The patent includes details of how the stylus could be used with different nibs or pen heads to write on different materials, so that it can be used with ink in notebooks, or with graphite for pencil drawings, or with markers for whiteboards.
I don't need to tell you that Samsung has something of a fixation on pen-based interfaces — take the pocket-sized Galaxy Note and the forthcoming Galaxy Note 10.1 for instance — so it's intriguing to see what they think the humble stylus could be better at.
There were a couple of small digital photos of people's faces stuck to the front of the card, and it came with a small stylus that could be used, Burns said, to touch a face on the card, which would then dial that person's number — a pictorial address book for someone who was illiterate.
In the patent, which is called Stylus With Touch Sensor, Apple notes one example of how an array of touch sensors that are capable of accurately determine finger location and action on a stylus shaft could be useful in supporting advanced device interactions — such as the ability to detect that a user is rotating the stylus.
I wish it was a tablet, and the whole stylus thing could be seen as a great accessory (maybe for kids) and that no one would ever, ever have to hold one of these things up to their face ever again.
Knuepfel's mechanical stylus demonstrates one way that could be changed.
For years, he had been planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced.
However, the HP Slate is said to come with a stylus and if said stylus is an active digitizer like Wacom tablets, it could be awesome and what's been missing from Windows tablets for so long.
The turntable could be used with an arm and stylus made by other firms.
Steve Jobs famously said "if you see a stylus, they blew it" during a Q and A for iOS 4, and when he unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, he asked derisively "Who wants a stylus?" But the landscape has changed, and sophisticated stylus devices that offer highly-tuned input for drawing and fine detail work could be a great boon to those who want to use iOS devices for digital creation.
The strands could be reconfigured using a changeable exit on the stylus tip, meaning it could shape one continuous brush, a spread out arrangement of individual strands, or various other permutations.
