Why doesn't stylus draw on S9 screen?

[Casey Cheung]

On my S9 phone, I can do a screenshot, then tap on the pen icon (whatever it's called) and use my finger to draw on the image.

I pulled out the stylus pen from my old Note 3 and 4 phones, but the pen will not draw on my S9 screen.

So if my finger is able to draw on my S9 phone screen, why won't a Samsung stylus pen do so?

Doesn't make sense to me.

 

[B. Diddy]

S Pens use Wacom technology to detect where the stylus is and when it's tapped. It's different from a basic capacitative stylus. See this article: https://www.howtogeek.com/177376/no...ual-capacitive-wacom-and-bluetooth-explained/

 

[Casey Cheung]

Great, thanks for the article link! I knew there had to be a technical reason for it.

Based on the article, there are different types of stylus pens. So no stylus pen whatsoever can draw on my S9 phone? I'm guessing not.

 

[B. Diddy]

It depends on what you mean by stylus. Technically, a stylus is any pen-like input instrument, so any cheap $4 stylus you find at your local electronics shop would work on the S9, as long as it has a capacitative tip. The problem with most capacitative styli is that the tip is pretty broad, so fine pointing is a little tricky. Wacom does make a capacitative stylus that has a fine point tip: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/...p-fine-tip-capacitive-stylus-android-devices/. But if your question is if there's an S Pen-like stylus whose tip can also be used as a capacitative input device, I'm not sure if one is available.

 

[chanchan05]

Great, thanks for the article link! I knew there had to be a technical reason for it.

Based on the article, there are different types of stylus pens. So no stylus pen whatsoever can draw on my S9 phone? I'm guessing not.

No. Just the S Pen from the Note. Basically that pen won't work on anything not using the same WACOM tech. It won't work on an iPhone or iPad either. That pen would only work on Note devices or the tablets that support S Pen (Tab S4, S3, a few others from Samsung).