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At 5.1" (130mm) with a price tag of $80, the Pogo Connect sports a stylish silver barrel with a rubber tip at one end and decorative cap at the other. There is a single button on the side and a LED light. It uses one AAA battery and because it’s Bluetooth 4.0 that battery will last a long time. A little wider than a regular stylus, the pen lacks heft, but it fits comfortably in the hand and has good balance. The tip is the same thick dark rubber that one finds on traditional styluses and is magnetic for easy replacement. Ten One promises new tip designs in the future.
Pogo Connect doesn’t pair with the iPad in the usual way a Bluetooth device would. To assist in getting everything set up correctly, users can download the free Pogo Connect app to link the stylus and then each of the 19 compatible apps - up from the original 13 - goes its own way. Some apps like Procreate just find the pen, while others like Noteshelf require users to poke around in the settings. It's easy.
One of the more glaring flaws when I first tested the Connect back in December was that it didn’t prevent palm marks, but recent updates have improved that functionality. How well it works seems to depend more upon the app than the stylus.
And what about pressure sensitivity? That’s the key selling point, but it’s very hit or miss. Some apps respond to pressure by varying line thickness, others opacity, and none respond to a light touch despite claims that the proprietary Crescendo Sensor technology requires “0 grams of activation force.” That said, the Connect outperforms captive models. It's not transformative, but with the right app and practice, sketching feels more holistic.
There are a couple of neat features worth mentioning: the Pogo Connect app has a pen locator, the button on the stylus works as an undo command, and the LED light indicates the active ink color. Still, while somewhat more intuitive than capitative models, the Pogo Connect needs a lot of tweaking before it warrants the hefty price tag, much less turns the iPad into a device that can compete with a dedicated graphics tablet.
A full list of compatible apps can be found here on the Ten One Design site.
Review by Amy Solomon, GiggleApps
Recently I have been given the opportunity to check out the iMarker by Griffin Technology, a stylus that is designed to work with the Crayola ColorStudio HD app, a coloring book for iPad.
I was excited to do so because my son, now five, has just gotten fully interested in coloring books, crayons and markers as his fine motor skills have become developed enough to start writing and effectively coloring while holding a pen or pencil correctly.
The iMarker resembles a large, chunky marker - ours specifically a lovely bright blue shade which my son really enjoys. Adults will need access to a very small, jeweler-sized phillips head screwdriver as the iMarker needs one AA battery to function. I was surprised by this as other styluses that we have do not need power to work, but I am impressed by the iMarker's ability to cancel out the contact one’s hand may have with the screen as contact here will not leave marks on the page - unlike working with other tool such as this.
After battery installation, one will notice that when the top button of the iMarker is pushed, the Crayola sign on the side of the stylus will light up with an LED that fades into different colors. There is also an audible “hum" sound from the iMarker, part of the mechanics that makes this stylus compatible with the Crayola ColorStudio HD, a sound which I found distracting, but neither my son nor my husband made note of this noise.
