Big Backing For 'Universal Stylus' Campaign (bbc.com) 87
Google has backed an effort to standardise touch-screen styluses so they can be used on many devices. From a report: The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) was launched, in 2015, to encourage companies to produce styluses that work on rivals' products Dell, Intel, Lenovo, LG and graphics tablet-maker Wacom have all backed the project. However, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung have not. One expert suggested the big brands would keep their proprietary pens. Styluses designed to work with modern touch-screen devices and graphics tablets usually contain sensors to detect pressure, movement and orientation of the pen.
Re:Another Google story? (Score:4, Funny)
The nice thing about standards... (Score:1, Flamebait)
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The galaxy S8 uses a USB-C connector and all Samsung smart phones I've dealt with used some standard USB connector.
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Galaxy S8 uses USB type C, which is not proprietary
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It is absolutely proprietary. USB is not open and free. It's just the proprietary spec most devices use and many devices pony up the $$$ to license. (You can always buy unbranded crap from Amazon and hope it doesn't short out.)
Re: The nice thing about standards... (Score:3)
Re:The nice thing about standards... (Score:4, Informative)
It is absolutely proprietary. USB is not open and free.
Actually it is open, you can download the spec from here [usb.org]. Also it is free of charge, you can pay for a VID ($5000USD) and you can pay to license the logo ($3500USD) but you can also do as many do and if you need a VID use 0xF055.
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It's no more proprietary than Micro USB, so the argument is still totally pointless.
Re:The nice thing about standards... (Score:4, Informative)
You can use the USB connector freely. You can't put the trademark logo on a device that hasn't paid for the logo license and passed USB-IF compliance testing. It's a nice loophole for hobbyists that want something totally free and off-the-shelf.
If you're manufacturing devices, it's a single fee without a per device charge. This is different from something like FireWire which was open spec, but the trademarked names and logos cost a $1 per device. (or $1 per port?). FireWire is an open standard (IEEE 1394-1995) but an official copy of the standard is $335.00 for IEEE members (membership is $35/year).
Really proprietary stuff means you can't even buy the components to build a connector or cable without an agreement from the manufacturer or custom manufacturer.
But perhaps you have a different definition of proprietary than the rest of us have. If so, please explain it.
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The S8 and S9 use a USB-C cable. It's about as proprietary as a MicroUSB.
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As the others above said, the Galaxy S8 uses a USB-C connector, however I do not recognize it as a standard USB connector since you do not need to try three times [redditmedia.com] to connect it the right way around.
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LOL
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The problem is then y
Re:The nice thing about standards... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. If companies decide that the standard isn't good enough, they can improve the standard, just like the USB consortium did with USB-C.
IMO, if Apple had pushed for improvements to the standard instead of going off on their own with Lightning, we wouldn't have two incompatible standards right now. After all, I think everybody had concluded that micro-USB was fundamentally unreliable by the time Lightning came out, and they were looking for a replacement by that point anyway. The idea of making a reversible connector might have been borrowed from Apple (no idea about the timeline for that decision), but it certainly wasn't the primary driver for replacing micro-USB.
In fact, if Apple had stuck with the standards and pushed to improve those standards rather than using the 30-pin dock connector way back in the day, there's a good chance we'd have gotten a USB-C-like connector many years earlier, instead of the disaster that micro-USB turned out to be.
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was filled with people saying how superior Micro USB was to Lightning.
Are you sure they were serious? Do you have any examples? Just because one thick headed nitwit on-line debated some stupid position doesn't really follow that /. is filled with such people.
FireWire/IEEE1394 was better than USB for many technical reasons, especially 800 and S1600. And I believe that dominance lasted for about 10 years. But technical reasons alone don't guarantee adoption. And every year 1394 stagnates we'll see USB moving beyond it.
The versatility of USB Type-C to carry USB 3, active power (
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Micro USB is superior to Lightning. Yes, Lightning and type C can allow you to plug in either way as compared to micro USB. But Lightning is not available on basically anything other than iOS devices. I have to carry an extra, special cable for just that. Or lots of dongles/adapters. Micro USB is ubiquitous, required by law in the EU, low cost, and fairly robust. I can get plugs and jacks for pennies at a dozen suppliers, and cables are everywhere. Lightning? Not so much... I can build cables with
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Lightning cables either fail quickly or last practically forever... Lightning just works.
