Adonit Pro 3

Write on your touchscreen with an analogue stylus.

Adonit’s Pro 3 is a passive stylus, requiring no Bluetooth and no batteries. The stylus has a very fine point; to persuade your tablet of choice to recognise this, it’s attached by a ball joint to a fingertipsized plastic disc, which skates across the screen.

It looks weird — but it works brilliantly, and is transparent, so you needn’t worry about it obscuring what’s on the screen. After a few moments of use, you forget the disc and use the Pro 3 like a ballpoint. The body is slim (at 9mm in dimeter), maybe too slim for big hands, but it’s beautifully made. The lid snaps on over the tip with a satisfying magnetic clunk, connecting in the same way to the other end (which has an integral pocket clip) to keep it safe while in use. The grip is textured, which gives it a really nice feel while in the hand, too. It’s also quite lightweight at 18g, and 12.6mm long. You can also grab it in four different colours: black, silver, rose gold and midnight blue.

On iPad, we found that while the Pro 3 lacked the precision of the Apple Pencil, and you can’t lean your palm on the screen with impunity, it did enable us to work much more finely than with a rubber tip.

It’s reportedly compatible with all touchscreens, so you can grab this for your smartphone or whip it out when using your Surface laptop, or basically any iPad or Android tablet.

If you don’t want to pay around twice the price for a Bluetooth stylus, and you don’t mind the slightly strange-looking tip design on offer here, then the Pro 3 is pretty effective.