Best Tablet With Stylus

As exciting a prospect as buying a new tablet is, before you pick one out, it’s a good idea to think about some of these key factors. It won’t take a second.

Display Size

Your first port of call should be to decide what size tablet you want. While they’re traditionally very portable devices, as you’ve seen from our list, some sizable options are available at the minute.

This increase in tablet size is vastly down to the increase in smartphone screen sizes. Now phone’s can run as large as 6”, smaller tablets are more or less defunct.

Resolution

The resolution of a tablet refers to how many pixels are in the display. The more pixels there are, the crisper images will appear.

Resolution is displayed as two numbers separated by an ‘x’, e.g. 1920 x 1080. The first number is the pixel count across the width of the display, while the second is the vertical pixel count.

If you watch TV, movies, or do a lot of creative design work on your tablet, a high resolution is essential. If you only need a tablet for general use such browsing the web and listening to music, you can save some money and opt for a lower resolution.

Refresh Rate

Expressed in hertz, refresh rate refers to the number of times the image on screen is updated a second. The higher the refresh rate is, the smoother motion will appear, making it essential for animators, gamers, and content creators.

Response Time

The response time of a tablet display is the speed at which colors can shift from one to another. It’s usually measured from gray to gray and should never take more than a few milliseconds. We recommend looking for something with a 10ms response time or less.

Color Gamut

If you want vivid and varied colors in a display, you’ll need one with good color space coverage. This space is known as a gamut.

Parallax

Parallax is the distance from the contact point of the stylus nib to where the display registers contact. This distance occurs when there is too much of a gap between the nib and the digitizer beneath the glass of the display. If you need a highly accurate device, say, for digital drawings, low parallax should be a top priority.

Stylus Design

Pressure Sensitivity Levels

Sensitivity levels in a nib work similarly to pressure sensitive keys on a keyboard. The harder you press one, the louder the note rings out. With a stylus, the harder you press, the darker and thicker the line or dot will appear.

Tilt Sensitivity

Tilt sensitivity allows you to shade with your stylus the way you would with a pencil. Measured in degrees, the greater angle of tilt it supports, the more articulate the shading options are.

Power

Historically, a stylus would either be just a plastic stick or battery powered. These days, they’re more likely to come with a charging port. Some advanced designs are even powered via contact with the tablet display.

Ergonomics

If you put in long hours on your tablet for work or otherwise, you’re going to need a stylus that remains comfortable all day long. It should be lightweight and fit nicely in your hand.

Can Any Tablet Use a Stylus?

Yes and no. As long as they have a touch screen interface, they’ll be receptive to a stylus nib, but not any stylus will do. While some companies claim to have produced universal styluses, they will never give you the full functionality of the officially branded version.

Can Apple Pencil Work on Android?

We’re afraid not. In fact, the Apple Pencil will only connect to a very small amount of Apple devices, let alone products made by competing companies.

Do Stylus Pens Work with Screen Protectors?

Stylus pens will still work through a screen protector, but they won’t be quite as effective. You may have to apply more pressure to get the display to register contact.

It’s impossible to ignore the growing prevalence of stylus use in both professional and personal contexts. The concept of a digital pen that can collaborate seamlessly with an interface solves the limited interactivity that plagues traditional computing, seamlessly transferring traditional creativity into future contexts.

If you’re something of an artiste, read no further. We’ve found the perfect tablet for you. Unsurprisingly, it’s the latest Apple iPad Pro. Featuring the very impressive A12Z neural engine chip with an 8-core graphics unit, 4K rendering and editing is kicked into hyper-speed, and tuned performance controllers offer an enhanced thermal performance. This means higher clock speeds and a practically zero-latency interface.

Giving you a wonderfully large canvas to let your imagination run wild on, the 11-inch edge to edge display is one of the largest ever made. Just install one of the many amazing digital art apps and let the wide color gamut and high-def screen breath life into your creations.

Of course, we wouldn’t be showing you this tablet if the stylus itself wasn’t also pushing boundaries. Highly sensitive to pressure and tilt, the Apple Pencil offers ridiculous amounts of articulation, allowing you to truly transfer your skills from page to screen.

The Samsung S7+ features an awesome 11.22-inch, 120Hz display, perfect for both drawing and note-taking. The quad-speakers are impressive too. For little devices, they sure can fill a room.

Running on an octa-core processor, this android isn’t playing around. It’s fantastic at shouldering parallelizing productivity workflows, and the battery won’t let you down either. It can last up to nearly eight hours, supporting your entire working day.

Redesigned specifically for the S7 line, the nib on the all-new S Pen is loaded with 4096 pressure sensitive points for an incredibly nuanced performance, and the 9ms pixel response time keeps up with your creative velocity, ensuring writing and drawing is incredibly natural and accurate.

We weren’t too impressed with the amount of Android bloat preloaded onto the S7+, as deletion has been disabled, but other than that, this is a beautiful tablet and stylus combo.

If you’re searching for peak stylus brilliance, the Cintiq 24 should… piqué your interest. Designed specifically for digital artists, the Wacom Pro Pen 2 is brimming with pressure levels, 8192 to be exact. Combine this with the extra-low activation levels and +- 60° tilt sensitivity, and you’ve got a very natural drawing experience indeed.

The display has also been treated to boost pen performance, the low glare glass featuring a special lamination that gives it a unique and tactile feeling on screen.

Speaking of the display. It’s a gorgeous 24-inch 4K creation with a 99% Adobe color gamut, offering the best visuals of any other tablet on our list. What’s more, due to the infinitesimal parallax, the stylus is amazingly accurate.

The Cintiq 24 Pro is a specialist device, so it’s not suitable for those who want a general purpose tablet, but it can’t be beaten in its class, and the stylus is a technological marvel.

While the new Surface Pro is more of a refresh of the SP6 rather than a fully upgraded device, it’s still one of the most impressive tablets on the market for pretty much any application you can think of.

Offering a huge amount of screen real estate per pound, this 12-inch tablet is super thin and lightweight, perfect for sliding into your bag and hitting the road.

The 10th generation i7 processor redefines the possibilities of portable computing. Programs that are normally deemed too intensive for tablets work in full on the SP7. No matter what kind of workflows you throw at it, it runs efficiently and gets the job done.

Unfortunately, the Surface Slim Pen has to be purchased separately, but when combined, these devices are a real force of nature. A lightweight, ergonomic design that feels lovely to hold, it exhibits a minimal amount of jitter, and the 2736 x 1824, 60Hz display ensures ultra-low latency.

The most innovative design on the list, the Lenovo Yoga Book takes what you think you know about tablets and politely discards it. A tablet and laptop hybrid. You can use it as a typical single surface tablet, and when you need to, flip out the Halo board and use it as a drawing pad or haptic keypad.

Boasting a 10” 1920 x 1200 display, the visuals the Yoga brings to the table are first-rate. It did let us down in terms of processing, though, as the Intel Atom X5 really isn’t up to much.

On the other hand, the Real Pen included with purchase does not disappoint. Packed with 2048 pressure levels, drawing and note-taking is fluid and pretty much lag-free. You can even digitize notes as you handwrite them, which is a lovely touch.