I live in the Swiss mountains and here, when the Winter arrives, you don’t wanna go out without gloves. But what about my iPhone ? Well, this year, to palliate this issue I got myself an iPhone stylus. It’s called the Pogo Sketch or Pogo Stylus and it sells for 15$ from its producer Ten One Design.
I know what you’re gonna tell me, hold on, a stylus ? With the iPhone ? Sacrilege! No but seriously, there are times when you just don’t have a choice.
The stylus itself might look confusing to you at first, the reason is that at its end, instead of the pointed plastic piece you would expect, you actually have a ball of conductive foam. It is intriguing, but it proved itself to be pretty solid. So quality-wise it’s a good product.
When I saw the first snow arrive this thursday I took it with me for the day. It’s actually pretty reactive on the screen, you might want to put a little pressure on it at first but it seems like it works better after you’ve been using it for a little while. For using it with gloves I found it to be extremely useful, even tho it might be frustrating sometimes when you need to do a two-finger gesture.
On the negative side I think the iPhone is actually a lot less fun to use with a stylus even tho it adds this little professional touch that it’s sometimes lacking.
Other negative point, you might not be able to use it if you have a screen protecting plastic.
Furthermore the stylus is also compatible with your Macbook trackpad (You can make your signature and little drawings but it won’t be of much use until somebody finds a way to put the touchpad in absolute mode).
So yeah I guess Steve was right, fingers are better, but in some cases a stylus can still find itself to be very helpful.
Winter is coming. You guys should have a contest for one of these bad boys.
My wife has Parkinson’s disease, and finds that one of these is about the only way she can reliably hit what she aims at on the iPhone.
We are grateful for this product.
Sorry in advance for the long post but I’ve got some experience with the Pogo Sketch to share as well.
I bought a Pogo Sketch because it was difficult to draw on the iPhone using my fingers, which were always covering my view of what I was drawing. I found a Canadian retailer who sold it to me for $9.00. But shipping was outrageous at $15.00. I wish I had bought 4 or 5 of them at once for two reasons:
The cost of shipping for such a small item would be spread out over several of the pens. People in other countries will probably find this as well. Maybe find a few close friends to go in together and share the cost of shipping.
Also I don’t think the construction of the stylus will stand up to constant use and it would be nice to have a backup stylus or two.
As mentioned in the article, The Pogo Sketch has some kind of a foam tip (probably plastic covered metal fibers similar to steel wool) and I can see that even after only a few hours of use that the foam is getting flattened. Also, it hasn’t happened yet but I worry that the foam will get torn off through the course of use, storage and travel.
The pen works well but you will need to learn to apply the right amount of pressure to get it to work consistently. Trying to use it like pencil with variable pressure will result in unreliable results. If the stylus had more weight it would probably work more reliably but it’s made of aluminum and is very, very light. It’s like holding a plastic drinking straw.
But the bottom line is that it works, and my iPhone drawings are much better with the Pogo Sketch. I use it for drawing ideas in Sketchbook and adding them to notes in Evernote.