Active Stylus for Dell Tablets (750-AAGN)

I recently purchase an HP Specter 360 and did some research on the best pen to use for the touch screen for my photo editing. Most the articles I read stated that the Dell Active Stylus was the one to buy, not the HP pen. Well they were right. This pen works great, synchronizes nicely, is well balanced and the button for functions works well. I use several photo editing program installed on this new laptop and this pen has made my workflow much more efferent. My only caution is this, I keep this laptop and pen in a compact brief case and due to the slim factor of the case, the pen gets pressure on the pen button if you don't position it properly. Hence, the battery dies in a day.

Love the stylus, I can confirm that this does work for the HP Spectre x360 13 in. (i7 8GB). I first received, what I assume, was a defective stylus. It recognized on screen but there was no touch input. That pen was manufactured in March 2016. I dont know if that had anything to do with it, but I contacted Amazon support and received a replacement in a timely manner and it is now working perfectly on my Spectre and Venue 8 pro. I'm running windows 10 anniversary and everything works well, very responsive and very precise. The second stylus was manufactured April 2016. If you have a Spectre, don't hesitate.

I bought this pen for my HP Spectre x360 since it uses the same tech and for the first 7 or so months it worked flawlessly. After that it started having some issues where it acted like the battery was dying. I swapped out batteries and finally found that just removing the battery for a few minutes seemed to help but it slowly got worse to the point I contacted Dell to work on getting a replacement. After talking with them for 2 days now they're unwilling to repair or replace the pen unless I buy a Dell computer off the officially supported list to test it with. So if for ANY reason this stops working, even under warranty they will not support it unless you own one of the like 5 dells that are officially supported. Until now I'd highly suggest it, now I have to say stay away from this or any other Dell stylus as they will not support them.

Just purchased the pen (PN556W) and a dell Inspiron 2 in 1 7568, pretty much exclusively for use with Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, & Illustrator. I've only had it a few hours, but so far, I'm very impressed. (will update if I have the problems with longevity a few others have mentioned) Pros: Accuracy: This is what I was really worried about. I wasn't sure if it would be accurate enough for producing quality art, but I'm really happy with it after one session of mostly testing/sketching. There is slight jitter when drawing straight lines slowly, but that's to be expected. Similar to the amount I've seen in video reviews of surface pro 4s. But in normal writing test, or drawing at typical speeds, the lines are smooth and consistent (my natural hand shake is more pronounced than the jitter from the stylus) Pressure sensitivity: This is fantastic, and totally blew away my expectations. Very similar feel/result to the wacom intuos on my desktop. Cons: Feel: My main complaint. The stylus feels a bit insubstantial in hand. I prefer the size & weight of the wacom stylus. I may try putting a rubber grip around the bottom of the barrel to fatten it up a bit. The rocker button is also not great. It's too flat, the ends are too close together. You have to actually stop a second and think about it to use the buttons. The standard intuos stylus' rocker is much easier to use on the fly. (I may try to mod this a bit as well) Software: The Dell drivers are terrible, and are very limited in terms of what they allow you to bind to the buttons Fortunately, you can just go to wacom and get the 'Wacom Feel' drivers, which allow you to program pretty much anything to the buttons.

Be aware that different Dell laptops use different pens. They are not inter-operable. I use this stylus for my Dell xps 13 inch. It works effortlessly. However, be aware of the batteries. The 2 small coin batteries in the top half of the pen drive the bluetooth. This is the battery that is shown in the capacity on the blue tooth interface. It is not related to the AAAA battery in the base. This AAAA battery is what drives the screen touch sensor. My battery lasts about 6 months. If you find the screen is not reacting to the pen, hi chance it is a low AAAA battery. I bought a bunch of them on amazon and carry an extra one around with me. Other than the battery issue, this pen works effortlessly.

Just got it so this is a first impression review: It works with the HP Spectre x360 13t! Works in One Note, Photoshop CC 2015 and Illustrator CC 2015 (pen tool is a bit strange in that you have to double tap to put down a point). It's pressure sensitive and has 2 buttons. Pen has a certain weight to it but I wouldn't say it's too heavy. Check out the photos for my tests in each of the mentioned programs. Doesn't have an on/off button but a different user has said that it's automatic. We'll see how long the battery lasts. Dec 2017 update: - Pen battery does not last long, runs out of battery in a month or two even though I don't use it more than once or twice a month. There's no on/off button and I'm guessing the short battery life may be related to an issue with the time it takes for the pen to "turn off" after it's not in use. - I have given up on the pen since then because my HP Spectre x360 has terrible palm detection such that it is impossible to draw a line longer than 2 inches before the monitor thinks my palm is the pen and the line stops abruptly.

I used the stylus for about a week and I loved every second of it. The metal body and the soft touch grip feels really good in the hands, and the weight lets you know this isn't just some flimsy pen. I've only used it on my HP Spectre x360, but I never expected it to be such a fun accessory to play around with. The responsiveness is great. I don't have to press hard on the screen to get it to register, and the touch sensitivity works amazing. I do wish you could customize the buttons more, but that is more of a software issue and unlikely to ever be addressed in Windows. Currently, one button is to use the erase tool and the other is select, which are pretty good tools and I actually use them frequently. I used it mostly for drawing, so I can't say how well it is for writing as I personally don't find writing on a screen enjoyable. Just remember this type of stylus is meant for quick sketches or notes. You aren't going to be creating professional pieces of art with this, you'll need something specifically designed and much more expensive. As long as you keep that in mind I don't think you'll be disappointing in this.

