Amazing!

I received this as a gift and I have used it everyday! I am a teacher and this has been extremely helpful and convenient. I love the pen to paper feel with the added technology!! I received a four pack of click erasable coloured pens and I am now looking into the marker pens and highlighters!
I will be purchasing a smaller size to fit in my work bag with more ease. Highly recommend!

More than a gimmick, actually useful

I thought these were AMAZING. I was hyped about the idea, reusable notebooks is a green initiative that I hadn’t even heard of before and though the execution was good too. My only minor complaint would be that they don’t come with any kind of simple guide to help you understand the features, you do have to poke around and experiment a bit.

For me the most important feature was the ability to translate my written lists into actual typing text (still in beta) and I was really impressed with this feature. Admittedly, I have a really simple barebones writing style, but it translated almost perfectly. Privacy buffs should note, though, that to have this feature, your info and writing must go through Rocketbook’s servers, something that might bother some. With regular scans, this doesn’t occur and the feature can be turned off easily.

Being able to send your scanned pictures to email or a drive, is really just a bonus. For me, the whole point of this thing is the re-usability. If you go through a ton of notebooks (I do) this is really going to help you reduce your use of paper. I can only imagine how useful this will be for students who take endless notes and don’t want a room cluttered with them.

This particular book has lined, dotted paper (neither show up in the scans) and a few really useful ‘template’ pages. I would recommend this type more for those who need ‘organisation’, for workers of an office environment or those who run their own business from home. For students and those who need a more blank notebook, check out the other Rocketbook types to find your perfect fit!

I had no issue with scan quality and it looked perfect. Of course, I have a modern smartphone with a great camera, but not sure if that would be the difference, since most people do.

Two of my big concerns were the paper and the pens. Let’s talk about paper first. I was worried it would just feel like a whiteboard (it doesn’t). The paper is definitely not ‘natural’, but surprisingly close to it. It feels like paper with a very flexible, thin mix of plastic coating in there. It’s surprisingly flexible and I was worried it would ‘rip’ out of the notebook’s spiral binder rings, but even tugging very hard, there was no issue with that. Writing with the pen does feel a little bit like writing on a shiny surface and it takes a couple of seconds to dry, so those who are left-handed or lean their hand on their writing, should be aware that this might not be great for them. I personally found I never smudged it and it dried very quickly.

As for the Frixion pens, they are not super expensive to replace. In fact, these pens already exist and people use them for other things. A pack of 7 coloured ones will cost you $20 here on Amazon and you can also use them to make disappearing art or messages on regular paper. One thing I will say is that they should remove the erasers from these. The instructions state that you should only EVER remove ink via the wet microfiber cloth. I’ve heard people say using the eraser can cause problems with the book over time. So if I was Rocketbook, I’d remove the erasers from the pens to prevent this problem occurring.

Wiping the book clean is so easy, though I wish there was more info on the microfiber cloth (do I need to wash it over time). The reality is, Rocketbook can be as simple or complex as you like. There’s a big level of customisation using the symbols (sending different types of pages to different places depending on which symbol is crossed) and a lot of finicky settings in the app. But you can also ignore all of those and just take photos of your pages and clean them off; a relatively simple use.

For somebody who takes endless lists and loves to sketch, this is a brilliant product and I’d heartily recommend it. If you rarely use notebooks and have no need of it, it won’t be the best buy for you. This particular Rocketbook is ideal for those who need to organise their work (or home) life and want some useful templates alongside the dotted and lined pages.