Pocketables

Rocketbook Smart notebook review

The Rocketbook wave is an innovative combination of old school pen and paper with modern technology. It is both a paper notebook, with well designed and laid out pages, and an app system, it ships in a thermally protected pouch for the sake of the pen with special ink that turns clear at 140°F(60°C).  The pages are heavier than standard paper helping them resist impressions from pens and is available both in a standard an executive size, I was sent the standard full size notebook for testing. The pages have a faint grey dot pattern and a QR code in the corner, these actually contain a unique page number that allows the app to order pages when scanned in and saved as a PDF.

The pen

The pen has erasable ink can be erased in sections using high temperature exposures(there are many references to coffee cups causing this effect on accident) or the textured end of the pen, it’s part of Pilots Frixion line which includes the full variety of colors and other implements such as highlighters and markers all with the same ink, although the included black pen is sufficient It would be appreciated for the manufacturer to consider adding a red pen as well going forward considering the cost. They’re generally nice to write with although I encourage a light hand to not dent the paper maximizing the notebooks reuse potential or using one of the softer frixion markers as they leave no impression when used.

The app

The rocketbook app is well laid out although I would prefer a different first launch setup that asks you to select different actions for the charms, instead they simply default to email but are simple to edit overall it works well, it has no issues scanning and sending multiple pages, if the PDF option is enabled they’ll be combined into a single document. The advanced settings provide for adjustment to the “washing” effect used to remove the grey grid from the pages, other than when I was using colored markers I never had to adjust this(on it’s default setting the light green in the markers came out yellow) although once i had adjusted this I found 50% to be an ideal washing strength as it didn’t show the background of the pages(the faint 4 dots) while leaving colors unimpaired.

Erasing

I made a short video demonstrating the erasure process, it worked flawlessly and took less than 10 minutes.

Closing thoughts

Overall I’m impressed, everything works as advertised and even better in some cases, but there are things i’d like to see in the future, I took time with their printable page that’s available and made a few types of custom paper to try and was impressed with how the app handles them as such i’d like to see lined pages/grid paper down the road for school and business use, as well as potentially an entirely blank art edition after my experience with the colored ink(including a pack of markers as well) Smaller software changes i’d like to see include the option for an “always” action, something like always save it to my gallery or google drive would free up an additional action as well as some flexibility for dynamic actions, picking one changes them all to “email” and the others decide who to or something similar. A large format page similar to the post-it wall pad would be an interesting development as well and something that I expect would be quite usefull.

 

For those interested the Rocketbook wave is available from the manufacturer with a promotional inclusion of three free “rocketpads”(50 sheet single use notepads) Here

And on amazon here where the markers I also recommend are available

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Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith is a full time IT administrator at a medium sized private business former FRC coach and technology enthusiast.

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