Farhad Manjoo writing for Slate states his case for "bringing back' or using a stylus with an iOS devices.

For certain uses, the stylus is way better than fingers--it's more precise, easier to control, and more capable. A stylus lets you type just as fast (and maybe faster) than you can with your finger on a touchscreen and it allows for fine-motor skills like drawing and photo editing. Jobs wondered who wants a stylus. I do! And if tablet and app makers took some time to optimize their product for styluses, you will, too.

Today, people use styluses on iPads for specialized, pen-specific tasks like sketching.

"The research shows that the type of content you produce is different whether you handwrite or type," says Ken Hinckley, an interface expert at Microsoft Research who's long studied pen-based electronic devices. "Typing tends to be for complete sentences and thoughts--you go deeper into each line of thought. Handwriting is for short phrases, for jotting ideas. It's a different mode of thought for most people." This makes intuitive sense: It's why people like to brainstorm using whiteboards rather than Word documents.
Today's touch devices cater to the first, deep mode of thought, but--lacking a stylus--they don't give us a way to jot down our nonlinear ideas. That's why I sometimes find it more frustrating to read e-books than paper books--I can't quickly mark up a Kindle title by underlining, highlighting, or writing notes in the margins. The best example of such marginalia--see David Foster Wallace's--are freeform doodles, as graphical as they are textual. You can't do that kind of thing with a keyboard.

I'm afraid I agree with the quote from Walter Isaacson's biography, "God gave us 10 styluses--let's not invent another." The last thing I need is another object in my pocket. There are many times I find a capacitive touch stylus extremely useful; writing Chinese characters, jotting notes, and fine point control I find much easier with a pen than a finger. But thats what the accessory market is for and there are a slew to chose from.

Steve Jobs hated it, but the iPad and iPhone could use a pseudo-pen.

Pew Internet:

The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.

It's not entirely clear which devices account for this increase, the survey strongly suggests that the Kindle Fire and Nook pricing played a role but doesn't produce data to support the assumption. But a good assumption, despite the deluge of initial negative reviews, they are attractive devices at an affordable price point.

Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period

Update:

From Apple's conference call detailing Apple's Q1 record-breaking revenue and profit stated that Apple saw no change in iPad sales due to the introduction of lower priced limited function tablets.

Apple doesn't consider [...] "limited function tablets and e-readers to be in the same category as the iPad". A big reason for the iPads success is that the ecosystem for the iPad is "in a class by itself".

[...] "We strongly believe in optimizing applications from day one to take advantage of the larger canvas. There are only a few hundred apps designed for the competition, versus more than 170,000 apps designed specifically for iPad. People who want an iPad won't settle for a limited function tablet".

According to the latest research from Nielsen, the launch of Apple's iPhone 4S last Fall had an enormous impact on the proportion of smartphone owners who chose an Apple iPhone.

Among recent acquirers, meaning those who said they got a new device within the past three months, 44.5 percent of those surveyed in December said they chose an iPhone, compared to just 25.1 percent in October. Furthermore, 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they got an iPhone 4S.

Android continues to hold the lead among all smartphone users, with 46.3 percent of all smartphone owners surveyed in Q42011 reporting they have an Android-based mobile phone.

As of Q42011, 46 percent of US mobile consumers had smartphones, and that figure is growing quickly. In fact, 60 percent of those who said they got a new device within the last three months chose a smartphone over a feature phone.

Look to Asymo's "The rise and fall of personal computing" for evidence of how smartphone adoption is disrupting where we as a percentage do our computing.

Japan's mobile industry and keitai culture have gone hand in hand in innovating cell phone features. This article in Pipeline Magazine gives us some clues as to how.

Yumiko wakes to the alarm on her cell phone. The charm dangling from her keitai is the likeness of Hello Kitty, and it jangles as Yumiko fumbles to disable her phone's alarm. She strives in vain to stretch away the chill of morning as she begins her day. A day like any other, in which her cell phone, the Japanese term for which is keitai denwa--literally, "hand carry telephone"--will play a large part.

One notable outgrowth of Japan's unique ethnography has sprung up around the cell phone. In the so-named "keitai culture" the humble cell is king. For over a decade, feature phones in Japan have filled roles Westerners typically ascribe to PCs. So pervasive are cell phones in the daily lives of Japanese that they have taken on something of a "social appendage" status. Keitai sits at the apex of a love triangle with culture on one corner and technology on the other. These three both influence, and are influenced by, each of the others.

So, what challenges or opportunities does keitai present to Japanese mobile carriers? How do they relate to and foster keitai culture, while at the same time, how does keitai influence them? How does that relationship translate to monetization?

