Here’s What You Need To Know About Apple's Pencil

At its much anticipated iPhone centric event on Wednesday, Apple revealed a lineup new device including the new S iteration of iPhone 6, the long awaited upgrade to Apple TV, iPad Pro accompanied by a stylus Apple is calling the Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil is a low latency stylus, 3-axis pressure sensitive digital writing utensil; the product has been especially designed to work with iPad Pro.

The Apple Pencil is the first time Apple has offered a stylus accessory to complement one of its tablets. Late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs was not a fan of the stylus, when he introduced multi-touch on the first generation iPhone he dubbed the finger as the best pointing device in the world.

"Who wants a stylus? You have to get them, and put them away, and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus."

However, eight years later Apple still went ahead with the stylus idea and people love it. The Apple Pencil is a new input device which allows the user enhanced graphic design capabilities, photo editing and other capabilities. Users can use the pencil for sketching, scribbling, annotating and editing.

There have been generic pens for iPad’s capacitive touchscreen before and that too by a number of companies. However, the Apple Pencil has been designed to work in unison with the new iPad Pro. The stylus has been designed to deliver accuracy and recognize different pressure intensities and tilt. The thin white pen has been equipped with sensors and a wireless radio inside to deliver flawlessly.

The downside therefore is that the Apple Pencil will not work with the existing iPads. According to Apple, the iPad Pro has been re-engineered to recognize input form the Apple pencil such as tilt.

 Bluetooth on the device is used to transmit force data, the accessory will allow the user to apply a different range of forces and the sensors in place will be able to determine the correct force. Users can therefore apply more force for thicker lines or a gentle touch for thinner lines. There is a slew of creative affects in place for users.

The Apple Pencil has been equipped with two tilt sensors which allow the device to determine the exact angle of the users’ hand. This may be great news for people who enjoy sketching; the Apple Pencil will be no different than a conventional drawing pen or charcoal pencil. The Pencil sports the ability to add shading effects with a simple tilt.

Responsive touchscreen can sometimes confuse the user’s hand for the stylus which is where palm-rejection comes in. Palm-rejection is designed to ignore the user’s hand as they use the stylus. The Apple Pencil is in fact equipped with the technology; it is also capable of differentiating between the user’s finger and the stylus. The Apple pencil has taken things further as it is equipped with the ability to determine the size of point of contact to see whether it is a resting hand or a stylus.

The low latency stylus by Apple has given it an edge over all other creative tools. The accessory has very quick responsiveness owing to the fact that the iPad Pro subsystem picks up the signals 2540 times per second. According to Apple, “When iPad Pro senses Apple Pencil, the subsystem scans its signal at an astounding 240 times per second, giving it twice the data points it normally collects with your finger. This data, combined with Apple‑designed software, means that there’s only milliseconds between the image you have in your mind and the one you see on the display.”

The tiny device is equipped with rechargeable battery which lasts 12 hours on a single charge. Moreover, the device can also gain 30 minutes of battery life from only 15 seconds of charging. The magnetic cap houses a male lightening connector which allows the pencil to be plugged into the iPad Pro charger.

While Apple has already added support for Notes and Mail, other apps will be able to incorporate the stylus once they get access to the iPad Pro stylus support.

The pencil will be available for $99 in November along with the new Smart Keyboard.