There are countless companies that make styluses for the iPad, but only a few companies have been the most innovative and have come out with some of the best styluses over the years. Adonit is definitely at or near the top of that list. (Wacom has also come out with some excellent iPad styluses.) Today, I'm reviewing the latest iPad stylus from Adonit, a product called the Jot Dash. It is the first active stylus that has a body that is as thin as a pen, so it feels great in your hand. Adonit sent me a free sample to review, and I've been trying it out for the last few weeks. Adonit sent me the Silver model, but you can also get it in Charcoal.
Background on styluses
The best way to understand the advantages of the Adonit Jot Dash is to start with a little background on iPad styluses in general. A stylus is an incredibly useful iPad accessory if you want to take handwritten notes or draw, but there currently trade-offs associated with using them because no current iPad is designed to work with a stylus. This will change later this year, when Apple starts selling the iPad Pro which is made to work with a stylus made by Apple called the Apple Pencil. But for any other iPad, you need a stylus made by a third party, and that stylus needs a way to work with an iPad that was not designed to work with a stylus.
There are two types of styluses on the market. Traditional styluses have a tip about the same size as your finger tip, which is necessary because the iPad was designed to recognize something the size of a finger tip. Those styluses work well, but you do sometimes feel like you are drawing with a crayon or a thick marker instead of a pen. My favorite traditional stylus is the 2015 version of the Adonit Jot Pro, which I reviewed this past March. It uses a fine tip attached to a clear disc, which gives you the illusion of using a fine point pen while your iPad feels something closer to the size of a finger. I love that stylus and use it almost every day in my law practice when I am taking handwritten notes or annotating a document on my iPad.
The second type of stylus is called an active stylus. It has a fine tip which makes it look and feel much more like a pen when you are using it, a huge advantage over traditional styluses. It works by sending out radio waves that trick the iPad into thinking that something larger, about the size of a fingertip, is touching the screen. Adonit invented this category when it debuted the Adonit Jot Script in late 2013 (my review), but now many companies make active styluses. Some active styluses also have a button that can communicate, via Bluetooth, with many apps. For example, you can program the button to trigger the "undo" feature, or switch from a pen to an eraser, every time you click it. Active styluses with these buttons are much more useful than active styluses and traditional styluses that lack a button.
While the fine tip of an active stylus is amazing, active styluses have typically had three disadvantages versus a traditional stylus. First, they require power. Some models use AAA or AAAA batteries, and other models are rechargeable. Active styluses typically charge quickly, but you do need to remember to charge them. Otherwise, you might be taking notes in a meeting when your active stylus dies, and unless it is a model that uses replaceable batteries and you have those extra batteries in your pocket, you are out of luck. (Apple's upcoming Pencil stylus has a neat way to deal with this; if it runs out of power, you can connect it to the Lightning port on the iPad, and in just 15 seconds it gets enough charge for 30 minutes of use.)
Second, active styluses are typically less precise than traditional styluses. You sometimes see a little waviness in a line as you draw — especially when you draw a diagonal line. This problem got significantly worse when Apple released the iPad Air in 2013 and it remained a problem in the iPad Air 2 introduced in 2014. Adonit figured out how to update its technology to work with the iPad Air and iPad Air 2, and released the Adonit Jot Script 2 a few months ago (my review), but the large majority of active styluses still don't work great with the iPad Air and iPad Air 2.
Third, because of the need to include a battery and electronics, the bodies of active styluses have always needed to be a little larger than the size of a traditional pen. For example, the Adonit Jot Script 2 and the Bamboo Stylus fineline (my review) both have a diameter of about 10.5 mm. To be fair, there are certainly larger pens being used every day. My personal favorite pen right now, the Zebra Sarasa Push Clip (my review), has an 11.11 mm diameter, but it still feels smaller than both the Adonit Jot Script 2 and the Bamboo Stylus, perhaps because of the weight. Suffice it to say that with every active stylus that I have used in the past, I had no doubt that I was holding a stylus containing electronics in my hand and not a pen.
The size and shape
With that background behind us, let's jump to the best new feature of the Adonit Jot Dash: size. The Jot Dash is the thinnest active stylus that I have ever used. The diameter is only 8.5 mm. This is the first time in my life that I have held a stylus in my hand and I felt like I was holding a pen. This makes a huge difference, substantially improving the feel of the stylus in your hand when you use it.
In the following picture, the Jot Dash is on the top, followed by two other active styluses (the Adonit Script 2 (review) and the Wacom Bamboo Stylus fineline (review)), followed by a normal pen (the Zebra Sarasa Push Clip (review)) and at the bottom is the Adonit Jot Pro (review).
Another nice feature of this stylus is that it has a clip on the side, making it easy to clip it in a pocket on your shirt or a pocket in a purse or briefcase.
The tip
Because it is an active stylus, one expects the Adonit Jot Dash to have a small tip, and it certainly does. The tip on the Adonit Jot Dash is only 1.9 mm, the same size as the tip on the Adonit Jot Script 2 and the Bamboo Stylus fineline (my review). This is a nice size for a stylus tip.
