styluses - page 5

If Crocodile Dundee had been a digital artist instead of a hardened Aussie hunter, and if you had pulled your iPad stylus out in the middle of a heated argument somewhere in NYC, then he would have said this:

“Call that a stylus? That’s not a stylus… This is a stylus.”

And then pulled out the JaJa, an iPad stylus that is not only pressure-sensitive (with 1024 levels), but manages to communicate its intent to your iPad without a cable, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or any other radio protocol. How the hell do it work?

If you carry a stylus for your iPad, it’s fair to say you like writing (or at least doodling). And – by extension – it’s likely that you also carry a pen. Now one of our favorite styluses – – the metal-mesh-tipped TruGlide from Linktec – has been turned into the Duo, a single stick with a different writing technology at each end.

The Motive Stylus solves one of the most annoying problems of carrying a stylus for your iPad: Where do you put it? We have seen magnetic styluses which snap onto the Smart Cover before, but none does it quite so securely and unobtrusively as the Motive, which actually folds flat.

With pens, there are really only a few designs — fountain pens with nibs, ballpoints and felt-tipped markers. Anything else is pretty much just a variation on those. But with iPad styluses, pen designers seem to be going crazy with brand new ideas. One of these is the GoSmart Stylus, and at first look it seems like a terrible idea. Pick it up and use it, though, and you’ll be hooked.

“If you see a stylus they failed.” That might be everybody’s favorite Steve Jobs quote about touch screens, but the fact is the finger is terrible at both drawing and writing — just look at your kid’s scrawlings up on the refrigerator door if you don’t believe me.

If you want to make pictures and words that the rest of the world can recognize as such, you need a little help. Luckily, iPad accessory makers also ignored Jobs’ complaints and set out to fill the world with wonderful iPad pens. Here are the best you can buy.

You might like to think that Cult of Mac deputy editor John Brownlee is a beacon of intelligence in the world of Apple news, but sometimes he can be as dumb as the rest of us. Example: When staying with the Lady and I recently, John came to meet me in a local bar.

I pulled out my brand-new, just-bought Wacom Bamboo stylus to show him, and mentioned that it had a super clean, easy-glide tip. I handed it over and watched as John absent-mindedly stabbed the virgin rubber repeatedly onto the filthy, sticky bar table. Thanks a lot, John.

If I had had the Hand Stylus, though, I needn’t have suffered. The biggest feature of the Hand is its retractable tip, but there’s more to it than that.

There is one huge problem with iPad styluses: the rubber tips tend to drag or even stick on the screen, especially when the screen gets greasy (which is always). Some styluses are better than others: The Wacom Bamboo manages to glide right up until Peak Filth, and the latest Alupen Pro comes with instructions to never touch the tip with your fingers (as you’d expect, I touched it immediately and often after reading that).

But the TruGlide Stylus takes a different take altogether: it ditches the rubber and replaces it with something that looks like a tiny metal scouring pad. Only it doesn’t scour — it glides.

The Ozaki iCoat Finger Case turns your iPhone 4/S into a see-saw, or teeter-totter. Kidding! While it *does* do that, it also protects your phone whilst storing a tiny, stubby stylus on its back. This design not only makes it awkward to hold the phone while in the case, it also stops it from fitting into pretty much any pants pocket or sleeve designed to accommodate even an iPhone already inside a case.

I was a big fan of the Alupen when it launched — so much so that I went out and bought my own. It was chunky, looked like a metal pencil and felt pretty good in my big hands. Then came the Wacom Bamboo stylus and our love affair was over.

Now, though, the newer skinnier, cleverer Alupen Pro has got me two-timing the svelte Bamboo. Why? Because it has a biro built in.

We firmly believe that Wacom’s Bamboo stylus is one of the best styluses money can buy for the iPad, but that was until this thing came along. The Wacom Bamboo Stylus Duo mixes a traditional ballpoint pen with Wacom’s famous iPad stylus to bring you the best of both worlds, whether you’re sketching a hobbit in Draw Something, or jotting down a phone number on an old envelope.

So, you just spent $800 on a shiny new iPad so you could write, paint and draw on the go. But — inexplicably — you’re still too cheap to spend $20 on a stylus to help you do it. And if you’re this tight with your money, it’s likely that you have been hoarding the very ingredients you need to make your own stylus right now. So go grab the detritus lingering at the bottom of your fruit bowl or junk drawer and follow along.

The new iPad is almost identical to the old iPad, in terms of its physical dimensions at least. This means that many of your old accessories will fit it, and some will not. Styluses, of course, will be just fine, but cases and docks will either just squeeze on, or not fit at all.

So what should you look out for when considering an upgrade for your accessories as well as your iPad?

