MSI made a stylus that can also be a pencil

Okay, so. This is a pencil. You can draw with it on paper, the best way you’d with a pencil. Then, you’ll be able to deliver it as much as your laptop computer display and write on that, as you’d with a stylus.

This MSI Pen 2, introduced earlier this week, really looks as if such a no brainer product once I give it some thought. If you have got a pocket book or Post-its in your desk the place you want to put in writing notes but additionally generally prefer to navigate your laptop computer’s display with a stylus, you now solely want one pen to do each. You may additionally strive sketching out an image, chart, or graph on paper earlier than diving into doing so on a pc with out placing down your writing utensil. You may take bodily notes on a textual content that you just’re studying in your pc, then additionally attain up and spotlight elements of that textual content. I preserve pondering of extra eventualities the place this might turn out to be useful.

I simply tried the MSI Pen 2, and I very a lot loved it. This stylus makes use of MPP2.6 expertise with 4096 strain ranges. MSI says it would final 10 hours from a five-minute cost. There’s haptic suggestions, and the display writing part was fairly comfy, with each a easy stroke and glorious resistance. Here, I took a video:

So how on earth does this work?

Well, the pen does even have a graphite tip inside. It’s a bit like these mechanical pencils all of us used to make use of in fourth grade; when the graphite runs out, you load one other stick in. (MSI tells me the pen comes with a number of graphite refills to get you began.)

MSI’s declare within the demo space was that the graphite tip was small and light-weight sufficient that it wouldn’t harm or depart residue on the display when writing on it. Accordingly, I didn’t see any graphite or residue on the display throughout or after my demonstration. My appointment was additionally late within the day, and at that time, folks had been coming by and writing with the factor nonstop. (I nonetheless assume it may be magic, although.)

The laptop computer line this stylus will include is the MSI Creator Z collection. The unit I demoed this with was Creator Z17 HX Studio, which the pen ships with. This monstrous laptop computer will embrace Intel’s new Core i9-13950HX, which has a ginormous 24 cores (though solely eight of these are efficiency cores, whereas 16 are low-powered effectivity cores). You can get it with as much as an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 laptop computer GPU and 64GB of reminiscence. Resolution is 2560 x 1600, and there’s a per-key RGB keyboard. But for my part, this pen is the spotlight.

The Creator Z17 will begin at $2,999, with launch date not but finalized.