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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Google should be supporting active pens in a much bigger way. There are certain "niches" in the app ecosystems where the iPad and the iPhone are much better than Android, and that's mainly because of Google's almost complete disregard for those categories of apps such as: games, music tools, and drawing/designing.

Rumors are Google begin to address gaming at next I/O, and some rumors said they will announce something about audio latency improvements in Android, too. But I'm not expecting them to announce anything about drawing yet.

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I don't think Google dropped the ball on active digitizers, other OEMs did. From what I remember, at least two other companies (HTC and Lenovo) also tried active digitizers on tablets. And soon after that (right around the original Note), Google started adding more stylus APIs in ICS.

Unfortunately, the HTC and Lenovo tablets flopped (and I can say, from personal experience, the HTC Flyer deserved it - the stylus was laggy and very disappointing) and only the Note took off. It's really disappointing how many OEMs are going after the Note's screen size and how none of them are going after the active stylus (though I'm sure Samsung's Wacom investment has complicated that). My Note 2's stylus is one of the few reasons I put up with TouchWiz.

I hope so.

Drawing/handwriting on the iPad isn't great either; the software (3rd party) is good but the hardware isn't. Samsung on the other hand have the hardware spot on, but their software could be a (lot) better.

Apparently the Surface Pro pen is just as good; that doesn't surprise me in the slightest because Microsoft have been active in that area for a long, long time.

A proper pressure-sensitive stylus from Apple would be nice. Out of the few pressure-sensitive bluetooth styli available from third-parties, only two (Pogo Connect & Jot Touch 4) support palm rejection. Even the prototype pen showed by Adobe during MAX didn't seem to have palm rejection implemented. It just feels really awkward holding a pen without putting the palm on a surface somewhere. The drawings apps on iOS are so good though, and if I have to pick between good hardware/weak software (Android tablets w/ S-pen) and good software/weak hardware (iPads w/ 3rd party pen), I would choose the latter.

Also, the Surface Pro pen apparently had issues supporting Photoshop, and it didn't get fixed until a (beta) driver update released two days ago.

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