Roger Fingas
Stylus maker Adonit on Tuesday launched its latest model, the Pixel, advancing its own technology and responding to new competition provided by Apple Pencil.
One of the most important improvements is predictive touch, which should boost accuracy and reduce latency, two of the main perks of choosing Apple's stylus. The Pixel also has 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, offset correction, and palm rejection in supported apps. Full feature support must be implemented by app developers using a provided SDK — compatible apps so far include titles like Astropad and Autodesk SketchBook.
One distinguishing design trait is the 1.9-millimeter "Pixelpoint" tip, which is said to offer "paper-like" drag. Another is a set of shortcut buttons for erasing, undo, and redo actions. To preserve battery life, the stylus turns on when it's picked up, and shuts off when it's put down.
Perhaps the main advantage of the Pixel over the Pencil is that Adonit's stylus can be used with any Bluetooth 4.0-compatible iOS device, whereas the Pencil will only pair with an iPad Pro. When an app doesn't offer support, the Pixel should still operate as a "dumb" stylus.
The Pixel goes on sale today in black or bronze at a price of $79.99, about $19 cheaper than the Pencil.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Oliver Haslam
11 Comments
Apple Pencil competitor(Apple is doomed) but you still need an iPad Pro to use it.
It becomes a dumb stylus when not supported, so I don't expect support outside iPad Pro.
I owned an Adonit Jot Touch, and which was supposed to be pixel perfect. It wasn't. The Apple Pencil was soooo much more accurate it was like going from trying to draw with a track pad to a Wacom. To be honest, I think the Pencil is even better than my Intuos. I can't wait for Affinity Designer and Photo to become available for the iPad Pro. (Though right now Procreate is handling really well. But the Affinity Apps on Mac are amazing.) Part of me wants Adonit to succeed. But I don't think they're ever going to get to the point of being a legit competitor with Apple. I suspect this fall they'll introduce an iPad Pro mini. Eventually there will be no iPad that doesn't support Pencil. At which point Adonit will end up becoming the stylus you buy for an Android tablet that didn't come with it. (Does Adonit even work with Android?) I feel bad or them, but they never found a way to really do a stellar job on the iPad.
And were all those added feature so hard for apple to have figure out?