A Mix of Paper and Digital – Rocketbook Wave Review

I doodle, write notes, plan things out on paper and write patterns as I go along. My office is organised chaos with what must seem random pieces of paper to everyone else. Although generally we are moving more to paperless, I do like to jot down ideas on paper, so when Dave was browsing amazon he came across the Rocketbook Wave and decided it would be a perfect present for me, so he brought it. Here is my review of the Rocketbook Wave.

RocketBook Wave overview:

I got quite excited when I seen the description of what Dave brought me. A note book that you can reuse, – less wastage of paper is always a good thing right, but the biggest feature I was interested in was being able to turn my notes digital. A paper and pen experience with the option of those notes digitally ticked all boxes for me on paper, because who really likes carrying around notebooks for reference . It also had the potential of enabling guilt free doodling, but did it deliver to my expectations ?

 

First Impressions:

When it arrived, it came with minimal packaging, and had the notepad and a Pilot Frixion ball point pen. I liked the fact that it wasn’t a specialist pen only for rocketbooks and could be purchased for a variety of places including a number of supermarkets. I have used the pens before  and they are nice to write with.  Now to the notepad. I loved the fact it didn’t feel glossy,  felt like normal paper and writing on it was nice and smooth.  Each page has a black border, QR code and symbols at the bottom of each page for digital capture through the app.

Rocketbook App:

I downloaded the app, and was prompted to create an account, it didn’t ask to many questions for the account creation, just based on email and password. Each symbol on the bottom of the page corresponds to an action in the app, which will instruct the app to send the captured image to the cloud. The default is in email, but can be configured to send your notes to Dropbox, Box, Onenote, Evernote, Icloud, Google Drive and Slack.  On capture, it produces an image and the QR code allows the app to know what page number it was. There is also a share function and the captured image is also saved to your device.

 

The app uses the black surround to focus the capture the picture only, and only captures the page itself. The resulting image impressed me as it was clear and the pen marks were defined well.

I sent the image through facebook messenger as well as my email, both worked well. This is the image produced by the app.

Erasing and starting again:

So this was a feature I was curious with, the microwave erasing and how this would work. One thing to mention, is the RocketBook Wave is recommended only for 5 erases on the paper, and they recommend using up all the paper before doing the microwave erasing – I decided for the review, and pure curiosity I would try it with without filling the 80 pages . I thought this element may not work well, or may be difficult, but actually it wasn’t, and while erasing you could make yourself a cuppa at the same time – if you don’t mind microwave boiled water.

You place the book in the microwave, with a mug of water 3/4 filled, then turn the microwave on, keeping an eye on the Rocketbook logo. Once it turns white, you flip over the book and repeat, then one last flip and then done. Then you have a clean book and a mug of boiling water

I was impressed on the way it erased, and was ready to use again – once it cooled down.  The magic is the combination of the paper materials and the Frixion ink, the ink vanishes at 60c, and the paper construction as well as the mug of water stops your pages catching fire.

 

Here is the before and after results :

 

Is the Rocketbook Wave good?

I love gadgets and anything to make my life easier, the 5 uses are limiting somewhat but would have saved 400 sheets of paper, and be able to get clean crisp digital notes for me is a big plus. On the useability and functionality, even with the £29.99 price tag I would get another one.

As I mentioned before, I like the fact you can buy pens compatible from a number of locations and it isn’t a specialised pen only for the Rocketbook.  The images are clean and you can see the pen marks without blurriness ( I used the camera on my S6) and having a readable digital form of notes to me is a great thing.

 

I love the concept and according to their website they have a preorder of a Everlast notebook, which doesn’t have a use limit and is wipe clean, so I may get one in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

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