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Comment by ek | Hacker News Reader

Good on Samsung for continuing the trend Lenovo seems to have started of bringing the digitizer pen back. The fact that people are buying aftermarket styli for devices that don't have pens is an indicator that there should be more devices with them, since nothing really beats an actual digitizer pen. To me it seemed like a step backward when Steve Jobs first asked "Who wants a stylus?" at the iPhone keynote.

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IMO, at the time, he had to say that. If Apple had promoted an optional stylus on an iPhone, the UI would either not have been usable without one, or have been derided as 'a toy; they could have made fit more on a screen'.

Also, once the App Store opened, I think we would have seen a zillion straightforward ports of applications that did not work with a finger at all.

Now, times may have changed. Perhaps, customers are savvy enough to see which apps work nicely with fingers, and which require a stylus.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people who wonder whether Microsoft makes the right choice with Surface, giving developers the choice between TUFKAM (The UI formerly known as Metro) and supplying straight ports of Windows apps.

Steve also removed the arrow keys from the original Mac keyboard to force developers to support the mouse, then put them back later.

Steve also said that native apps weren't needed because Web apps would be just as good.

I thought jobs was right to slam the stylus and still is because stylus (at least in my mind) isn't the same thing as a digitizer pen like a wacom.

When i hear stylus I think of a tiny plastic pen that exists because interface designers didn't want to know how to make finger friendly ui and hardware. At the time there had been many devices (anyone remember the ipaq?) where users were stuck in tap the tiny menu options with a plastic stick hell and I think that's what jobs was rightly slamming.

But a true pressure and tilt sensitive pen in addition to touch is a fantastic idea. Browsing, viewing, navigating are much better done with touch but writing and drawing can be better with a pen. There's a reason the masterworks of art aren't all finger paintings. Sometimes an intermediate tool is best but only in the right context.

> The fact that people are buying aftermarket styli for devices that don't have pens

Are you sure about that? My completely unscientific anecdote is that people buy the galaxy note for it's size, but end up never using the stylus at all. I see a lot of galaxy notes in the wild, but never seen someone who actually used the pen. People usually tell me they tried, found it terrible and gave up.

Are my anecdotes too off? Are you guys seeing something different? Maybe someone has some good data on this?

People are buying styli. The Kagi Stylus is popular on the train I ride to work. I saw someone using one on their ipad with Notable and I asked her where she got it (it has a clear disk on the end so it feels more precise) and she said ebay. Right from China to your mailbox. But it turns out that this type of styli is hard to come by otherwise. In my email exchanges with the vendor they claimed they were selling thousands of them, but I would not expect them to say 'hardly any' so its not solid data, Ebay's 'how many are left' on their buy it now auctions were starting at 100 and working their way down to 0 pretty quickly (a few days).

That said, one of the things I really liked about the iREX Illiad (RIP) is that it used an honest to god Wacom stylus digitizer. That can capture tilt, pressure, and doesn't require a conductive connection between your finger and the tip. I've argued for a while that blending the two would provide a really useful combination.

The Wacom only allowed single touch so using capacitive touch as 'modifier' keys would allow for combined intent+action type things.

Sure, AmazonBasics has a capacitive stylus that several iPad owners I know use, and my point was that this is a much less elegant solution than, say, this device or the ThinkPad tablet, which are designed for use with actual pens. I also know a number of ThinkPad tablet users all of whom love the pen and bought the device specifically for this purpose.

Can those pens work on other tablets as well, as long as the software/driver there supports it? Because I really wish Samsung started selling them off as accessories, at the very least for their other Galaxy/Nexus devices. The thing is I might want to use a pen like that, but with a Nexus tablet for example.

No, digitizer technology is built into the tablet itself as well as requiring a special pen.

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