Just Mobile AluPen & Penultimate app review

We stumbled across these products a little while ago when enquiries started to flood in through our web stores, after much pre-release coverage in the press. Having tried other stylus products in the past, I have to be honest and say i wasn't expecting this one to be a great deal better. However, on opening the box the AluPen felt completely different from it's competitors. Like all the Just Mobile products it's primarily brushed aluminium and therefore fits the Apple look just perfectly. The box I tested came with a nice leather-effect case, although I have heard from several people who got no case with theirs (maybe the early production models didn't have these included?). If I had to describe the size of the pen I'd say it's a bit chunky, something like the big pencils people of my age (and older) might have used at school in their early years (it even has the same hexagonal profile). That said, it feels beautiful in your hands, especially once the aluminium has drawn some heat from your body. Running down the centre of the AluPen is a black rubbery nib, which adds to the whole chunky lead pencil look.

Admittedly, one of the flaws of the technology used in the iPad means that a rather chunky nib is required, but because theAluPen is itself on the rotund side, its nib doesn't seem so bad. Let's say that it's in proportion. The key thing is that it feels and looks pretty much like a really nice writing implement, nicely weighted and elegant looking.

Now the whole point of the pen is to get rid of those greasy finger marks all over your iPad and iPhone, which it does beautifully in general use. But where it really excels, for me at least, is when being used with an app I found called Penultimate. I've tried several apps in the past that try to emulate the paper pad, but this is the one that seems to do the best at that job, and possibly at the cheapest price (currently 59p). Put simply Penultimate is just a paper pad emulator, but it offers a few extras, such as the ability to email a page (or pages) from your notepad directly to a contact as an image, perfect for the salesman in a meeting to send back to the office to get a quote started for example. Most important though, Penultimate actually reflects your writing pretty well on the iPad screen, something it's competitors dont seem to do quite so well. It's become my most used business app recently, and I now believe I can safely say that the future of our trees is starting to look just a little safer.

The AluPen is available in silver, black, blue, red, gold and green at allmacshop

Penultimate is available through iTunes