The elegant, stainless-steel oStylus ($37.50) is oVerthinking things. This overengineered piece of metallic elegance aims to offer a smoother glide than other styli, and a more precise line by essentially removing the stylus's point. It works well, but we just couldn't get past the weirdness of the experience here.

Why use a stylus on your iPad? It gives you more precision when you're drawing or making handwritten notes, and it gets your finger out of the way. A stylus turns your tablet into a true sketchbook or notepad.

The oStylus has a very light aluminum handle, with a stainless steel and ceramic "o" connected to the end by titanium wire. The hole in the "o" is where the point of the stylus would be, giving you very precise control. The whole assemblage is rather long, at 6.75 inches, but very light.

We gave the oStylus to professional artist (and my wife) Leontine Greenberg, and, well—it's a taste thing. Greenberg dubbed the oStylus excellent for clicking and dragging and fine for drawing, with good precision. But the stylus has an awkward shape and feel to it, and sometimes the "o" flips over into a position that doesn't work.

I can see the oStylus really appealing to geeks who like highly-engineered gadgets; it's peculiar and efficient in the way that, say, the Dvorak keyboard was. That said, we still prefer the Pogo Sketch Pro ($24.95, 4.5 stars) as a mainstream drawing stylus for tablets; it offers excellent precision with less of a learning curve.

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