Acer Alpha Switch 12 Active Pen

efjay

To be clear, this is NOT a Windows problem. I still have access to my Surface Pro 3 to compare and the handwriting on that device is flawless, so was the Surface 3 and original Surface Pro I had. I should add that i also had the infamous Dell Venue 8 Pro which also used a Synaptics digitizer and you can search yourself for the horror stories. So much so that Dell switched to Wacom AES for their latest tablets. So no, its nothing to do with the OS and all to do with the digitizer/pen combo Acer chose to use.

gbardach

 

My Acer is the SA5-271 a.k.a. Alpha Switch 12. This is from the Acer FAQ shown on the Acer Care site. Maybe we all use the wrong stylus! Here the Elan stylus NP.STY1A.005 is recommended and I got the version NP.STY1A.006.

 

Anyone using the NP.STY1A.005?

gregoryx

Echoing what a couple others said above, the quality of the stylus experience with the SA12 is not top-notch. As others noted, there have been worse experiences - I've had the Dell DV8P as well (version one and two) and the first version of that was truly terrible. The real message here is that it did improve as they improved the drivers. So it wasn't just hardware. 

 

With the DV8P, there was even an enthusiast who wrote their own program to manipulate the sampling rates on it and it made a huge difference - thus proving (though Dell wouldn't acknowledge) that it was something that could be addressed with software if they'd just step up and deal with it. 

 

I'm not seeing a single post saying, "this is my tenth Windows tablet and compared to the Wacom experience this thing is excellent." What I'm seeing is, "what are you talking about? It's fine. You're whining. You suck." or "Having experience with other Windows pen systems, this is inferior." 

 

Frankly, I wish those of you who have no real point of comparison would just stop posting. You're confusing a very real situation with your irrelevant input. 

I'm in the camp of having over a dozen Windows sylus-based tablets for about 13 years now. I know a good stylus experience (old Wacom or now the new Wacom - see the DV8P2) from a bad one (initial Surface N-Trig release, DV8P, others). This is not the worst. But it's not as good as it should be. 

Acer, any chance of an Acer person posting on this? Might there be a driver update in the works? Could you at least acknowledge that this could be better? Maybe Elan (stylus manufacturer?) has newer drivers that we could manually update to? 

sLapz

Hey, do you guys know if the Active Pen's Diamond Cut butt really acts as an eraser? I can't seem to make it work. Is there a settings there?

 

Also, I can't seem to add a shortcut on the bottom (near point) button, just the upper one. Does this have an updated driver or something?

 

Thank you!