Apple’s Steve Jobs famously disliked using a stylus on his smartphone. But there are plenty of reasons to dismiss his views. For one thing, your sausage fingers aren’t precise enough, and today’s oversized phone screens make typing with one hand difficult. A stylus solves both problems. Here are a few more reasons why you should give the stylus another chance.
Once we’ve made that decision, you can either pick up a phone with a stylus, like Samsung’s Galaxy Note, or buy a cheap third-party stylus and use it on your current device. Most of the latter, like the LIBERRWAY Universal touch capacitive Stylus ($6 for a 10-pack from Amazon) or the Friendly Swedish Stylus ($9 for a three-pack from Amazon), work with any touchscreen device — but to be safe, check compatibility before buying.
1. Enjoy easier swiping
A small, pointy pen can make all your screen interactions smoother and more intuitive. Consider signing digital documents, highlighting a phrase in larger text, selecting a group of documents, or jotting down handwritten notes. You can do this with your fingers, but it’s easier with a stylus. This will make all your actions faster: you’ll find yourself navigating menus and options screens faster.
In addition, Samsung has added some exclusive stylus features to the Note 8. For example, you can now draw your own emojis, swipe on a video to create an animated GIF, scribble notes on the lock screen, translate text on the screen and more.
Plus, there’s another benefit to cold weather: the stylus lets you do all of these things without taking off your glove.
2. Increase your accuracy
Look at your index finger—it’s hardly the most exact of instruments, is it? And yet so much of what we do on a smartphone, whether it’s tapping out a message on the keyboard or selecting a link on a webpage, requires precision.
The stylus’s smaller tip can provide the accuracy you’ve been missing. From selecting blocks of text in an email to aligning a row of matching crystals in a game, a dedicated pointing device will give you an edge. Once you adopt it, you should find yourself typing faster and committing fewer errors, especially if you’re working with a smaller screen where items are harder to hit.
3. Get detailed with art
When it comes to artistic applications, drawing with a stylus is a much better experience than doodling with your fingers. You can exert more control over strokes and details — you may even discover your hidden creativity.
Try an app like the free Adobe Photoshop Sketch(for Android and iOS), which lets you draw with a variety of brush types and apply a ton of effects. Another leading choice is Autodesk SketchBook(for Android and iOS), which offers more sketching tools, including a ruler and a shape drawer. While unlocking the full SketchBook toolset costs a one-time fee of $5, you can still use a large number of brushes and tools for free.
In addition to drawing, if you edit any photos or videos on your phone, the stylus allows you to select pixels more precisely. This makes it much easier to choose an accurate color or clean crop the background.
4. Keep your screen clear
It doesn’t take long for a clean smartphone to become dirty and fingerprinted. The dust can blur what you see on screen: Watching a movie on a big phone isn’t as much fun when you have to watch it through a layer of grit left over from your hands. You can avoid this expression if you keep staring at your pen.
It’s not just about looks. Almost every smartphone carries a lot of bacteria, but touching it with a stylus instead of a dirty finger can keep germs from constantly contaminating it.
Stains aside, your fingers not only stain the screen, but also blur what you see when you interact with the app. For example, using your finger to open subtitles on Netflix causes you to miss a lot of action when you tap on the screen. A stylus can cover much less ground.
5. Hop around a big screen
While a stylus can provide more accuracy on a small screen, it can also help you navigate on a larger screen — especially if you have small hands.
As smartphones grow in size and the front bezels shrink, your fingers have to make all sorts of motions to pull the screen from side to side. But the stylus can reach further, making it easy to type and slide, no matter how small your hand.
Of course, to operate a large phone, you still need both hands. But when it comes to scrolling down a web page or tapping ICONS at either end of the screen, the stylus makes things a lot easier.
