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A Pen for Your Thoughts
Given the current direction of technology, especially in the wake of Windows 8 along with the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, touch interfaces are only going to become more important in the coming years. We’ve harped on some of the touchpad manufacturers for producing less than stellar hardware, and there’s certainly the potential for the same to happen with stylus devices. At least for now, the active digitizer stylus market is pretty limited—Wacom and N-trig are the only real contenders, with the other stylus devices basically just using capacitive input (as far as I’m aware). So how do Wacom and N-trig compare?
Honestly, I’m not fully equipped to judge between the two—for one, I haven’t really used a Wacom device in some time (other than poking around at a Surface Pro briefly), but second we’d really need an artist or someone that takes copious notes if we were to try to declare a winner. I’ve looked around to see what others are saying on the Wacom vs. N-trig question; many prefer Wacom, but quite a few have also stated that the new G4 hardware from N-trig goes a long way towards bringing them to parity (e.g. in the Sony VAIO Duo 11). Ultimately, without proper hardware (meaning, a G4 N-trig device to go with the DuoSense Pen2 and comparable Wacom hardware), I obviously can’t call one better or worse.
From my use of the Flyer, N-trig’s stylus worked fine for the most part, but palm rejection was an issue for me, and that’s something the G4 sensor and controller aim to address. We couldn’t review Intel’s latest CPUs by looking at Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, so judging N-trig’s latest Pen2 on the basis of time spent with the Flyer is something of a misfire. (So why did N-trig send the Flyer? Because they were paying for the hardware samples, and purchasing a bunch of Sony VAIO Duo 11 laptops would cost five times as much!) Even with current hardware, however, I feel like the end result would be like keyboard and mouse preferences—they’re highly subjective as to what works best for you. If you happen to fall into the category of users that want/need a stylus, trying to get some personal time with a platform before making a purchase decision would be strongly advised.
Regardless of which stylus vendor you might feel is better, however, we do like seeing competition as it forces companies to innovate and improve rather than resting on their laurels. Imagine where Intel would be without the likes of AMD, ARM, Cyrix, MIPS, etc. over the years; or where Windows would be if we had no Mac OS/OS X, Android, Linux, etc. Wacom feels more like the reigning heavyweight champion, with plenty of device wins including the recent Microsoft Surface Pro. In contrast, N-trig has noteworthy wins with the Sony VAIO Duo 11/13, and hopefully they can get more Tier 1 designs with G4 hardware going forward. The simple fact that Microsoft and Sony are choosing to include a stylus, plus other devices like the Galaxy Note and HP Slate, suggests that contrary to Steve Jobs’ bold claim, the days of the stylus are not coming to a close with the advent of capacitive touch. If N-trig (and Wacom) have anything to say about it, we’re only just starting to see the proliferation of inexpensive, quality devices with stylus support.
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