14 DAY TRIAL // The race for the best stylus out there isn’t something exclusive to Apple, as this isn't the only company that promises excellent performance in touch sensitivity. Intel seems to want a piece of the pie when it comes to the growing trend of the stylus-using market, and promises to beat the Apple Pencil both in availability and cross-platform features.
In 2014, during the Intel Developer Forum, Intel got together a couple of touch hardware vendors and started an initiative to bring ubiquity to styluses, in the shape of the Universal Stylus Initiative. Current participants in the initiative include Lenovo, Synaptics, Wacom, Atmel, Pentech, Sharp, Silicon Integrated Systems, Waltop, Dell, EETI, ELAN, FocalTech Systems, Primax, Weida Hi-Tech, Solid Year, and many others. Their plan is to allow users of all available tablets to use this stylus without having them confront compatibility issues between different manufacturers.
The idea is not only to make it interchangeable between tablet brands but also to provide the best performance and accuracy on the market for an affordable price. In short, Intel wants this to be the best stylus out there, by far. The USI specs must define lots of features and design protocols that the final pens will have, like, for instance, the first USI 1.0 should sense up to 2,048 different levels of pressure.
Backed by an army of hardware vendors, Intel decides to tackle Apple head-on
According to DigiTimes, Intel wants the first USI 1.0 stylus to come out in December, almost a full year since the entire plan started, so it could quickly work with Dell’s 2-in-1 hybrid PCs that have USI-compliant stylus pens on their roadmap and are to hit the market in late 2015. Soon after Dell, Hewlett-Packard will also join the USI 1.0 bandwagon by providing three new USI-compliant devices due in Q1 2016.
After Dell and HP, lots of other companies like Lenovo, Asustek Computer, Quanta Computer, LG Electronics, Atmel, Hanvon Pentech, Sharp, Wacom, Synaptics, Montblanc will join Intel’s initiative by providing USI compatibility. This is great news for those non-Apple consumers, who'll be having a good and responsive stylus at their disposal. The only companies Intel would need in order to finish their stylus “domination” are Adobe and Microsoft. Without them, the USI would seem just another universal passive capacitive stylus for amateurs.