I’ve made no secret of the fact that my first gen Kindle Fire is just fine and dandy for the uses I have for it. One thing that did stand out, though, as a usability PITA from the beginning was the onscreen keyboard. For typing, not much fun. So, one of the first things I did was to locate some conductive foam in my stash of junk, urm, parts and equipment and make some styli. They worked and were a help, making “typing” on the Fire almost Good Enough, and easily OK for typing brief notes in books.
But actually buying a stylus? Fuggedaboutit. All of ’em I found on the web were too much money, once I’d made some from castoff junk, urm, parts and equipment for essentially nothing.
Page forward to today when I was standing at the checkout at our local “fell off the back of a truck” store and saw mini-styli (with handy lil 2.5mm/3.5mm plugin tethers) for a buck apiece. Since my home made styli have long since become well-worn, I picked up a couple. They work quite well, but “mini-styli” means using something about the size of a pencil nub, so. . .
At the same “fell off the back of a truck” I buy a particular ball point pen that has a Parker-compatible refill. A buck apiece. Cheap and useful, since I have more than a few Parker (and Parker compatible) ballpoint pens. While the barrels of these cheapies are fairly nice bamboo tubes, I junk the barrels and keep the refills handy. (Where “junk the barrels” means “put ’em in my stash of someday useful stuff” *heh*).
Do you see a convergence coming up here? Right. I just mated one of the mini-styli to one of those spare bamboo tubes (with a handy pocket clip already installed!) and have a pen-sized stylus that works a charm and even clips nicely to the leather case my Fire regularly occupies.
The smaller surface contact area of a stylus really makes a difference when using the onscreen keyboard, and the more normal pen size of the bamboo barreled (with the conductive part protruding for index finger contact) stylus is just right.
Rabbit trail: it’s also a wee tad easier using TeamViewer on the Fire with a stylus, well, for most things. Pinch-n-zoom isn’t all that improved. *heh* I do kinda enjoy accessing the Win8 Media Center compy with TeamViewer on my Fire. Comes in handy sometimes.
