Most drawing apps have sliders to control things like brush
size and opacity, but using just your finger or a regular stylus, it's hard to
feel you have total control. Ten One Design's Pogo Connect Bluetooth 4.0 Smart
Pen is a pressure-sensitive; we hoped it would make drawing on that touchscreen
feel more like drawing on our Mac using a Wacom graphics tablet. But the
pressure sensitivity features vary between the 13 and counting compatible
drawing and note-taking apps. In ArtSense and Photoshop Touch, for example,
pressing hard gave us darker lines, but didn't change the width, and in Paper
by FiftyThree, the thickness changes but not the opacity.
The Pogo Connect uses low-power Bluetooth 4.0, so the AAA
battery should last a really long time but this also limits what devices it
works with. The iPad 1 and 2 don't have Bluetooth 4.0, but you can still use
Pogo Connect with them if you have the Pogo Bridge app running on an iPhone 4S
or 5. We’re glad to have the workaround, even if pairing did take a few tries.
But pairing is clunky on a new iPad 4, too. You don't use
the Settings app; just fire up a compatible app and it'll either pair with the
Pogo Connect automatically, or you'll have to poke around the in-app settings
and find a switch to enable its use in just that app. We wish the apps told us
up front how they would react to the Pogo Connect. Using trial and error, we
wound up erasing our drawings more than once by bumping the Pogo Connect's
button with our finger: whaddya know, it's for pairing and undo.
The pressure sensitivity is trial and error, too. Sometimes
very light brushes across the screen didn’t register at all, but other times
they did. Pressing super hard would sometimes show no change from pressing
lightly. When it works, the effect is really cool, but it was hard to learn
exactly what to do in each app to get the results we wanted.
The bottom line. Ten One Design obviously put a lot of
thought into this. The tip is removable, and they plan to offer different tips
later on. There's a Pogo Connect app for the iPad you can use to disconnect the
pen if needed, and even help you find it if you've misplaced it. But if you're
imagining the sensitivity and precision control of a dedicated graphics tablet,
the Pogo Connect might feel more like a regular (and pricey) iPad stylus.
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Information
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Website: www.tenonedesiqn.com
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Price: $79.95
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Requirements: iPad 3 or 4, compatible app(s)
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(+) Long-lasting battery. Feels nice. Soft tip. Free
Pogo Connect app lets you find it if it's lost.
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(-) Doesn't work with iPad mini or first* or second-gen
iPads, without a workaround.
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