Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus (for iPad) Review

Drawing on the iPad without the right tool is more like finger painting than using a pen or a brush. Drawing with a stylus is a more feasible option. Wacom's Intuos Creative Stylus ($99.95 direct) is the company's first foray into professional-grade pressure-sensitive iPad styli. But with less expensive options like the $80 Pogo Connect and the extremely precise Adonit Jot Touch ($99.99), Wacom has some stiff competition, especially considering the Creative Stylus is priced on the high side.

Design and Setup
The Intuos Creative Stylus comes in a small, but sturdy case that holds two extra rubber nubs, the included AAAA battery, and the stylus. The pen itself is 5.3 inches long, 0.4 inches wide, and is very light at .88 ounce. The top half is made of brushed aluminum and the bottom is covered in a comfortable soft touch grip. It's available in all black or black and blue. The rubber tip feels and writes like a magic marker on glass.

The concave button rocker allows your thumb to rest naturally on the indent. The programmable buttons, used for undoing, redoing, or erasing (depending on your settings), don't feel as sturdy as the rest of the pen, however. Running your finger over them causes them to move just enough to activate accidentally with the smallest bit of pressure. You can situate the stylus so the buttons aren't under your fingers, but then you lose easy access to them.

The Creative Stylus is compatible with all Retina-display iPads (3rd- and 4th gen.) as well as the iPad mini. I was able to pair the pen with my 4th-generation iPad via Bluetooth 4.0 without any difficulty, and it worked almost all the time after the initial pairing. Whenever I couldn't get the pen to pair with the tablet, which wasn't often, I simply restarted Wacom's Bamboo Paper app (free in the Apple App Store). The Creative Stylus also works with relatively few third-party apps, but names like Adobe and Autodesk are on the list.

Putting Pen to Tablet
Wacom claims the Intuos Creative Stylus offers 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity. Rather than a series of steps increasing in opacity, the stylus creates a smooth transition, making a very natural looking stroke. My lightest touches didn't always register, though, sometimes making it difficult to get the same type of  sketches I could make with pencil and paper.

Pinching and moving around with two fingers in the app zooms and pans the canvas respectively. As I was sketching, I often found that the opaque nub on the pen obscured the line I was creating. The Adonit Jot Touch, with its clear disc tip, makes it easier to view what you're drawing. Opacity aside, drawing was always a smooth experience. The motion never stuttered on the glass touch screen, nor did stop-and-go strokes distort the lines I was creating. Palm rejection worked flawlessly, even though drawing on glass does take some time getting used to.

After a week of testing, the pen's battery was still at more than 90 percent, which is a good thing, since the AAAA cell isn't rechargeable or as available as, say, a AAA cell. Wacom says the battery can last over 150 hours, and so far I have no reason to doubt that claim.

While the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus with offers a nice writing experience with pressure sensitivity, the $100 price is probably too much for casual sketchers. They would likely be better served by the $80 Pogo Connect, which has a heavier, squishy tip similar to the Wacom stylus, and also offers pressure sensitivity. There's also the same-price clear-tipped Adonit Jot Touch, which lets you make more precise movements. Both of these styli earn our Editors' Choice.