Just Mobile’s AluPen is a rubber-tipped stylus designed for big capacitive touchscreens like those of the iPad 2, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and virtually every touchscreen device going these days.
As you can see, its main appeal is that it’s big and chunky and shaped like a large pencil. The hexagonal shape gives the AluPen a more natural feel for when you’re sketching. The grainy finish gives it a degree of grip as well and the fact that its aluminium means that it doesn’t weight a ton.
Unlike the Magic Pen that comes with HTC’s Flyer tablet, the AluPen is ‘dumb’ i.e. it’s not active. So while you don’t get any features besides tap and touch with the squidgy rubber tip, it also doesn’t require batteries.
Available in a range of hues, the AluPen is a pretty sweet looking item. You can snap one up in the standard silver colour or pink, black, blue, gold, green and red.
Along with the AluPen, there’s also the AluCube; a neat little cube-shape stand that’s sculpted from, you guessed it, aluminium.
The AluPen is available to order from xtand.net now for £32.60 (converted from the £37.45 total price in Euros) including shipping.
The AluCube isn’t yet shipping to the UK but we’ll let you know as soon as it is. Click through for some more hands on pictures of Just Mobile’s AluPen doing its thing.
As we said, the AluPen is really light and yet feels solid; don’t go trying to snap this thing across your forehead. It might look like a pencil…
The nib of the AluPen is a bouncy rubber tip that’s designed to mimic the pressure of a fingertip on a capactive touchscreen.
There’s also a rubber ‘eraser’ tip on the end of the AluPen. This obviously doesn’t work as you’d think, it’s just a nice little touch.
The AluPen is pretty basic function-wise but it’s a solid and well designed piece of kit.
Here’s the Just Mobile AluPen working with the Drawing Pad app for iPad. It’s really satisfying to draw with the AluPen, especially with crayon and pencil-type ‘brushes’.
Here’s Just Mobile’s AluCube. It does what it does; acts like a stand for the AluCube. We half expected it to double as a pencil sharpener. Note the little arched tunnel on the side there.
This little groove on the underside is a cable pass through for your iPad, Macbook or laptop or whatever. So it’s a neat way of keeping at least one cable in its place while giving you somewhere to prop your AluPen up.
The AluPen in its six other colours. Sadly these appeared to be stuck into the clear acrylic block, so we were stuck playing with the pink and silver ones. Not that there’s anything wrong with pink or silver mind.
Leave a Reply