#adobeinkandslide

The new and friendlier option.

As designers we love our tools, working away hour after hour, relying on the function to drive our concepts into solutions. With an interactive laptop, or a touch capable work space, I researched what my options were without buying an additional graphics tablet. 

Ultimately I found my list of comparable products, consisting of:

The Apple Pencil 

The Adobe Ink and Slide 

The Surface Pencil 

and the Bamboo Ink + the Bamboo Sketch 

While the Apple pencil offers competitive technology, its range of supported devices are so minimal you have to almost exclusively work on the iPad Pro and while there are Adobe Suite Apps, there is little possibilities of completing a project solely on the iPad. 

The Adobe Ink and Slide had many of the same problems, they offered an increased range of support on the iPad’s, supporting the newer generations of the iPad in addition to some of the iPad Pro models. 

The Surface Pencil both marketed and performed similar to the Apple Pencil, although because it was released first, it does not offer the same level of technology (tilt detection for example). The Surface Pencil was also one of the most restrictive, built initially for work only on the Surface Pro tablet it left users disappointed with the promised compatibility on other Surface models. 

The Bamboo Ink and the Bamboo Sketch are a newly released WACOM digital stylus’ available for both IOS and Windows. They were released around March 2017, and available for sale in June 2017 in the UK. They are the first company to offer both a Mac and Windows supporting system, with all the technology and a continually increasing platform for app capability. Not only do these allow for new technology but the Bamboo Ink is fully supportive of Windows Ink, allowing it to be used directly in Adobe Suit apps on supporting laptops and tablets.