I don’t like calling myself an artist, but I do in fact draw, sketch and design characters (for fun now, but hopefully professionally in the near future). Sometimes when I’m not at home and find myself to be waiting for someone or something, or perhaps I get an idea or inspiration for a character or I just want to doodle, I would wish that I was able to just sketch on my phone since that’s always around me. Galaxy Note owners may not know what that feels like, but for an “artist”, it’s quite the conundrum as fingers and those terrible rubber tip styluses just don’t do the job well enough (yes, I know there are some insanely talented people that can do insanely impressive artwork with less than that). That’s where Adonit came in and saved the day.
Adonit is a company that makes fine point styluses for touch screen devices. I searched one day for such a thing and Adonit is the company that popped out the most out of the rest (there’s a couple more out there), and their Jot Flip was exactly what I was looking for; a stylus for the touch screen devices and a pen for whenever I need to write/sign/draw on paper.
Let me clear the air about these fine point styluses. Current day touch screens are capacitive touch screens, which means they work by detecting the electric charge in your skin (didn’t you know we have that?). It gets quite technical beyond this point but that’s what you need to know, and that styluses in general work the same way by conducting electric charges to the screen of the phone. The difference between the normal everyday stylusi (yes that’s another plural form of Stylus, I looked it up) and the fine point ones is that the latter has a smaller and finer tip, and usually have a small glass disk surrounding said tip to allow you to see what/where you’re drawing for more precision.
So, let’s take a look at the Jot Flip. It looks nice and has a premium feel to it, it definitely doesn’t look like something you’d buy from those random mall booths. The Jot Flip has the stylus on one end and the pen on the other, with a decent grip on the stylus side. There’s a cap that you have to twist off of the stylus end (which can be twisted on the pen end, so you don’t have to worry about losing it). The pen itself actually is tucked in the stylus itself, and with a twist of the barrel it will emerge in a very nice manner. The pen itself is fine-tipped and has a nice flow to it.
Anywho, we’re here to talk about the stylus itself. First thing you need to get used to is the writing angle. It’s not a terrible angle by any means, but there is a limit of some sort, even if it may feel that the glass disk is lying flat on the screen. Also, you need to be wary that your phone can and will still detect your palm or rogue fingers. You need to adjust your hand so that the palm doesn’t touch the screen, or lay it on your table and draw as if it were a canvas painting.
Once that’s out of the way, the magic is ready to happen. I found it quite joyful to finally be able to draw with some precision! Really, the stylus was the only missing tool in my mobile arsenal (Autodesk’s Sketchbook does the rest). The flow was smooth, and the precision was almost as advertised (I wouldn’t say it has pixel perfect precision, but it’s impressively precise).
Best of all, the Jot Flip will not break your wallet with its $34.99 price tag (roughly equivalent to 150 AED) directly from their site, or you can get it for 180 AED from your local iStyle (gotta call and check if they still have them in stock).
