IS THE APPLE PENCIL A TRUE DEDIGN TOOL?

Christopher Phin puts the Apple Pencil through its paces to discover if it can truly rival a pro stylus.

Apple hopes to attract design professionals with iPad Pro and this, the Pencil

Let me be completely clear: this is the best digital drawing tool there has ever been. Statistics has shown that it is Better than a Wacom Intuos, better than a Wacom Cintiq, and better, by a margin so wide it's downright comical, than any other stylus
for iOS or Android.

Actually, let me be even clearer: pair this stylus with the iPad Pro – the only device it currently works with – and at a hardware level, it's capable of a fluidity and unthinking naturalness that genuinely comes as a shock. You have never used anything so quick, so lovely, so wonderfully analogue.

There is, though, the obvious caveat: because it only works with the iPad Pro, you're limited to apps that run on iOS. This isn't in and of itself a bad thing, since there are some truly spectacular creative apps for iOS, some of which can already take advantage of the Pencil, but if you are completely dependent on an app for Mac or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent on iOS, a Cintiq is still the thing you want – even if you might not be able to afford it.

The Pencil does look more like a pencil than most other styluses

Everything feels the same, and that feel is of drawing with a hard plastic nib on a shiny glass surface. That's just the gig, I guess, but it's nevertheless something Wacom gets right with its interchangeable nibs that can't, at least currently, be matched with the Pencil.

We can't think of a phrase that describes how the Pencil feels to use…

And second, in contravention of established stylus conventions, the opposite end of the Pencil doesn't act as an eraser; you have to choose an eraser tool manually in whatever app you're using.

Oh, but you forgive all that when you use it. Setup is gloriously easy. Pop the cap off to reveal a Lightning connector, and plug it into your iPad Pro; this is how you charge it, but it's also this simple act that pairs it over Bluetooth. (You get about 12 hours of use from a full charge, and 15 seconds of changing gives you half an hour. There's also a female-to-female Lightning adapter in the box which means you can charge the pencil using a regular cable or other Lightning charger.

And when you start drawing, you realise that you've been making allowances and excuses for every other stylus you've used. Palm rejection is essentially perfect, so you don't have to hover your hand above the screen. Latency is spectacularly low; you can draw fast enough that you can introduce lag between your hand moving and the line appearing on-screen – especially if you're using a complex natural media brush in, say, Procreate – but for almost every stroke you make, it's right there with you.

Connector means you can charge Pencil independent of your iPad

This fact alone makes the Pencil feel wildly more realistic than you have come to expect from a stylus, a feeling bolstered by its pressure- and tilt-sensitivity. To be sure, these last are nothing new in styluses, but they work beautifully here, and put together with the low latency and excellent palm rejection, the effect when you're sketching a character on the slim, lighter-than-you-expect iPad Pro – quickly blocking in areas of shade by tilting the Pencil for a broader stroke – is simply the closest thing you can get to working with pencil and paper. Lock the iPad's orientation and you can spin the whole thing around just like a sheet of paper.

The difference, of course, is that you have all the flexibility of working digitally, including easy sharing to other people or other apps, infinite pages, and, uh, the ability to undo. Plus, if you're of a certain mindset, there's just something hugely fun and galvanising about drawing with the Pencil; certainly it's gotten me looking for life drawing sessions locally just because I want the excuse to draw more with it.

You don't have to use it for drawing and painting though, of course. With support in Evernote, Paper, and Apple's own recently beefed-up Notes app, you can just use it for handwriting notes and sketching diagrams. Or, with LiquidText, to mark up PDFs. Or, with Adobe Comp, to quickly throw together wireframes for print, web or apps, which you can then export to InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop.

Pencil's end pops off to reveal Lightning connector for charging and Bluetooth pairing