This means that capacitive touchscreens, which require an extended surface of the finger to be in contact with the screen to register a "touch", are not at all appropriate for pocket-sized devices like smartphones when one tries to do more than just viewing information, but tries to actually modify the text/picture/etc. that is shown on the screen.

So far, only resistive touchscreens allow to work with a stylus or a finger-nail. For many users, this is really a more useful feature than being able to zoom with gestures (multi-touch feature of capacitive touchscreens). Zooming can be achieved in many other ways (for ex. by having a zoom-button, etc.). But nothing can replace pointing accuracy. Note that track-balls and other similar poiting-devices are no substitute for the ability to directly point to the screen with high accuracy.
In any case, technology already exists that allows to combine the advantages of capacitive and resistive displays, see for ex. http://www.stantum.com/ (to whom I am related in no way). Unfortunately, this is being ignored in the newly released smartphones.

Personally, I would like the tentacles in addition to my arms, legs, fingers and toes. I’m going to put my mind to it and see if I can mutate.

A drawing tool like an active digitizer is a smart form of leverage which can never be replicated by fingers… Of course we had fingers before pens too, so this iPad virtual keyboard is a major regression. I am absolutely frustrated by it right now typing this.

I can get up to 40 wpm on my tablet PC with pen, but I’ve tested this thing and the best I could do was 25wpm.

Unfortunately since apple tightly control the os, there is unlikely to be any better input methods developed because they would be out of the scope of an app.

Using this makes me understand the theory of evolution better. In reverse. I feel like a caveman!

Your fingers are just another tool, and just like other tools they’re limited in their possibilities. Maybe we could be more creative if we had tentacles instead of fingers? What if our fingers had pointy tips and we could control them much more precisely?

Creativity benefits from more possibilities. That’s what a stylus offers.

I have now broken my stylus and do everything with fingers. I also threw away my kid’s NDS stylus. He cried a little but I told him he is more creative now, and he has since calmed down. It was more difficult to argue with my wife, but she has also come to terms that we should eat with our hands and appreciates the better tasting food.

Thank you again for enriching my life and ridding me of all negativity. I will go now and enjoy my newly found imagination.

There is an infinite variation in the possible input through a stylus, while a keyboard presents a limited set of discrete choices. Once technology allows for input mechanisms to coexist without paying a too steep price on performance, styli will come back.

that, with onenote not being promoted enough as a tool, and the hardware not being able to keep up with the dream (first when asus released the eeepc did intel seem to get the idea of a low power consumption computer) ended up with the idea being far ahead of the hardware available.