Except, apparently, when it doesn't?
And it's much more expensive, not as ubiquitous, and only works on your iOS device. If you have a Macbook, you need to carry extra cables for your iOS devices and your type C ports...
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> Micro USB is ubiquitous, required by law in the EU
Pretty sure the EU just endorsed it as the recommended charging standard, rather than actually requiring it by law. Otherwise iPhones couldn't be sold in the EU.
That said, having an official EU-wide phone plug recommendation did absolute wonders for the global phone-charger market within months, so gotta give credit where it's due.
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Wow, I wonder how I missed that.
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Yeah, but how are you going to tell if it's better?
USB-C didn't come out of thin air. And I'm pretty sure there was zero need for it - after all, all the cables had USB 3.0 versions of them.
You can invent USB-C but then you have to prove it's much better than the existing standard which is well entrenched - you're convincing an entire industry to change to something n
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There was definitely a need. Several needs, actually:
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If true (citation needed), the important question to ask is why it was rejected. For example, if they tried to push a connector like Lightning, I can understand why. It's a very Apple-centric design, and has lots of behavior that isn't all that useful for other devices that aren't trying to do unusual tasks like providing non-USB serial lines, analog audio, etc. It also has pins on the outside of the plug, which requires some degree of intelligence on the other end to avoid risk of shorting out and caus
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What made you think Samsung was using a proprietary cable on their phones?
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00062655/
I even gave you a link. GO on, click it and look.
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Re: The nice thing about standards... (Score:3)
as far as I know
That would be a new unit of measurement based on the number zero? Sounds far indeed...
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Be careful with lightning cables. I got a couple of cheaper ones. After a while, _all_ the devices I was using them with could no longer charge properly. I switched to apple branded cables and the problems mostly went away, but not completely. I think the cable might have caused some kind of damage to the power system of said iDevices.
Never buying 3rd party cables again. Just can't trust them.
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Nor do I. After all, what incentive does a leader in a particular category have for giving up their competitive advantage? To my eyes, this push for a standard is an attempt to stem the tide among the crowd that's interested in these sorts of things (among which I am not a member).
Apple currently provides the best stylus in the consumer tablet space, hands down. The Apple Pencil uses a proprietary Bluetooth chip that pushes its wireless latency to a far lower point than anything else on the market, and it o
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Haven't paid much attention in a long time, but I always thought Wacom was the undisputed leader in the stylus market. No batteries required in the stylus, plenty of special-purpose buttons, incredible fast and high-resolution position tracking, excellent pressure sensitivity, and their pro-level products offer orientation tracking as well for high-fidelity virtual paint brushes and the like (2 axis? 3? I'm not certain.) Of course, I don't know what the power consumption was, it might not have been as su
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I'd think this was a stupid story (Score:2)
It comes with a stylus that imitates "real writing experience", including replaceable tips that wear down like pencils, and brake when falling like fountain pens.
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They have parachutes?
Universal = least common denominator (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example, exploding/burning/shorting chargers are another one.
Lightning, Thunderbolt and especially USB-C are better examples, with companies behind it that have at least some level of QC.
There's nothing somebody else in China can't manufacture a bit cheaper and a bit crappier and a bit more dangerous for the end-user.
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The problem with standards is that they can be well defined to do one thing well, or be loosely defined and leave people guessing. The problems of cheap products that don't follow the standard, and therefore short out and explode, is rarely the fault of the standard.
Lightning is, IMHO, a well defined standard as it tells you exactly what it can do. USB is a generally good standard as it's mostly just a general purpose protocol that people can for the most part create devices that "just work". Where I bel
Re:Universal = least common denominator (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example
I think by most metrics, micro USB has been a wildly successful standard. What is it the perfect example of?
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The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example
I think by most metrics, micro USB has been a wildly successful standard. What is it the perfect example of?
It's the perfect example of a standard that's run it's course and was overdue for replacement.
When it came out it was a vast improvement over all the proprietary connectors, and old RS-232 based data cables. It had power and data on one cable, and was standard on most every phone. Early attempts violated the standard, but those didn't last long. Near the end there were attempts to extend it's life with more power (with sometimes disastrous results), wider and faster plugs, and extensions to the spec that
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The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example, exploding/burning/shorting chargers are another one.
