Samsung made it cool to use a stylus with a smartphone again, and it seems a few of their competitors want in on the fun. One of those competitors is headquartered in their very own South Korean backyard, and we’re speaking of none other than LG.
The company tested out the use of a stylus with a smartphone with the LG G3 Stylus spin-off, though they failed to capture any meaningful interest. Aside from the fact that Samsung’s “been there, done that,” the LG G3 Stylus’s pen was a run of the mill capacitive stylus that had its own docking bay built into the smartphone. It doesn’t help that the phone’s specs screamed mid-range and couldn’t hold a candle to the original LG G3.
But a new trademark by LG suggests they could be looking to get serious about this thing. The company has claimed “LG G Pen” in the USPTO, though the trademark filing doesn’t tell us much about their exact plans. The description is littered with vague and open-ended terms relating to pretty much any piece of technology you can think of, and even a few things outside that realm. (“Rings of precious metal,” anyone?)
There are many possibilities for the use of this name. It could be that LG’s looking to take that same capacitive stylus, sell it standalone and simply market it for use with any of their existing products. They could be rebranding it for use with the LG G4 when or if it eventually launches. We could even see it used as a major focal point for a new stylus or tablet altogether.
But none of that alone would steal any thunder from Samsung’s premier phablet. LG would have to do a lot more work to create an exciting stylus experience than to simply create a crawl space fit for a somewhat-ordinary plastic stick.
Samsung’s S-Pen for their Note line of devices employs many advanced bits of technology such as pressure sensitivity and and hover detection. That much is possible thanks to Samsung’s hefty stake in the world’s leading digitizer company Wacom, though LG shouldn’t have much trouble licensing the technology from the same or a competing company if they so wish. They’ll have to do that much if they wish to seriously challenge Samsung’s stronghold on the market they practically created.
LG has also trademarked “G Scrawl,” the description of which has equally as many open-ended terms as the G Pen’s. It’s possible this could be the name of a new app for scribbling pictures and notes that LG would look to market for the G Pen.
It doesn’t sound like LG will go it alone in the near future, either. Lenovo also trademarked a new stylus-related mark — WRITEit — that tells of an app that can interpret handwriting from the use of a stylus or digital pen.
We haven’t heard anything from Lenovo’s camp on the mobile front when it comes to a digitized stylus, though the company does currently sell stylus accessories for their ThinkPad computer/tablet hybrid lineup. Whether or not either of these companies are looking to one-up Samsung at their own game remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure — a lot more companies are starting to realize the potential of marketing a pen to use with these huge smartphone and tablet displays being doled out as of late.
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