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LinkTec Apex TrueGlide vs. Wacom Bamboo vs. Jot Pro vs. NVidia TegraNote Styluses

jnjroach

Administrator
Staff member
As many of you know I like to take notes with OneNote using digital ink, I have the Surface Pro 2 which has the a Wacom Active Digitizer and it will always deliver superior quality of ink then any Capacitive Stylus, but it is thick and heavy compared to the Surface 2.

On the Surface RT the Adonit Jot Pro was my preferred stylus but results on the Surface 2 are less than stellar. I get good results if I'm using the Surface 2 in my lap resting by hand on my thigh, on the desk the results are spotty.

The Wacom Bamboo Capacitive Stylus didn't work well on the RT but seems to offer the best experience on the Surface 2, the more I've used it it is giving pretty decent inking which smooth and consistent.

As an experiment I purchased the NVIDIA TegraNote Stylus that comes with two tips, a small hard rubber tip and a softer chisel tip, the hard tip does not work but the Chisel Tip works pretty well if you can master the alignment, but results are no better then the Wacom Bamboo. This is the Stylus that the Tegra4 is able to detect if the CPU extensions were active in Windows RT, there is still a possibility that these could be enabled in the future.

The new player in Active Capacitive Stylus is LinkTec, they have created a stylus that uses a Quad A battery to create a Capacitive Charge on a small tip, I was hopeful that this would work well, but alas it hasn't produced great results, I believe the charge (you can feel it while using it) overwhelms the Capacitive Layer and causes some wavy inking. One very interesting side effect of the technology, as long as you make sure the tip touches the screen before your palm you get some level of palm rejection and seems to work even if slightly raise the tip above the screen, lift to far and you'll get stray marks.

At the end of the day, the Wacom Bamboo Capacitive Stylus is the most consistent, I find using a medium to medium thick pen in OneNote gives the best results, the thinner pens give very poor results.

So, save you money and pick up a high quality rubber tipped stylus if you are planning on doing some inking on the Surface 2.

The bummer is all of the fine tipped styluses I've tried work great on my Nokia Lumia 1520. Here's to hoping ink comes to OneNote on Windows Phone!!!
 
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