Apple Pencil Wants to Take on Samsung’s S-Pen
What do you do when Apple announces an Apple pencil? You write about it. Then, because it’s so similar to Samsung’s S-Pen, you compare them.
Whether you’re sketching in the park, painting a watercolor portrait, or drafting a blueprint, Apple Pencil gives you a variety of tools in a single instrument. You hold it, but it doesn’t hold you back.
The new S-Pen most recently arrived with the Galaxy Note 5. It came as a stylus on the side of the smartphone and could be used on the Note 5 even when the display was off. Sounded fancy enough.
In comparison, the Apple Pencil came along with the 12.7 inch iPad Pro that was just announced at their 2015 event today. Now here’s the annoying bit about the Apple pencil – you have to buy it for $99, which is approximately Rs.5,000. It’s unfair, because they make an expensive iPad with this new stylus and then don’t even give you the full stylus in one set. It’s like buying an iPhone without the battery.
Moving on, we see that the Apple Pencil is charged by directly plugging it into the iPad Pro while the S-Pen is independent. The problem with that is, that you already have a 12.7 inch iPad and if one has to charge the pencil, that too will be attached to the length of the iPad. So how does one fit it in their bag pack? Seems uncomfortable. That being said, it has a battery life of this novel Pencil is 10-12 hours and it gives you 30 minutes of usage with just 15 seconds of charge. That seems grudgingly, impressive.
The Apple pencil doesn’t really have a ‘wrong side’ either, so you can write using both side. Whereas, you can use the S-Pen only on the ‘right side’. Not just this, you can draw lines of varying thickness depending on how much pressure you apply and you can even shade if you tilt the pencil and use it at a slant.
Now all we’re waiting for is to get our hands on the Apple ‘Stylus’ (and the iPad Pro) to tell you if it really lives up to the hype.