I fully disagree! My chargers have never exploded. I thank the EC on my knees everyday for imposing standardization of power supplies for phones.
Google..no skin in the game (Score:4, Informative)
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Google is not a player in this game, and be honest I really doubt they give a damn what gets developed as a "standard" Googles stance has EVERYTHING to do with attacking Apple and Microsoft.
No, Google is trying to prevent fragmentation by trying to reign in Samsung. At this point, it couldn't care less about Apple or Microsoft. HTC is the second player in the Android space which has a pressure sensitive pen. Google already owns HTC (the mobile part). But even before Google purchased HTC, HTC had already adapted its pen API to work with the standard Android API.
And despite the fact that Samsung is using Wacom technology for its pen technology, Samsung is still insisting that developers use its
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http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
Oreo (v 8) is on 0.3% of devices vs gingerbread (v 2.3) 20.6%
each successive version has fewer and fewer users, what version 9 going to be called " Android 9 "Who gives a toss"
If this were Windows, over 20% of people would still be running MS-DOS 6.
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The light blue is Nougat (v 7) 20.6%, NOT Gingerbread.
Gingerbread (v 2.3) is only 0.6% (it's a slightly different blue). Here, take another look at the original link [businessinsider.com] you referenced.
And here is a less confusing graph [statista.com] with an even earlier date.
I'm not blaming you though, the Business Insider purposefully altered the original graph so it would tell the story they wanted to tell. And it took a while to figure it out myself, even though I knew that 20.6% of single-processor phones couldn't possibly be correct.
Hey, who needs competition anyway? (Score:3)
A few searches leads me to believe that Dell, Lenovo, and LG have all put out devices with Wacom stylus technology. I wonder what this "universal stylus" technology will be based on? I wonder whose patents it will depend on?
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I'm a big fan of Wacom technology; however, even among Wacom-based styluses there's no guarantee of interoperability. I've had three different Wacom tablets (desktop digitizer, old transformable laptop, and modern tablet), and none of the styluses work with the other devices. It's very disappointing, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to lowering power requirements for successively more power-sensitive devices.
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A few searches leads me to believe that Dell, Lenovo, and LG have all put out devices with Wacom stylus technology. I wonder what this "universal stylus" technology will be based on? I wonder whose patents it will depend on?
Notably left out of your list are Fujitsu, who basically owns the tablet market in the medical field, where swivel-tablets with keyboards and Windows 7 still reign supreme, and Samsung, who use Wacom styli in their Galaxy Note series of phones and tablets.
To answer your question though...Wacom's, hopefully.
Look, I'm all about having competition, but this strikes me as one of those areas where the need for competition is not nearly as bad as others. Even though Wacom seems to license out to basically-everyon
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Only the followers want a standard (Score:3)
Apple and Google have zero incentive to have a standard, so that they can be undercut and effectively cede the market to cheap knock-offs. Pens are never the reason for choosing a platform, but it factors heavily into consumer satisfaction. Having a best-in-class experience is critical to maintaining satisfaction.
Also, I suspect the margin on Apple and Microsoft Pens is quite good.
Ob (Score:3)
Looks like they're supporting universal run-on sentences too.
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Mistake isn't there in the original. The editors can't even copy and paste properly.
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Both my Wacom tablets are "too old" (5-6 years) to work with the latest MacOS. My only recourse is to buy new tablets. Consider this before buying from Wacom.
Maybe your problem isn't so much Wacom, but that you bought an Apple product and expected to not get stuck on an upgrade treadmill.
As a counterpoint, Wacom's Linux drivers, which are still maintained primarily by a Wacom employee named Ping Cheng, have excellent support, even with old tablets. I still have an Intuos 4 (early 2009) and an ancient Graphire 3 (2003) that both work just fine in Linux thanks to her work, and I've noticed that sometimes the old tablets gain new features added for other tablets o
wirless charging (Score:2)
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Charging?
Well, the Stylus with my Samsung Tab S3 tablet doesn't need charging - doesn't have a battery at all. I've used a Surface Pen and tried a friend's Apple Pencil, and the Samsung is just as good. Pressure sensitive and accurate.
I'd hope that would become the standard, rather than yet another thing that needs charging or weird AAAA batteries that aren't widely sold.