In addition to being small, the tip feels great against an iPad screen — about the same as the tip on the Adonit Script 2, which is also an excellent stylus tip. In fact, the combination of a great tip plus a thin stylus that feels good in the hand means that the Adonit Jot Dash feels better than any other active stylus that I have ever used.
Because the Jot Dash tip is hard, it makes some noise when you tap it against the iPad screen. Having said that, the noise is a little less with the Jot Pro than with the Jot Script 2. I sometimes find the Adonit Script 2 tip just a little too noisy for me to feel comfortable using it in a quiet room when others are around. With the Jot Dash, that is slightly less of an issue for me, although there is still some noise.
Power
The Jot Dash is rechargeable, and you charge it by sitting it in a small dongle that fits into a USB slot. The Jot Dash attaches by magnets, so it can hang on its side or upside down and it wont fall off of the charger. This is the same design that Adonit used on the Jot Script 2. It works great on the Jot Script 2, and I also like it on the Jot Dash. It takes about 45 minutes to fully recharge.
One thing that I don't like about the Jot Script 2 is the way that the power button is on the side is sometimes hard to find. The Jot Dash doesn't have this problem because the power button is on the top. Not only does this make the power button easy to find, it is also a natural location for a button — the same place that you would push down on a pen with a retractable tip. Press it once and the Jot Dash turns on and a small light on the body of the stylus glows green for about two seconds. Press it again and the light glows red for two seconds and then the stylus goes off. The Jot Dash will also turn off automatically after a period of time if you are not using it.
Other than the power button, there is no other button on the Jot Dash. Thus, it does not have a second button that can communicate with some apps using Bluetooth — a useful feature of some other styluses, such as the Bamboo Stylus fineline. (It is very handy to push a button to immediately undo whatever you last drew with the Bamboo Stylus fineline; no such feature exists on the Jot Dash.)
Diagonal lines
[UPDATE 11/17/15: In the following section, I describe troubles that I had with diagonal lines on the iPad Air and iPad Air 2. Note that on the iPad Pro, the Adonit Dash draws diagonal lines perfectly.]
My main complaint about the Adonit Jot Dash is that it has the same problem that most other active styluses have: it isn't as precise as a traditional stylus, especially when you are drawing a diagonal line, and especially on the iPad Air and iPad Air 2. I was surprised to see this problem because Adonit solved it in the Script 2 that it released earlier this year. For whatever reason — maybe the technology wouldn't fit in the thin Jot Dash? — the Jot Dash works the same as the original Adonit Script. This means that it is virtually impossible to draw a straight diagonal line on an iPad Air or iPad Air 2; the line always has waves in it. It also means that the digital ink is more wavy when you are writing anything other than a horizontal or vertical line. The end result is that, on the iPad Air and the iPad Air 2, your penmanship is a little worse than it is when you use a traditional stylus. Here is an example in which I use the excellent GoodNotes app on an iPad Air 2 to draw lines using the Adonit Jot Pro and the Adonit Jot Dash:
As you can see, the Jot Dash has obvious problems with those diagonal lines. But many letters also look less neat with the Jot Dash. For example, compare the "J" in the word Jot — it looks fine when drawn with the Jot Pro, but the Jot Dash made the letter look worse even though I believe I drew it the same way both times.
Here is the tip of the Adonit Jot Pro on the left, and the Adonit Jot Dash on the right. As you can see, if you ignore the clear disc on the end of the Jot Pro, the tip seems to be about the same size on both styluses.
Conclusion
There is a lot to like about the Adonit Jot Dash. The thin size feels great in my hand, the power button on the top works well, the clip on the side is useful, and the tip is small and feels nice against an iPad screen. If only Adonit had included the same technology that it put in the Script 2 to solve the problem with diagonal lines, this stylus would easily be my all-time favorite active stylus, and I might even pick it as my all-time favorite stylus overall.
Instead, almost every time I tried out the Jot Dash over the past few weeks, I found myself wanting to return to the Adonit Jot Pro, which I gave a rave review earlier this year. The Jot Pro is almost as thin as the Jot Dash and is certainly thin enough to feel great in your hand. And even though the Jot Pro is a traditional stylus, the creative use of the fine tip connected to a see-through disc gives you the illusion that you are using a true fine tip (just like an active stylus) without wavy diagonal lines or a decline in penmanship.
Thus, I myself would pick the Jot Pro over the Jot Dash; I think it works better, and it is also $20 cheaper. Having said that, if you are in the market for an active stylus, you'll want to seriously consider the Jot Dash because it does have a lot going for it.
[UPDATE 11/17/15: As noted above, the Jot Dash works much better on the iPad Pro. The Apple Pencil works better as it has less lag time and excellent palm rejection when you rest your hand on the screen, plus it has the handy Lightning charger built-in so you don't need to worry about losing the Adonit Jot Dash charger. But the Jot Dash works almost as well as the Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro at half the price.]
Click here to get the Adonit Jot Dash from Amazon ($49.99).
