Giving an E-Ink Tablet This Year? Set It Up Before You Wrap It.

You found the gift. An e-ink tablet for your sister who keeps buying paper notebooks, or your dad who reads on the porch, or your kid heading into a second year of college with a backpack full of loose handouts. Good choice. It is the kind of present that gets used every day instead of living in a drawer.

Here is the part people skip. A reMarkable tablet out of the box is an empty tablet. If you hand it over with nothing on it, the first hour of Christmas morning turns into an account setup, a software update, and a search for a charging cable while everyone else moves on to breakfast. The gift lands flat, not because it is a bad gift, but because the person has to do a chore before they can enjoy it.

You can fix that in about forty minutes, on an evening before you wrap. Here is the order to do it in.

Charge it all the way, then top it off the night before

Open the box the day it arrives. Plug it in and charge it completely, because a device that ships in October has been sitting in a warehouse and losing a little power every week.

Then charge it one more time the night before you give it. E-ink tablets hold a charge for a long stretch, but "a long stretch" measured from half empty is still half empty. You want it to turn on the first time without a cable attached. That moment matters more than it should.

Decide now who creates the account

This is the one choice worth thinking about for a minute, because it is awkward to undo later.

If you set the device up under your own account, you can load files onto it before you wrap it, and the person opens a tablet that already works. The tradeoff is that it is tied to you, and purchases or syncing may route through your account until they change it.

If you leave it sealed for them to register, everything is cleanly theirs from the start, but you cannot put anything on it, and the first thirty minutes belong to a setup screen.

There is a middle path that works well for most families. Set it up under your own account, load the files, then walk them through switching it over to their account after they have had a chance to play with it. For someone who is not especially comfortable with technology, a parent or a grandparent, consider just leaving it on your account and handling the file loading for them from here on. That is a service, not a shortcut.

Run the software update before they ever see it

Whatever the device shipped with, there is almost certainly a newer version waiting. Updates on these tablets tend to be slow and they sometimes want to restart twice. Get that out of the way on your own time.

While you are in the settings, set the sleep screen, turn the handwriting features on, and check that the pen is working. If the pen uses replaceable tips, find out where the spares are and tape them to the inside of the box.

Put three things on it before you wrap it

This is the step that changes the gift. An empty tablet is a project. A tablet with something already on it is a thing you can pick up and use.

Three files is the right number. More than that and it feels cluttered. Less and it feels like a demo.

• Something to plan in. A hyperlinked planner PDF gives the device an immediate daily job. Our undated digital planner for Kindle Scribe and reMarkable Paper Pro is undated on purpose, which matters for a gift. They can start in January, or the second week of February when they finally get around to it, without a single wasted page.
• Something to write in with no pressure. A blank notebook asks a lot of a person on day one. A prompt gives them a place to start. The Kindle Scribe writing prompt journal has a prompt for every day of the year, most of them funny, which is a better on-ramp than a page that says "Thoughts."
• Something to do that is not work. This is the one people forget. The device needs a reason to come off the shelf on a Sunday. A write-on puzzle book does that nicely. A 150-puzzle Sudoku set that runs from easy to hard will outlast the novelty of the tablet itself.

Each of these devices has its own way of accepting a PDF, usually a cable, a desktop app, or a browser uploader. Whichever one yours uses, do the transfer on your couch with time to spare, not in front of an audience.

Build the folders they would not think to build

Left alone, every e-ink tablet turns into one long undifferentiated list of files. Give them a shape to fall into instead.

Four folders cover almost everyone. Planner for the thing they use daily. Notes for meetings, classes, and calls. Reading for PDFs and books. Fun for the puzzles and the journal. Put the three files you loaded into the right folders so the system is already demonstrated rather than explained.

It takes four minutes and it saves them the six-month slide into chaos that most people go through before they invent their own system.

Write on the first page

Open the planner or the journal, go to the first blank page, and write them a short note by hand with the pen.

It does two things at once. It shows them what writing on the device actually feels like, which is the thing they will be curious about first. And it means the gift has your handwriting in it, which a tablet is not supposed to be able to do.

Keep it to a couple of lines. The point is the handwriting, not the paragraph.

One last thing: keep the receipts somewhere findable

Digital files get lost when a phone gets replaced. Forward the order confirmations for anything you bought to an email address you will still have next year, or drop them in a folder with the gift receipts. If you ever need to re-download a planner, you will be glad the email isn't buried.

That is the whole list. Charge it, decide on the account, update it, load three files, make four folders, write a note. Forty minutes, and the difference between a gift used in January and one used in March.

If you are putting a kit together, the undated planner is the piece that does the most work on day one. Add the journal and a puzzle book and you have a tablet that already knows what it is for.