14 DAY TRIAL // In mid-January I told you Dell had pulled from sale the styluses for two of its most popular tablets, the Venue 8 Pro and Venue 11 Pro, but what if we told you there's an alternative?
The absence of the styluses caused a lot of unhappiness with users who were counting on the Active Stylus to enhance the overall tablet experience.
After a month or so, it appears Dell has finally solved the issues and has started shipping out the new styluses marked “REV A01” to select customers.
The big roll-out will probably happen in the upcoming days, but for those of you who are disheartened with Dell after the experience, might want to consider the alternatives.
For example, ASUS just launched the VivoTab Note 8 tablet which comes bundled with a nifty Wacom digitizer, among other things.
When launched, ASUS said the smart-pen was capable of supporting up to 1,000 levels of pressure sensitivity and other nice features. But if you’re worried the real experience won’t rise up to what has been advertised, you might want to check out this video test of the stylus, posted on UMPC Portal.
Since styluses aren't created just for hand-writing on your Windows slate, the vid includes several other scenarios like palm rejection, pressure sensitivity, hover actions, desktop access and a demo of wrong-hand handwriting recognition.
As a little spoiler (because the video lasts up to 10 minutes), the pen turns to work out really well, so if you’re sick of waiting for Dell to ship out their improved pen replacements or you aren't so convinced you should be buying a Venue 8 Pro anymore, the ASUS Vivotab Note 8 might be here to fill the void.
As a quick memory refresh, aside from the stylus, jumping onboard with ASUS you’ll also be getting an 8-inch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels.
Under the hood there’s an Intel Atom Z3740 quad-core processor (from the Bay Trail family) powering everything with 2GB of RAM and backed up by 32GB of internal storage. Customers can grab the ASUS for $329 / €241 a pop.
