Pencil by FiftyThree
After their Moleskin merger with Book, FiftyThree is in the process of releasing their latest gadget: Pencil. As an avid Papers user I’m really excited about the product and would have pre-ordered it straight away, pre-orders are only available in the U.S. and in Canada for now .·´¯`(>▂<)´¯`·.
On their site is all the information you need including a product video which I refuse to link here since the camera mimics the perspective, or more precisely, the motion of the stylus… which frankly put, made me feel nauseous.
To briefly sum up the hard facts: Pencil…
- won’t roll around your desktop. It’s square shape prevents that.
- will connect to your Papers app with a tap. No more sub-menu fiddling. That’s great.1
- will not only give you a stylus and Wacom-inspired eraser, but:
“you can use your finger to smooth rough edges and blend colors directly on the page”.2
- comes in two version, the $59.95 walnut version is magnetic, so you can clip the stylus on your iPad. If you don’t need that you can choose the graphite version and save $10.
- will allow you to rest your palm on the screen.
- is rechargeable via USB (charge time: 90 min.) and you can go a full month with one charge.
- is not touch-sensitive… which is not a big deal to me.3
Currently I own 5 styluses at the moment, and I’m eager to see how it holds up against my longtime favorite: the Maglus.
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All hail Bluetooth. ↩
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That’s an extra function you won’t get with the build-in Papers tools. Reads like it’s the “smudge” tool from Photoshop. ↩
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I bought the pogo connect and it drives me slightly insane that once I activated it, I can’t use my normal stylus anymore to write some text. Writing small print with this thing isn’t possible since the touch-sensitivy on the iPad isn’t the fine-tuned experience I’m used to from the Mac+Wacom combination. ↩