Yumiko buys a can of coffee from a vending machine and pays her train fare using her cell phone. The train pulls in at the station, and Yumiko confluences with the tail end of a stream of rush hour commuters boarding the train. Gone are the days when the rail line hired dedicated Oshi ya--or "pushers"--to physically push commuters into packed railcars. Now, station staff fill that role as rush hour demands. A college student utters quiet apologies as he crams Yumiko forward. A recorded voice pleasantly admonishes passengers to refrain from talking on their cell phones and requests riders set their phones to mana modo--"manners mode" or "silent mode." Having heard the announcement countless times before, it occupies only a peripheral part of her attention, like the sound of cicadas on a summer night. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the railcar, she is busy looking up reviews on tablet devices, wondering how she could use something so big in such a cramped environment as this. She then picks up where she left off on the keitai shousetsu--cell phone novel--she had been reading. This one is a particularly racy pregnancy romance, which Yumiko devours in 100-word morsels downloaded via SMS.

Japan's mobile industry and keitai culture have gone hand in hand in innovating cell phone features; some things we take for granted, even features that are just now gaining momentum here, have been around in Japan for ages. Short message service (SMS) first sprang up in Europe in the mid-'90s, but in the early '90s, Japanese were already engaging in a proto-texting via pagers, which used a numeric lingo based on the Japanese words for numbers. Mobile gaming saw mainstream popularity in the early 2000's.

Japan's Keitai Culture: Galapagos Now!

While addiction to apps or texting is not a recognized medical condition, there have been numerous studies produced on whether the technology causes more harm than good. A study by Case Western Reserve School of Medicine found that teens who spend a lot of time on texting or on social media are also more like to use drugs or alcohol and get into fights.

A recent article in the New York Times by author and brand consultant Martin Lindstorm claimed the top three most powerful affecting sounds in the world are baby giggles, the Intel chime and a vibrating phone.

Weldon confesses to feeling lost without his phone. He never turns it off.

"Even when it's charging, it's on," he said. "I left it once and went home on my lunch break just to get it."

Smartphones also can be habit-forming, according to a study by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Intel Labs. Researchers found that smartphone users in the U.S. and in Finland checked their phone repeatedly throughout the day, usually for less than 30 seconds.

I am like many chained to my phone but I don't think that my behaviour constitutes addiction, yet.

Studies reveal addictive nature of smartphone use

Korean opposition Democratic Unified Party is opening up it's leadership election process to ordinary citizens and allowed them to vote through their mobile phones. It's an experiment that could reshape the election culture in Korea.

According to the DUP, more than 643,000 citizens have applied to be part of its electoral college, a turnout that surprised party officials who predicted a maximum figure of 250,000 to 300,000.

Another merit of mobile voting is that it enables political parties to accurately reflect public sentiment in electing their leaders. Hence, they are moving to use it in selecting their candidates for the parliamentary and presidential elections.

Ultimately, mobile voting is likely to accelerate the transition of party politics to what is called citizen politics by opening the way for massive participation of citizens in political processes. This transition will be also fueled by the penetration of social networking services, which contributes to stimulating young electorate's interest in politics.

Yet voting on the cell phone is not without its negatives. For instance, it can make a leadership race of a political party a popularity poll, as citizens participating in the vote are likely to choose candidates based on the familiarity of their names rather than a scrutiny of their policies or qualifications.

Mobile voting can also distort the outcome of a poll if a certain political group tells its followers to become members of the electoral college and vote for the candidate of its choice.

These and other adverse effects, however, do not outweigh the merits of mobile voting. Hence, we believe it is the way domestic political parties should go in future. Yet it would be better if they can minimize its negative aspects.

Korean Herald: Voting by Mobile Phone

After leaving his passport at home Canadian man Martin Reisch managed to use his iPad to cross into the United States, from The Guardian:

A Canadian man who realised that he had left his passport at home as he approached the US border managed to cross over by using his Apple iPad.

In a novel deployment of the tablet that may have come as a surprise even to the late Steve Jobs, Martin Reisch said that a mildly annoyed US border officer made an exception after he was handed the iPad displaying a scanned copy of the forgotten passport.

Reisch was a half hour from the border between the US and the Canadian province of Quebec when he decided to try to gain entry rather than turn back and make a two-hour trek back home to Montreal to fetch his passport.

He told the officer he was heading to the US to drop off Christmas gifts for his friend's kids. He said that the true story, the scanned passport and his driver's license helped him get through last week.

Read on The Guardian

The Wall Street Journal reports on the potential lifesaving practice of loading Taliban ringtones on Afghani mobile phones.

Afghan shopkeeper Nasratullah Niazai has developed a brisk new business over the past year. For about $2 a pop, he uploads into customers' cellphones a collection of Taliban songs and ringtones.

A skinny 22-year-old who operates a one-room computer store on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, Mr. Niazai is no Taliban. Neither are most of his customers.

Instead, the songs and ringtones romanticizing the insurgents' jihad against the infidel invaders serve as potentially lifesaving travel insurance for Kabulis who brave increasingly perilous countryside roads.

Sentries at improvised Taliban checkpoints, some only an hour's drive away from central Kabul, routinely check travelers' cellphones. As a result, government officials, police, soldiers, security guards, university students, translators for Western companies, construction workers and scores of others go to extraordinary lengths to scrub their phones of any evidence of links to the coalition and the Afghan government--and to masquerade as Taliban sympathizers.

For Safety, Afghan Travelers Tune In to Taliban Ringtones . Photo Jan Chipchase. Via Danger room.