When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and its touch screen he said, "Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and you put them away and you lose them ... yuck! Nobody wants a stylus, so let's not use a stylus."
While this has been pretty much true of the iPhone, the iPad may be a different story. Georg Petschnigg, CEO of 53, says styluses are are quite popular for iPads. His research shows that people use styluses with an iPad 3-5X as much as they use keyboards with an iPad.
His company is introducing its own stylus, which it calls "Pencil." Pencil matches with "Paper" the iPad app that Apple called app of the year last year.
Paper is a sketchpad style application, with 8 million downloads. Petschigg declined to say how many active users the company has, but he said users have created 100 million papers, which is a drawing, basically.
The new Pencil stylus comes in two designs - graphite for $50 and walnut for $60. It's available at 53's store today, and ships in early December.
We got to play around with the Pencil stylus on Paper, and it was impressive. For anyone that likes to draw, it's a great combination. You just hold Pencil against the app, it connects and then you can draw.
Here's a demo video: