PICK THE PERFECT STYLUS

There's nothing quite like the intuitive, tactile experience of a digital stylus. Darien Graham-Smith explores the technology, and how to pick the best stylus for your needs

- Darien Graham-Smith

If you don't regularly use a computer stylus, you might imagine they're only relevant to artists an impression reinforced by the fact that they're often sold as optional add-ons to tablets, rather than essential components.

But try one out and you might well find that the stylus is a transformative way to interact with a computing device, especially a tablet. Holding it in your hand, like a pen, is much more comfortable than prodding and swiping on a hard glass screen with your fingers and thumb - and it allows you to be far more precise in your interactions, so it's particularly handy for apps with lots of buttons, or tapping in text on a small-scale virtual keyboard.

Needless to say, though, you don't have to use that keyboard - you can use the stylus to handwrite directly onto the screen. Today's handwriting recognition systems have come a long way since the much-ridiculed Apple Newton (see "Never out of style", p46); a tablet can instantly convert your scrawl into text with eerie accuracy, and things will probably only get better as AI is increasingly brought into play.

That's assuming you want to have your writing converted, of course. If you're making notes for your own reference or annotating an existing document, you may prefer to leave your notes in handwritten form -behind-the-scenes text recognition can still make it searchable and indexable. You can also use the stylus to cross out and highlight bits of text or make marginal sketches, and share them with others.

And while it may seem like a small, silly thing, it's also pleasing to note that a stylus won't leave greasy smudges on your screen and cheapen the appearance of your shiny, sexy tablet.

Different types of stylus