Capacitive styluses come in many shapes and sizes and most are not good at all. The majority are rubber tipped which causes them to drag on the screen and this makes selection and writing very difficult. The Pogo is better because it has a foam style tip which works very smoothly, if a little imprecisely. It shouldn’t work at all, but it does and the main downside is that is a little fragile after prolonged use- two have broken for me.
Gavin sent me a DAGi Transparent Stylus from Brando which he hated and I had to agree with him when I first picked it up. It looks like a dental instrument and is as far away from a stylus as you can get in terms of design. However, after ten minutes use on my iPad I was scribbling away like a pro and even managed to write small enough to make a page worth of notes worth taking, something never before possible for me on any mobile device.
It is made of clear plastic and does not feel particular well made, but I have had no problems with build quality so far. The flat circular tip has a small red dot in the centre which you use to focus your aim when writing and it feels surprisingly natural. In no time at all it felt perfectly natural to write with the DAGi and despite the strange looks in meetings I now have a series of meeting notes stored safely on my iPad. Perhaps I can now stop buying Moleskine notebooks every few months?
I have testing it on an iPhone and also an HTC HD2 and it works really well on each. Obviously the small screens make long periods of note taking impossible, but no other stylus has come close to this one for me and I will be using it for a long time to come. For those of you, like me, who saw the Microsoft Courier demo and wanted more this is one solutions that brings the potential experience one step closer. Once developers get to work and create notebooks that you can search by writing search strings and allowing the insertion of photos, maps and the like an accessory like the DAGi will be a must have item for many people.
One of the best accessories I have tried in a long, long time.
Available from Brando for $20.
On the subject of scribbling on a tablet or smartphone, this article from Viet Tran sums up the thoughts of many. I have a copy of Notes + on the iPad which I will review shortly, but it does look like the nearest solution yet to recreating pen and paper digitally.
“Leave alone the price, I will discuss in this post why a $.99 ballpoint pen and a paper notepad is still better than a $500.00+ iPad.
The beautiful enormous multi-touch iPad screen shouts out for handwriting applications. That is why there are at least a dozen iPad apps today aiming for handwriting notes (smartNotes, Penultimate, TakeNotes, WritePad, uWrite, Scribble Notes, PaperPad, WriteNow – I just searched the App Store for “handwriting”). I recently added one more into the collection – Notes +. Many of these apps focus more on the cool factor (the hype) than on being practical. And they are not even close comparing to pen and paper.”
I love the iPad for it’ls portability and note taking promise. I use Penultimate because or he ability to rest my hand on the screen, For longer hand written notes I Use Notetaker HD. I just installed an anti scratch cover and it negatively effected how the Pogo works. I will need to try the Dagi out.
I have to say, the look of it is pretty unappealing, it definitely sounds like something worth looking at though.