Since Nvidia hasn’t been more than moderately successful in the mobile chip market so far, they’ve decided to take matters in their own hands, and start making devices themselves. This may or may not make Nvidia some money if the devices themselves are successful, but it does also show their customers what can be done with their chips and other technologies. Think of it of Nvidia’s “Nexus” devices for their own chips, which they’re using to showcase the benefits of their own technologies.
After the Project SHIELD console, Nvidia has announced a Tegra Note 7 tablet that will be launched as early as next week, on November 19th, while Newegg should open up its pre-orders in the next day or two.
The Nvidia Tegra Note 7 comes with a 1.8GHz Tegra 4 chip, 1GB of RAM, 16GB storage, and a 7″ 1280 x 800 display. That puts the Note 7 at a slight disadvantage from the new Nexus 7 in terms of resolution, but it makes up for it with a lower price tag, a stylus, and its “DirectStylus” technology, which makes a custom Nvidia capacitive stylus about as accurate as one that comes with an active digitizer (and costs significantly more).
This stylus isn’t pressure sensitive per se, like those Wacom pens are, but it’s designed in a way that you can switch from the thinner part of its tip to the flatter part, and the lines will get thicker as you do that. It’s an interesting idea, and it’s a definite improvement for capacitive styluses which are normally about as thick as your finger tip, but I wouldn’t say it’s a better solution than the pressure-sensitive Wacom pens, where you don’t even have to switch the tip of the pen around to quickly draw with thinner or thicker lines. Plus a Wacom pen like Samsung’s S-pen should be a lot more accurate in how think the lines will be, since it has 1024-levels of pressure sensitivity, while this stylus is a lot more limited in thickness levels.
Still, if this sort of technology gets widespread and lands in a lot more tablets, that are also more affordable, I think that is great news for consumers who like drawing or taking notes on their devices.