Move. It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to have in my life: a notebook where I can store all my ideas in one place from now on. Maybe someday that will come along. It’s definitely not the version of the reMarkable Move that’s available today, though.