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Ten One — purveyor of beautifully designed Apple accessories to the tasteful and handsome — has announced an iPad 3 compatible, pressure-sensitive stylus. Codenamed “Blue Tiger,” the wireless pen could be just what artists have been waiting for.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Samsung’s showing at this year’s Mobile World Congress is light compared to the scattering of new products companies like ZTE have vomited onto the market today, but it is curiously strong, despite being hampered by the still-sluggish Android OS. First up is the Note 10.1, a proper iPad-sized version of the ridiculous five-inch Note. It’s not much different from the Tab 10.1, but for the skinny Wacom-based stylus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgfknZidYq0

Samsung’s bashing of iPhone users is becoming a regular occurrence. Its latest swipe came during yesterday’s Super Bowl, when it ran a commercial for its new, super-sized Galaxy Note smartphone, which sports a huge 5.3-inch display and includes a stylus.

Yes, “it’s got a pen!” 

Did you ever wonder what Siri would look like, if she weren’t just a bunch of 1s and 0s bouncing around inside an Apple data mega-center? The Big Bang Theory’s Raj thinks she’d be a sultry, promiscuous sex line operator, but that’s not the only possibility, which is why the makers of the popular Nomad Brush Stylus have thrown a contest called the Compose Portrait Siri-Ies Challenge, in which they’re giving away a custom engraved Nomad Compose to the person who comes up with the best depiction of what Siri really looks like.

We’re totally digging the entries they’ve gotten so far, which range from beautiful to monstrous, from realistic to abstract. Check out the best faces of Siri below, then go over to Nomad to vote for your favorite.

Children and Apple stuff mix pretty well — iDevices cap the top three slots on kids’ wishlists, right? So it’s a good bet that there’ll be a bunch of Apple stuff underneath the trees or the Menorah this year. We’ve put together a short list of icing-on-the-cake type gifts — or great follow-ups if you got ’em iDevices last year.

I’ve never found a stylus for the iPad that I’ve really liked. Whether an aluminum tube filled with cheap capacitive foam, or something more beefy like Wacom’s official $35 Stylus, I’ve found that more often than not, iPad stylii are maddeningly unpredictable when it comes to registering the tip of the pen and where a pen stroke actually starts.

That’s why I’m blown away by this demo of the XStylus Touch by Hong Kong inventor Elton Leung. He’s noticed that all styluses have an issue with where the pen stroke starts, and he’s designed an incredible stylus that seems to register on the iPad at the exact pixel when it first comes in contact with the display.

Kosella think they have a slick new way to make stylus tips: Instead of using the rubbery tips of most styli, they’ve figured out a way to use a fabric tip that has tiny metal filaments woven into it in order to make it conductive.

There’s no space the iPad hasn’t invaded — the kitchen in particular seems a favorite for me place for me to plop it down in. I’ll look up recipes, stream live TV news in the background while I’m cooking or kick back with the Grey Lady over breakfast.

But Apple’s probably going to void your warranty if they find egg yolk in the iPad’s innards. Never fear — Belkin has just announced a whole aisle’s worth of iPad accessories for the kitchen that’ll keep the iPad mess-free.

The iPad’s screen apparently wasn’t designed to be sullied with anything other than human fingers. there’s an oft-refferred to quote  from Steve Jobs saying as much: “If you see a stylus, they blew it,” referring to other touch-screen designs that rely on the stylus.

But we don’t always use Apple’s gadgets the way Apple intends. Most of the time, sure, we stick to the script, because the damn things are so well designed that any deviance ends up as a fool’s adventure. Using an iPad with a stylus, however, isn’t foolish. Whether or not you use one — to scrawl notes, draw, paint, as a way of circumventing long fingernails or just ’cause you like it that way — styli (or styluses, depending on your preference) are here to stay. Here’s a by-no-means-exhaustive showdown between a few picked off from the herd. All these styli are, of course, capacitive, which means they conduct bio-electricity from your hand, down the shaft and onto the screen.

Apple’s devices were designed work wonderfully without the need for a stylus, but sometimes they come in handy for certain things. But where do you keep them? There’s no room for a stylus in the iPad itself like those old touchscreen devices you no longer see, and if you clip it to the from of your Smart Cover it’s going to keep falling off. The JAVOedge Mini Stylus, however, fits neatly into your iPad’s dock connector.

About a week ago I spent $2 on Penultimate, an iPad app that lets you scribble notes on the screen and save them in notebooks. Maybe I didn’t have to though, because tablet-maker Wacom has recently released their own free iPad app, Bamboo Paper, that does basically the same thing. Almost.

These paintbrushes by Don Lee seem like an incredible idea. Called the Nomad Brush, each brush’s bristles are made of conductive fibers, so that it’ll work for painting on the iPad with any paint tool app.

I’m not sure I entirely see the point though. The iPad’s touch display can only register ten touch points at once, with none of the granularity that would be required to capture individual bristle strokes, not just brush strokes. Consequently, a lot of the feel and look of painting with a brush will be lost, especially since the iPad’s display doesn’t register pressure: you might as well use any rubber-tipped stylus instead for roughly the same effect.

Ultimately, it seems like whether or not the Nomad Brush is worth the dosh for you is how much more comfortable you are painting than drawing. If that sounds like you, the Nomad should be out in February.