“WHY use a stylus pen when a keyboard will do?” one may ask. Obviously, taking down notes is a lot easier with a stylus pen and tablet in hand since one can do it standing up, while seated on one’s favorite chair in meetings or resting under a tree shade.
One doesn’t have that luxury when using a Bluetooth keyboard attached to or situated near a tablet, since you’d have to find a seat to place it on your lap or on a table. It’s more difficult with a laptop even if it’s lightweight.
The stylus pen as well as digital pens are lighter and offer more precise control in note taking, design and drawing especially on touch screen tablets compared to a mouse which is heavier and clunkier on the hand even if it’s on Bluetooth mode.
Of course one has to use his fingers to use desktop computers and mobile devices. But with the increasing use of touchscreen in both PC and mobile devices, a person’s fingers, no matter how clean, produce oil and eventually dirt on that touchscreen.
Most gloves aren’t conductive when used on most capacitive touchscreens, unlike stylus pens which have a variety of tip designs that can be used for note-taking and drawing, making the tablet or smartphone a true productivity tool.
Handwriting technology
But for the stylus pen to truly take off as a must-have accessory, Samsung, Microsoft and other mobile technology firms should fully develop the hand-writing recognition technology, which at this stage still remains imperfect.
Imagine being able to write on a tablet and having it translate your writing perfectly in Verdana, Times New Roman or any other typeface for sending as e-mail to friends and co-workers/employers.
Easier than typing on a keyboard, I say.
Animators, architects, musicians and graphic artists can also draw their cartoons, do their storyboarding, plan out technical designs and graphs and write musical notes a lot easier on a stylus pen and tablet or personal computer than using a mouse. In fact there’s the Cintaq tablets with digital pens that are used by some artists in the US, Asia and Europe.
This is not to say that the tablet with stylus will replace the laptop and the personal computer anytime soon. Far from it, it will actually complement the laptop, which is geared towards mid-level to semi-heavy tasks and the PC, considered the resident workhorse for computing jobs.
Rather, the stylus can perhaps replace the mouse as an input instrument owing to the increasing use of touchscreen technology. At Kickstarter.com, there’s already an invention called the G-Stick that is a pen-shaped mouse.
Break the code
As a side note, I always wonder why some mobile technology reviewers compare the Samsung Galaxy Note smartphones and tablets to the iPhone and iPad series when both the iPad and iPhone don’t
include a dedicated stylus pen.
That said, while the iPad doesn’t have any stylus pens, manufacturers have designed some to be used on both iPhone and iPad and the Apple Store doesn’t lack for applications for note-taking and drawing.
However, they don’t compare favorably with either the Samsung Galaxy Note line with their capacitive styli or the Microsoft Surface Pro series with their N-Trig digital pens.
Still, if there’s one developer that can break the code or fully develop stylus pen technology especially handwriting recognition, it is Apple.
Though Steve Jobs may have been averse to using stylus pens, Apple had recently been following the lead of Samsung and others in developing bigger yet even better cell phones and tablets.
Why shouldn’t Apple include the stylus in their mobile devices? After all, Jobs was drawn into developing sophisticated personal computers and mobile devices when he attended a calligraphy class in Reed college, a class that he said “changed his life” and contributed to the elegant fonts used in computer typing text in a 2005 commencement exercise speech he gave in Stanford University.
I can only hope Apple CEO Tim Cook picks up on the trend and include the stylus in their future lineup of devices. So to answer the question “Which is mightier, the pen or the keyboard?” I reply, why not use both?
