Home » Review: Adonit Pixel – Pressure Sensitive Stylus for all your sketching needs

Review: Adonit Pixel – Pressure Sensitive Stylus for all your sketching needs

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Tablet styli come in all kinds of shapes and forms. Some big, some small, some even fit into your headphone jack. Some of them take it a bit further, giving you motion sensitivity, and some like the Apple Pen, even give you pressure sensitivity. The Adonit Pixel is one such offering, giving you not only a Bluetooth connection and 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, but also gives you short cut buttons. Shaped and designed to feel like a pen, this iPad stylus should be the only accessory you should need.

Here is a quick look at the specs:

  • The tip offers unparalleled precision, giving you increased tip drag.
  • Compatible with all iPad models and iPhones above iPhone 5.
  • Offers 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity
  • The 1.9mm tip creates a paper like drag to give you the best writing performance
  • Palm rejection means you don’t have to worry about resting your palm on the screen, and unwanted input
  • Two short cut buttons, which can be programmed to your needs, and give you undo and redo by default.

Look and Feel

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In many ways, it is a pen, and is designed to look like one. The device comes in bronze, and looks and feels the part. Instead of sticking to the standard Apple white and simple design, Adonit have gone for the premium look. Glossy metal finish, an LED to give you the battery status as well as pairing, and a couple of buttons that end in the tip.

The tip features 2048 pressure points, and you can push on it to check that.

The top of the Adonit Pixel is actually a magnetic charging point, which attaches to the charging accessory that comes with this. It charges via USB, and stands tall and proud on it.

The charging accessory looks like a USB stick, but with a metal circle on it, which the magnetic ends fits on. While a bit annoying to have to carry, specially since this is designed for an iPad and not a computer, it fits and works quite well.

It weights the same as an other pen, and should be easy to carry around as per your needs.

Setup

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The box comes with a Quick Start Guide. It tells you to make your Bluetooth is on, and you’ve disabled MultiGesture support in your iPad. You don’t really pair the device, but if you’re in a compatible app, you can turn that feature on and use it. A list of compatible apps can be found on the website for the device, and while some are paid for, a lot of them are free.

You need to press and hold the lower button to turn this on, but in reality the pen comes on the moment you lift it off the table, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

In-App functionality depends purely on the app, though it worked well for us in most. Once within the app, just go to preferences, and somewhere in there will be the option to turn the Pen or Stylus input on, and from there you should be good to go.

Even if you don’t pair it, you can still use this as a very good Stylus, though of course you won’t get the pressure sensitivity or the buttons functionality.

Compatibility

All iPads, but not with Android or Windows.

Usage

While it took me a little while to figure out how to get it properly connected, once connected, it performed well. Particularly impressive was how it feels on the screen, and palm rejection is a great touch too. However, compared to some of the other graphics tablets that I have tried, I found the pen was not as responsive on the screen. At times I had to feel like I had to press it hard to register, and every now and then, you could feel just a tiny bit of a delay in registering your stroke. This could be down to the iPad though (using an original iPad Mini!).

So, is it the best stylus ever? Probably not. Somehow the strokes didn’t come out as well on screen in the various apps I tried, and I found that writing with it, while felt good in hand, didn’t look good at all. I am not proud of my hand writing, but this definitely made it worse. What I did find over time was that if you hold it vertically, it performs a lot better. Like all other thingsthings, it is all about practice. 

Why buy it then? If you want to draw or sketch on your iPad, and don’t want to spend extra bucks on an iPad Pencil (and a more expensive iPad!), this is one of the best options out there. It is not perfect, but it is pretty good.

More information

More information on the Adonit Pixel can be found on their website. It retails for around £80, but better deals can be found online, including Amazon.

Verdict

Close but some of the competition definitely gives this one a hard run for it’s money. 

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