S Pen

S Pen and paper

Almost every other device shed native stylus support years ago, leaving Samsung alone to evolve the relationship between tablet and stylus. Its Wacom-powered S Pen is far and away the best stylus experience on a tablet, with this year’s Note 10.1 a gentle refinement of last year’s efforts.

I hadn’t seriously used a stylus since giving up my Palm Treo for an iPhone 3GS (and that brief stint with my iPad), but I quickly found myself pulling out the S Pen as soon as I sat down with the Note. Writing with the S Pen is fast and responsive — it’s much more natural than with an iPad stylus, which is basically just a hacked attempt to mimic a fingertip. The 10.1 doesn’t just detect contact, but can differentiate numerous different pressure levels as well as the location of the pen tip when it’s hovering an inch or so away from the screen.

You can now use handwriting for almost every text field on the Note, which I used a lot. I’ve always found typing on a tablet keyboard to be quite clunky, and the longform writing for quick searches was a lot easier than straining my thumbs to hit the keys.

Handwriting recognition is far more useful on a tablet than a phone



The keyboard itself can also be switched into handwriting mode, which replaces the entire field with a big writing area. It’s still hidden — you have to tap and hold the gear icon to switch over — and every time you tap into a new text field it switches back to the regular keyboard. It was pretty annoying to handwrite the subject line of an email only to tap into the body and get a traditional keyboard again.

At the center of the S Pen experience, on both the 10.1 and the Note 3, is a new widget called Air Command that gathers together a bunch of tools designed specifically for the stylus. The Air Command widget automatically appears when you remove the pen from its holster, or it can be invoked at any time by holding the pen near the screen and clicking its one button. The semi-circular popup provides quick access to five S Pen tools: Action Memo, Scrap Booker, Screen Writer, S Finder, and Pen Window.

I’ve never really used a stylus that offered much value outside of the random sketch or doodle, but I used Air Command more than I thought I would. I was able to use S Window to open a small calculator, so I wouldn’t have to try to memorize any numbers before switching to the new app. I preferred to use S Window over multiscreen mode, since it felt like it didn’t interrupt what I was currently doing as much.

Then there’s S Note, which remains basically a scrapbook with handwriting recognition. The app is pretty useful, though it still suffers from some recognition problems. Writing at an angle or letting my handwriting slip as I wrote fast caused issues. Sometimes only half a heart would be recognized, a corner of a triangle would be flattened out, and S Note oddly can’t recognize a figure eight. But I really liked that I could write a quick note using as much space as I want, then quickly transform that into smaller printed text. The process was a little cumbersome — I had to switch from pen to selection mode, circle what I wanted, tap the Transform Into button, then select Text — but I got into a sort of awkward groove after doing this enough.

But aside from S Note, there just aren’t that many S Pen apps. Photoshop Touch is the same as on any other Android tablet plus added support for the pressure sensitive S Pen, though oddly it’s not preinstalled this year. And beyond that, there’s very little.