I'm guessing that Dell was trying to reduce costs, the apparent price, or both by using an active stylus then not including one with the tablets using it. It uses Synaptics technology, with is irksome since, unlike Wacom- or N-Trig compatible styluses, Dell and HP are the only sources for the styluses (the Acer active stylus is the same as the Dell stylus). Like many others, I've had trouble with battery life and disconnections. But checking the "dead" batteries shows that they're all still generating slightly over a volt. That made me curious. The pen uses AAAA batteries, would what would happen if I wired an AAA battery to it? I tried it with one of my two styluses, which had become intermittent even with new batteries. Not only did it stop losing connections to the tablet, but that AAA battery lasted and lasted and lasted. Why? An AAA battery typically has about 1000mah capacity, while an AAAA battery has about 500. The constant-power discharge curve for an AAA or AAAA battery is about the same, with a relatively fast drop from a bit over 1.5 volts to 1.2 volts, then a slower drop down to about a volt after which the curve steepens. Obviously an AAAA battery will only last half as long as an AAA battery under the same load, but a little research (Energizer has data sheets with lots of graphs) shows that the initial drop to 1.2 volts is proportionally faster for AAAA batteries. Interesting. Now, one way of getting a little more juice out of a battery is to wet the positive (nib) end. So, after testing in my working stylus to make sure that one of the "dead" AAA batteries did _not_ work, I took it out, wet the end (with my tongue, having nothing else immediately at hand), and put it back. It worked. For a while. Wetting it again made it work again. I don't have a variable power supply in my office, so I can't do a bench test. So all I can say is that I suspect that the Dell implementation of the Synaptics system is sensitive to the voltage applied to the stylus electronics. I can imagine a few ways that can happen - low receiver power causing the receiver to lose the tablet, low transmitter power causing the tablet to lose the stylus, or low processor power causing the stylus to crash. Another data point: When my working stylus, the one that still works with AAAA batteries, starts cutting out, indicating a "low" battery, it's possible to reset it by unscrewing the barrel from the tip, breaking the connection to the battery, then screwing it back down again. This becomes less effective as the battery continues to drain. This hints that the stylus is crashing, but it's not enough to exclude the other possibilities. One last point. I have two working styluses, of three I've owned so far. The first was flakey out of the box. The next became intermittent even with new AAAA batteries after a month or so, the latest one works fine (so far) but goes through batteries fast. This, combined with evidence presented in other reviews, suggests that the issue - whatever it is - varies in degree from stylus to stylus. There are undoubtedly possibilities I didn't think of. I may be completely off base, and I'm not saying that to be disingenuous. I'm not an EE, I can't do a truly rigorous test, and I'm not privy to the Synaptics design docs. If someone from Synaptics or Dell reads this and cares to comment, rebut, or call me names I would welcome it. Ok, not the calling names part, but if someone more knowledgeable cares to contribute that would be great. What does that mean to someone thinking of buying one of these? If you have a tablet that needs a Synaptics stylus, right now your options are this Dell stylus, the Acer stylus, or the HP stylus. The Acer stylus is the same as the Dell stylus. The HP stylus is more expensive and has worse reviews than this one. On that basis I recommend this one, but keep the packaging and be prepared to shoot it back directly if it's flakey or develops problems. I'll update this if I learn anything new. Update: The stylus I wired to an AAA is working perfectly. I keep handwritten notes, to-do, scheduling and such in OneNote and I use the stylus a lot. So far it's solid. Remember this is the stylus that was intermittent even with new AAAA batteries. Another update: The black, nib end of the stylus is made from two parts, one inside the other. You can see this if you unscrew the barrel from the nib. A new stylus - and I just got another one from Dell, since they're on sale for only $14 - is quite firm, but my two older styluses (stylii?) allow the inner part to slide pretty easily inside the outer part. This sounds more complicated than it is, just unscrew the silver part from the black part and look. You'll see that the threaded bit is slightly free to move up and down. Long story short, the sensitivity of the stylus varies with how firmly they're pressed together. Why? I don't know. I can only tell you that when a battery is discharged to the point where the stylus is intermittent, it will reliably fail if the threaded part is pulled back, and reliably work if it's pressed down firmly again. When a fully charged battery is in the stylus, it doesn't matter. Some folks have asked how I hooked a AAA battery into the stylus. Since it was just for testing I didn't much care about damaging the battery, so I soldered a short wire to the negative end of a AAA battery and a strip of copper tape to the end of the wire. I wound the copper tape around the screw threads, held the positive end to the contact point on the stylus nib, and wound a couple turns of electricians tape around the join to keep it in place while I made sure it worked. Then I used a piece of heat-shrink tube to hold the whole thing together. It actually looked ok, not as bench-ish as some of the things I've cobbled together, but it only lasted as long as the battery. Dave