Anyone remember a time when Pocket PCs came with proper styli? They were thicker, stronger, and most importantly they didn’t fold up like a picnic blanket.

These days manufacturers have been stealing space from the old stylus slot to cram ever more stuff into their devices. While I understand they are under pressure to make stuff thinner and smaller, they need to consider how it compromises usability in the process.

I’ve really come to notice this stylus origami since trying to ink on the HTC Shift and the Fujitsu U1010. They include these tiny little toothpicks reminiscent of the CLIE styli that are too thin, too light and they are constantly collapsing when you use them! The Shift has the added excitement of an overly sensitive touchscreen that makes getting that tiny pointer onto the screen (without brushing your hand on the screen) very difficult.

It hasn’t really drawn my attention before since I mainly used on-screen keyboards or hardware thumboards, but for users of transcriber on the PPC or handwriting recognition on a small tablet PC, how do you get on?

For now I will be using the nice chunky stylus that came with an IBM 730TE from the early ’90s. They knew what a stylus was back then.

This was written entirely in ink on the U1010