Hands On With the Samsung Staedtler S Pencil

BARCELONA—Why can't more styli be like this? Samsung's new Staedtler-branded stylus, the "Noris Digital," finally gets the shape and balance of a stylus right. It's shocking that it's taken so long to reinvent the wheel —or, in this case, the pencil.

For some reason, most of the styli out there tend to be cylinders or squashed cylinders. At best, they evoke a Sharpie. At worst, they roll helplessly across the table and onto the floor—I'm looking at you, Apple Pencil ($94.99 at Amazon) . The regular Samsung S Pen, like most Wacom pens, is basically an oval piece of plastic that doesn't have any soul to it.

So, enter Staedtler. They're a legendary German pen-and-pencil maker that Samsung has suborned to make a version of S Pen for its new Galaxy Tab S3 and Galaxy Book tablets. Its "Noris" pencil line is, according to Wikipedia, very popular in British schools. That makes them the European equivalent of the Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils that most Americans grew up with. But unlike the Ticonderoga pencils, which have a plain wooden feel, the Noris has a waxy non-slip coating.

The Staedtler S Pen just feels like somebody cored a Noris pencil and stuck a pointy rubber tip where the lead goes. It's that simple. It came to me in a pack with two actual pencils, to help me compare. It has the same hexagonal shape, and the same exterior coating. It's light, but not too light, and it feels like wood, even though it's plastic. Since it's Wacom technology, it doesn't need a battery.

I used the Staedtler S Pen along with a regular S Pen on a new Tab S3 and a Galaxy Book 12-inch. The first thing that hit me was how fine the fine-point tip is—it really does feel like a very, very sharpened pencil. Pressure sensitivity worked well, giving a more intense line when I pressed down, but I didn't get a good grip (so to speak) on the pencil's tilt sensitivity; perhaps I was using the wrong tool in Photoshop. While the app showed that the pencil was tilting, my strokes didn't change. I saw the tilt sensitivity work in an earlier demo with Samsung.

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Compared to the Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro ( at Amazon) , the Apple Pencil showed better palm rejection and (in my experience) more flexible tilt detection across multiple apps. But the Apple Pencil is also oddly balanced, it runs out of battery, and it rolls immediately off your desk the moment you put it down.

Samsung still hasn't announced the price and availability of the Staedtler S Pen(cil), but they have a lot of them around, so hopefully it'll come soon.