MWC 2022: Hands On with Samsung Staedtler S Pencil

Why can't more than styli be like this? Samsung's new Staedtler-branded stylus, the "Noris Digital," finally gets the shape and remainder of a stylus right. It's shocking that it's taken so long to reinvent the wheel —or, in this instance, the pencil.

MWC Bug Art For some reason, most of the styli out at that place tend to exist cylinders or squashed cylinders. At best, they evoke a Sharpie. At worst, they roll helplessly across the table and onto the floor—I'm looking at y'all, Apple Pencil. The regular Samsung Southward Pen, like near Wacom pens, is basically an oval piece of plastic that doesn't have whatsoever soul to it.

So, enter Staedtler. They're a legendary German pen-and-pencil maker that Samsung has suborned to make a version of S Pen for its new Galaxy Tab S3 and Milky way Volume tablets. Its "Noris" pencil line is, according to Wikipedia, very popular in British schools. That makes them the European equivalent of the Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils that nigh Americans grew up with. Just unlike the Ticonderoga pencils, which have a patently wooden feel, the Noris has a waxy non-slip coating.

The Staedtler S Pen just feels like somebody cored a Noris pencil and stuck a pointy rubber tip where the lead goes. It's that simple. It came to me in a pack with two bodily pencils, to help me compare. It has the same hexagonal shape, and the same exterior coating. It's low-cal, but not too light, and information technology feels similar forest, even though information technology's plastic. Since it's Wacom technology, it doesn't need a bombardment.

I used the Staedtler S Pen along with a regular S Pen on a new Tab S3 and a Galaxy Book 12-inch. The outset thing that hit me was how fine the fine-point tip is—it really does feel like a very, very sharpened pencil. Pressure sensitivity worked well, giving a more intense line when I pressed downwardly, only I didn't get a good grip (so to speak) on the pencil's tilt sensitivity; possibly I was using the incorrect tool in Photoshop. While the app showed that the pencil was tilting, my strokes didn't change. I saw the tilt sensitivity work in an before demo with Samsung.

Compared to the Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil showed better palm rejection and (in my experience) more than flexible tilt detection across multiple apps. Merely the Apple Pencil is also oddly counterbalanced, information technology runs out of bombardment, and it rolls immediately off your desk the moment you put it down.

Samsung all the same hasn't announced the price and availability of the Staedtler S Pen(cil), just they accept a lot of them effectually, then hopefully it'll come up presently.