Work or play?

I think we are back to what are you doing with it!

For play (that is, entertainment via browsing and games) the finger works fine in tablets and you don't have to keep track of where your stylus is. For work, when you have a lot of information in the screen and/or need some precision on what you are doing, then a stylus gives you that precision.

Remember, Jobs only went anti-stylus after the Apple Newton died in its infancy (it was beaten up by Palm among others which proved to be extremely popular using a very basic stylus). Yes, smartphones have since killed Palm and the other PDAs, but not because they didn't use a stylus and not for a long time.

No stylus - no business

I have tried hard to like the finger based UIs and failed. Asides from getting the idea that the real business plan was "sell the hardware cheap, make a killing on the cleaning tools" I have found many websites, mostly forums, to be at least difficult to use with either finger of capacitive stylus. It was always either

a) Increase font size so I can hit the forum entry reliably loosing (already scarce) screen real estate

b) Zoom - select - Unzoom and clean the screen every hour to keep it readable

So I am back to where I was since 2003 - Induktive digitizer (WACOM or NTrig) and a stylus. No zooms, no need to enlarge the font size to 200+ percent.

In addition to this the stylus has a number of additional benefits:

+ Quick note taking simply by writing into MS-Journals/OneNote/SNote without Handwriting-Recognition

+ Limited writing into forums etc. WITH Handwriting-Recognition

+ Fine lines drafting/drawing during discussions about UI etc.

+ Commenting on documents (PDF, MS-Office) with handwritten notes

Since a tablet takes a lot less place than a net/notebook and has no "Chinese Wall" between me and the people I talk to handwritting is a lot more "accepted" on the table. And the "clean" state of a stylus-based tablet makes it more acceptable to others, just like a piece of paper / legal pad that gets swapped around the table with everybody adding notes/comments

And having used both "capacitiy styli" (for iPad and Iconia A500) and the real things (for Note 10.1, Thinkpad Tablet 1 and half a dozend tablet pc) - one is a thick way crayon and the other is a finely honed pencil

I generally use the iPad for day to day stuff. I also used to use a windows tablet PC. I love the touch interface in the iPad and the fact that it works so well by hand. I don't love that you can't use a pen in any sensible way for writing and drawing - I am not an artist, I am a software engineer but my most use tool is a pad of paper.

I used to love the pen system on the tabletPC, and that I could write and draw on it, like the pad but then search for things. I did most of my open university using it but using windows with a pen was not a lot of fun in general.

A system that combines both of those would be fantastic. The note 10.1 seems quite close but not cigar, but I will probably get one anyway. Would certainly be interested to see what the surface was like.

stylus

I use a Rocketfish stylus with my iPod Touch because it's easier for me to tap some of the tiny icons that way. It also works with Android kit.

Note / Note 2 and either the integrated SPen or any other pen for WACOM-based tablet pc. Some are the size, feel and use of a ballpoint pen and should work nicely

Handwriting

You people talking about using it for hand writing notes / annotations or worse yet actually using it for text input must have far better handwriting than I do. I had decent handwriting as a kid when I was taught it in school, but it has atrophied since I rarely write anything longer than a sentence or two for the past 20 years.

I can see it for the types of tasks (drafting, photo editing, etc.) that have historically been done with Wacon digitizers, but I don't see the appeal otherwise. I guess by including it rather than making it an option Samsung wants to differentiate itself, which is fine, and it would add less than a dollar to the price.

I can't help thinking that if Apple had done it, the haters would have said Apple was hoping they'd lose their iStylus and be forced to buy another from Apple for $29.99 :)