Big Backing For 'Universal Stylus' Campaign (bbc.com)

Google has backed an effort to standardise touch-screen styluses so they can be used on many devices. From a report: The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) was launched, in 2015, to encourage companies to produce styluses that work on rivals' products Dell, Intel, Lenovo, LG and graphics tablet-maker Wacom have all backed the project. However, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung have not. One expert suggested the big brands would keep their proprietary pens. Styluses designed to work with modern touch-screen devices and graphics tablets usually contain sensors to detect pressure, movement and orientation of the pen.

Comments

Universal = least common denominator

[rainer_d]

The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example, exploding/burning/shorting chargers are another one.

Lightning, Thunderbolt and especially USB-C are better examples, with companies behind it that have at least some level of QC.

There's nothing somebody else in China can't manufacture a bit cheaper and a bit crappier and a bit more dangerous for the end-user.

Re:Universal = least common denominator

[chispito]

The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example

I think by most metrics, micro USB has been a wildly successful standard. What is it the perfect example of?

Re:The nice thing about standards...

[dgatwood]

The problem is then you get no innovation. Micro USB sucks in various ways, being a single orientation connector is one of them. Yet, if everyone stuck to the standard, we'd all be ... stuck with the standard.

Nonsense. If companies decide that the standard isn't good enough, they can improve the standard, just like the USB consortium did with USB-C.

IMO, if Apple had pushed for improvements to the standard instead of going off on their own with Lightning, we wouldn't have two incompatible standards right now. After all, I think everybody had concluded that micro-USB was fundamentally unreliable by the time Lightning came out, and they were looking for a replacement by that point anyway. The idea of making a reversible connector might have been borrowed from Apple (no idea about the timeline for that decision), but it certainly wasn't the primary driver for replacing micro-USB.

In fact, if Apple had stuck with the standards and pushed to improve those standards rather than using the 30-pin dock connector way back in the day, there's a good chance we'd have gotten a USB-C-like connector many years earlier, instead of the disaster that micro-USB turned out to be.