I love the iPad Air 2020 and consider it the best tablet in Apple's entire lineup. But most of them are iterative remixes of the iPad Pro's features and a lower price. But my favorite tablet of the year is from a company I've probably never heard of, and it doesn't even run my favorite apps.

Despite its quirks, the reMarkable 2 is my pick for best tablet of 2020. The reMarkable 2 lives up to its name and has become an essential part of my life this year after adjusting my workflow.

The reMarkable 2's completely unique appearance is part of its appeal, starting with its shockingly thin frame, just 0.2 inches thick. This is 50% thinner than the reMarkable 1, which is 0.3" thick, and much of the change is due to its entirely new body. Gone is the blocky, chunky white plastic frame and bezel, and in its place is a sleek, machined aluminum flake that houses a 10.3-inch digital paper screen.

Comparatively, the new iPad Air is just an iPad Pro with new color options. It's neat, but by no means shocking.

The reMarkable 2 has lost the physical "back," "home," and "forward" buttons, replacing them all with on-screen taps. It is essentially a giant Kindle, but thinner.

But the reason the reMarkable 2 feels more - wait for it - remarkable than the iPad is that writing on it feels natural. Of course, I don't begrudge the iPad's cool new Scribble tool for converting handwriting to text, but it still doesn't feel right.

And therein lies reMarkable's triumph. Writing with the unique Marker stylus feels like pressing a pen or pencil against paper. That natural feel makes a difference when writing, and writing with the reMarkable 2 is so effortless that I find myself using it all the time.

From remote presentations of upcoming product launches to Dungeons & Dragons nights, I find myself pulling out the reMarkable 2 whenever I need to take notes. With unlimited pages, this notebook is my new favorite device.

While a pen and pad alone would be fine, the reMarkable 2 has two advantages that my notebook does not. First, thanks to cloud syncing, reMarkable has apps for Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android, so I can always call up my virtual notebook on my laptop or phone. This means you won't have to struggle to find which of the many small Field Notes notebooks you were using.

Second, and even cooler, reMarkable recently added a tool to convert to text. Its accuracy is similar to the aforementioned Scribble feature in iPadOS.

In addition, the reMarkable tablet has a large number of templates built in, so you can choose any kind of paper you like. There are even templates for storyboards and compositions.

Ultimately, I like the reMarkable 2 for many of the reasons people prefer the Kindle Paperwhite over the iPad. Sure, it doesn't do much, but the Kindle's backlit e-ink screen is better for reading than the iPad's LCD screen.

So, if you like to write, but feel totally bored with the tablet world (and I don't disagree that Apple's is the best overall), you need to take a look at the reMarkable 2. It's made for the 100,000 things you might like, not the 100,000 things you ...