Stylus Pad

Stylus Pad and other Stylus hardware devices are now gaining attention again! It is a usual thing that every trend and fashion completes a cycle and begins again, from where it starts, but in a different form. This fact applies to everything. Right from the music that we listen to the clothes that we wear, we get back to the old trends at some point of time. Now, it is time for the stylus pads again, after a long time when the technology of touching with fingers got popular and killed the stylus usage. Recently, Samsung too has announced that its tablet products may release along with a stylus pen, most probably the Samsung Galaxy Note’s S Pen!

Stylus and Its History

We can date back to the late 1980s or the early 1990s when the stylus pad attracted many takers. Many tech companies released many supportive tools for the stylus technology. Even Microsoft launched special windows for the stylus computing some twenty years ago. Many companies like the Toshiba, IBM and Fujitsu released many ranges of tablet PCs that created a new wave in computing. The entire tablet PCs released at those times used stylus pads as the only mode of input. Hence, Stylus became a very important tool then. The real reason was that, stylus tablets were using the resistive type of touch pads, which cannot function without stylus hardware.

The Change

Even though the stylus tablets used the resistive touch pads in 1990s, the mid 2000s witnessed a major change in the tablet PC technologies. Many tablet manufacturers ignored the resistive touch pads and the stylus hardware and started using the capacitive touch pads. This major shift accounted for the death of stylus pads. Human hands were just enough to use a capacitive touch pad. In the year of 2010, Apple released the epic iPad tablet with a capacitive touch pad, which set the benchmark for rest of the tablet PC manufacturers. Late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, even went to an extent of joining a stylus pad to the list of failed tech products.

The Comeback

After the inception of capacitive touch pads, only very few devices still stick to the stylus hardware. Mostly, these devices are for the gaming stuff and not the regular tablets. This is the reason why we do not see a tablet coming along with a stylus pad nowadays. However, Samsung has now initiated another shift in the tablet touch pads. Even though Samsung tablets do not come with a stylus pad,Samsung Galaxy Note, a smart phone, has hit the markets with a stylus. The Galaxy Note has also earned many positive reviews, as it can allow the user to do any drawing or painting on the go with the use of the stylus. Adding support to this move by Samsung, many application developers have also created a good number of applications, which needs an input through a stylus.

Stylus has got better

Twenty years back, the stylus pad technology did not reach any great heights, even though it was a new form of input. Many limitations in the technology prevented accuracy of computing when people used the stylus hardware. However, Samsung’s S Pen is awesome and has done away many limitations, which promises a comeback of stylus pad or other stylus hardware!