Poundland's £1 Signalex iPad iPhone Stylus

Not that I frequent Poundland much you understand, but when I noticed a Signalex iPad stylus for £1.00 I thought it was worth a try. But wait, there's more! For £1.00 you get not one but two styli. One is a typical pen-like stylus whilst the other is much smaller and as a consequence difficult to hold. So how do they perform?

Stylus for iPad - Boxwave and Kit Universal compared

Whilst using apps on the iPad just with your fingers is great, there are times when holding a pen just feels more natural. This isn't just for those artists amongst us, but for anyone who needs to make a small sketch now and again.

For example, I regularly attend meetings and conferences where as well as taking notes, I need to visualize some idea with a little drawing. Whilst using your finger to do this works, to me it seem hard to get the accuracy you would expect when using a pen or pencil.

Hence I decided to buy a stylus for my iPad, and based on the reviews I found decided to buy a Boxwave and so ordered one from Amazon UK for just £12.31.  But it just so happened that the same day I was in our local Tesco grocery store and noticed they had a Kit Universal Tablet stylus on sale for just £2.47  (and who would have imagined that one day your local grocery store would be selling iPads? But that is another story).  At that price I couldn't resist and so decided to give it a go.

So, how do they compare?

Keynote for iPad and PowerPoint

When I was recently given an iPad 2, I was keen to see how well it might function as a presentation device. I give a lot of presentations and training courses where all the content is currently based in Microsoft PowerPoint. So I wanted to see whether an iPad could substitute for my laptop.

The first task was to install Keynote. For just $9.99 or £4.99, there is certainly no need to worry about justifying the cost!

Then I needed to try opening a PowerPoint presentation in Keynote. The first step is to get the file onto the iPad.  There are a number of ways to do this.