Well Mike, you don't seem to agree with any of my inquiries or uses related to the iPad. I am beginning to wonder if you are an Aggie....
While you may not see the use of this, many folks do. You can see many such comments for yourself here in ipadforums.net.
I personally use my iPad for my work, which involves taking many many pages of handwritten notes and some sketches, handwritten tables, graphs and the like. For me - and many other folks - this is best done with a stylus rather than a finger. Using an imprecise stylus - or one where I don't really know where the tip is going to be registered on the - creates problems. As one example, try taking a full page of notes with your regular handwriting style, but use standard fat tip magic marker. That gives you some idea.
Even though the size of the pen tip image can be adjusted to a very fine line in the app itself, the fat tip of the stylus (combined with the iPad's need to register a large surface area for a valid sensor input) frequently places the electronic image of the pen tip in a place other than where it needs to be to make a letter. Imagine writing a capital "E" of "F" and having it end up looking like nothing more than a vertical line that may or may not have the associated horizontal line elements of the letter. Makes it pretty hard to understand what you have written. And for me accuracy has an increased importance as my notes are many times used for attorney-client privileged matters and may be subject to legal review.
Current commercial styli cause a lot of these problems, plus tend to require far more downward pressure as you write than you normally use with a pen and paper. My homemade styli have been successful at reducing the tip size about 50% and working using my normal downward pressure when writing. But the tip size is still too bulky and registers imprecisely on the screen.
I realize that you are very knowledgeable about the apps and operating system of the iPad - far more than I ever will. But I don't know if you have the same depth of understanding of the hardware engineering. If you do, then you already know about capacitive sensing and the control logic/circuitry and understand that the effectiveness of the stylus is really driven by the programmable current source, a precision analog comparator, and an analog bus that sequences through the array of capacitive sensors. These are all programmed specifically for the intended use and in Apple's case is proprietary and must be hacked to change.
I know of at least one company that is almost ready to launch what they hope to be a stylus-based solution, but in my discussions with them they seem to have found a proof-of-concept that reduces the tip even more than mine, but still not to the level they are targeting.
I hope someone out there has the expertise and interest to look into this.
