I always wonder… Samsung has been in this for a long, long, LOOOOONG time and they’re essentially the Gods of smartphone styluses (stylii?).

So, would we ever see such a level of integration?

  • monotremata
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    31 year ago

    The tech behind the s-pen is made by Wacom, and they’re in the USI, so I don’t think it’s totally impossible. Pens are just pretty niche right now, partly because the android tablet market is so lousy. I think the tech has improved a bit–supposedly they’re down to a 0.7mm tip now, which is in the range where handwriting on a phone starts to make sense again. So maybe we’ll see more uptake of these, especially if the foldables market grows.

    The use cases I really want to see for this tech are things like an advanced calculator that lets you handwrite an integral and then gives you the closed form solution if it exists, or a graph, etc. if it doesn’t; and a nice pen-driven CAD program. Those would be amazing things to have in your pocket all the time, but they’re a little too intricate to work well with fat fingers on a phone.

    But for now I don’t think the tech is really quite good enough for phones. It’s good enough for my brother-in-law, who is an animator, to use it to doodle all the time, but that’s kinda it. On the iPad Pro he can do a lot more with the Apple Pencil, but that has more to do with the Apple tablet software ecosystem than with the pen itself, and Google has neglected that aspect of Android. On phones the pens just seem pretty limited.

    • ElPussyKangarooOP
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      11 year ago

      Google has failed Android on all fronts multiple times and Samsung and other manufacturers have been picking up Google’s slack for years!