iPad Pens: AluPen and/or Bamboo Stylus

Finally this week has my bamboo stylus arrived from Hong Kong, as it was cheaper to buy than local.

Cost $31 including shipping.

I have been using AluPen for almost a year and was carefully avoiding buying any other pens since I was extremely disappointed by almost all except AluPen.

Now I read a lot of rave reviews about bamboo stylus and decided to buy and after a few hours I can clearly say it is a good pen.

BUY.

(Make sure you had the chance to test the Pen because choosing between AluPen and Bamboo is not always easy. I like to use Faber Castell 0.7 thick thick wooden pencils and then I switch back to my wooden 0.5 Lamy pencil and then there is also the new 0.5 Faber Castell triangle rubber pencil which comes in handy.)

Will this mean I will be happy, no! The problem lies between the keyboard (or Pen) and the iPad; which means me. I just can not cope to really work efficiently with the iPad no matter how hard I try. Using about 10 note taking applications and going through iterations of versions but still fail. Most of them are used differently and don't give full flexibility, are slow, buggy etc.

The biggest issues are:

• With the pens you cannot write as small as on paper and if you try like I do then you'll probably end up missing always the initial stroke. All applications that automatically zoom or have a real manual gesture zoom are good but hard to work with.
• Some strokes get lost, especially the first ones of a Character etc.

I cannot use the iPad for note taking. I should stop trying.

 I failed to use Windows XP Tablet PC on Motion Computing around 2004, because XP Tablet and Windows 7 tablet is not really made for use with a Pen. They never made the applications behave the same and your arm had to cover distances that were by far more than inconvenient and inefficient. Compare what you can achieve with a perfect mouse like Logitech MX 1000 or the newer models.

Nothing beats a letter/a4 notepad with a Lamy or Faber Castell pencil.

Maybe the KNO Tablet or something else, an letter/A4 iPad anyone?