If you saw my last video review of the new entry-level Kindle for 2016 you probably noticed that I was using a stylus to interact with the touchscreen for most of the review.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of using a stylus sooner; it helps not having my hand blocking the view of the screen when using the touchscreen in video reviews.
There are a bunch of different kinds of styli at Amazon. In fact there are too many. I didn’t know which one to choose.
Some have smaller tips, some have larger tips, there are different kinds of tips—it’s all rather confusing.
I ended up getting this AmazonBasics Capacitive Stylus because it has three different-sized tips.
It’s an older version than some of the other AmazonBasic styluses. The listing date is 2012. But I figured the three different sizes would cover all the bases.
The newer ones only have one tip size. Now I know why. The smaller tip on the one I got doesn’t work very well on capacitive screens. It works great on infrared touchscreens like new entry-level Kindle, but with capacitive screens you have to press quite hard for the smaller tip to register.
At first I didn’t think the stylus worked very well on capacitive screens at all, and I was wondering why it had a 4.2 star rating, but that’s because I was using the smaller tip and capacitive touchscreens don’t pick it up half the time.
The larger tip does work quite well and the touchscreen recognizes it a high percentage of the time. You do have to press a bit harder than you would if you were using your finger, so you have to get used to a more deliberate pressing motion, but once you get the hang of it the stylus works quite well with capacitive screens on tablets and ereaders like the Kindle Paperwhite.
The main negative for me is the stylus that I got is about the length of an average pen. That’s fine for regular usage but I wish it was longer for doing video reviews. There doesn’t seem to be any longer ones; they’re all about the same size or shorter than the one I got.
Nonetheless it’s nice having a stylus on hand. I don’t use it very often outside of video reviews but it does come in handy for certain things, and it’s another way to use touchscreen devices when wearing gloves (more of an issue in winter).