Capacitive touchscreens are great — if you want a finger friendly, multitouch tablet or smartphone with an on-screen keyboard, large icons, and no stylus required. But what you lose with a multitouch capacitive screen is accuracy and palm rejection capabilities. And that means handwriting and drawing are a lot tougher on tablets and phones with capacitive screens. In fact, for the most part, they just won’t recognize input from a stylus or the back of your fingernail at all.
Smartphone maker HTC released a stylus last year that’s designed to work with capacitive screens though. The HTC ST C400 is actually designed for the HTC HD2 smartphone, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with other devices as well.
The ST C400 went on sale last month and you can pick one up for about £16.99 in the UK, or about $23 in the US. The stylus apparently has a magnetic charge which lets it work with a standard touchscreen. I haven’t seen any reports of anyone using this stylus with a touchscreen notebook like the Asus Eee PC T91MT yet. If you’ve had a chance to try one out, let us know about your experiences in the comments.
HTC didn't release a capacitive stylus. They just put their name on an existing DAGI model. But they have patented an idea for a capacitive stylus, which appears to be a proper pointy one and not just a surrogate finger like all the current ones. No idea if/when it will be released for sale.
Or one could always just use a AA or AAA battery as a stylus…
Or one could always just use a AA or AAA battery as a stylus…