Hands on- iPad Pro with Apple Pencil

Apple Pencil for Pressure Sensitive Drawing/Painting

The new big screen iPad Pro of Apple has been expected for some time and bears some resemblances to the present products in the market. The iPad Pro introduced at the media event recently is a 12.9-inch screen with the potential of running two apps alongside each other without either of them getting cramped.

The iPad Pro weighs 1.54 pounds and is much bigger and can be held easily. Its screen is amazing and at 2732x2048 resolutions, it has 5.6 million pixels and the short side has several pixels as the longer side of an iPad mini. The Apple Pencil is not a stylus and is not focused at pointing and tapping things which one can reach, but is for pressure sensitive drawing and painting in app as Apple’s own Notes app or as complex and professional as the demonstrated Procreate or AutoCAD.

The Pencil feels great like a pencil and very natural wherein the sensors tend to detect the pressure and angle and effortlessly create lines of various thicknesses. The Notes app even has a ruler which enables perfectly straight drawing. Utilising the side of the Pencil’s tip one can also create realistic shading like using the side of a pencil lead.

Lightning Connector at End of the Pencil for Charging

A Lightning connector concealed at the end of the Pencil enables plugging right into the iPad Pro for charging. According to Apple rep, a quick charging provides enough juice for an hour or so of work in a few minutes while a full charge could last all day.

Besides this, Apple has also developed its own Smart Keyboard identical in appearance to the Touch Covers which Microsoft made for the Surface tablets and closes around the front of the iPad Pro. It tends to flip back to form a stand like the Smart Covers Apple had made for a while, though it has a built-in fabric surface keyboard having short key travel like the new MacBook.

Third-party keyboards would be capable of using the iPad Pro’s Smart Connector that power as well as pairs the keyboard. Logitech has already planned to introduce its own `Create’ keyboard in November.

No Buttons, Detects Pressure/Angle/Orientation

The Apple Pencil does not have buttons and besides detecting pressure, it also detects angle and orientation enabling it to perform more than just a simple stylus and follow more closely the behaviours of a pencil, brush or charcoal. That is the reason, why Apple chose the name `Pencil’ instead of a pen or stylus, both of which have induced an earlier generation of input sticks.

Adobe, for instance had demonstrated a watercolour brush effect for Apple Pencil which changes the paint-to-water mixture as one change the tilt of the Pencil enabling the artists in adjusting how much colour they have put down mix on making a stroke.

Another difference in Apple’s Pencil is that it tends to use a male Lightning connector in order to plug in the iPad Pro, once for initial automatic Bluetooth setup and subsequently to recharge. According to Apple it takes 15 seconds to charge the Pencil for 30 minutes usage and a full charge tends to last for 12 hours.It now remains to be seen if the Apple Pencil would be significant drivers of sales of iPad Pro or would remain a niche tool for certain classes of education, business and artist users.