Google Joins the Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) Along with Five Other Companies

When you talk about stylus, Samsung'southward S-Pen from their Notation line of phablets and the Apple Pen are pretty much the just devices that come to our listen. While other manufacturers are also getting on lath, the technology is simply not there yet. Yet, information technology looks like the stylus space is about to get a lot more than interesting, as Google has at present joined the Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) for a standardized stylus specification.

In instance you lot don't know what USI is, it is an initiative to encourage companies to produce styluses that work on rivals' products. For instance, a universal stylus manufactured past Samsung volition even work with, permit's say, a device manufactured by Lenovo. This initiative was launched in 2015.

In addition to Google, the USI is welcoming five other companies – 3M Touch Systems, Inc., Lattice Semiconductor, Maxeye Smart Technologies Co. Ltd., MyScript and Tactual Labs Co. The USI ane.0 Stylus and Device Specifications were finalized in September 2016, and now, Google has joined at the highest "Promoter" level, which also includes another big players like Intel, Lenovo, Synaptics, and Wacom.

A standardized stylus will be able to:

work across any compatible affect-screen device or graphics tablet
store a user's settings such equally ink color and stroke width
change radio frequency instantly if interference from other devices is detected

Talking about the advantages of this standard, the device users will hugely benefit from this, as switching from one hardware to the other wouldn't require a new pen. Naturally, this would reduce expense for users and in fact, information technology volition as well increment collaboration opportunities in the market.

The USI said, "The specification enables the OEM, IHV and software ecosystem to develop a new generation of agile styluses that provide consumers a consistent, customizable and interoperable experience across make, model and form cistron. It as well enables new usages for active styluses, such as multiple styluses operating simultaneously on a single device."

Lastly, it is as well worth noting that Google'south support for this initiative could help the specification to go a long way. And needless to say, there are a lot of other companies like Intel, LG Brandish, and Sharp, etc., engaged in the initiative as well. However, there are companies similar Microsoft and Apple, who are heavily invested in their own technology likewise. So it will be quite interesting to meet how the market saturates overtime.