Home > News

Can the Stylus Completely Eliminate the Need for a Mouse?

By Laura Tucker
Can the Stylus Completely Eliminate the Need for a Mouse? Featured Image

Everyone over a certain age can remember what life was like before the mouse. When you sat down at your computer, all your work was done with keystrokes. But the mouse added much in the way of productivity.

But that was decades ago, and now another implement is knocking on the door, and it’s threatening the livelihood of the mouse, and that appears to be Microsoft’s very intention. Can the stylus completely eliminate the need for a mouse?

Microsoft’s Plans

Microsoft picked up a new patent last week for an update to the Surface Pen. It will have a U-shaped touch-sensitive retention clip and will be different than most other styluses. The goal is for it to replace the scroll wheel that is found on a mouse so that you can use it to scroll through pages and zoom in and out. Running your finger along that retention clip will allow you to do these functions.

news-stylus-replace-mouse-surface

“By providing a touch-sensitive retention clip on the stylus, the stylus is able to provide scrolling, zooming, and/or other computing functionality in a manner that is similar to a scroll wheel of a mouse device,” reads the patent. “As such, a user may forgo using a mouse device in favor of the stylus when interacting with a computer.

The current Surface Pen connects to devices running Windows 10 through Bluetooth 4.0, and it uses a AAAA battery. This new patent includes a tail eraser and two barrel buttons. These will emulate the left- and right-click buttons of a mouse.

Could It Replace the Mouse?

The real question is if this new stylus could eventually replace the mouse. Clearly that’s what it’s being designed to do, but will it do that just for some people, or will it eventually completely eliminate the need for a mouse?

news-stylus-replace-mouse-mouse

The retention clip is towards the eraser end of the proposed surface pen. To use the scrolling function, it’s shown in the artist’s rendition laying down next to the device, not being held in the user’s hand. Only one hand is shown on the stylus, using the retention clip, so it would seem it would have to be laying down.

This seems to be the biggest drawback of this proposed stylus. What makes a stylus a stylus is that you can hold it in your hand as you would a pen. If you have to lay it down, it seems like you may as well be using a mouse.

Sure, it’s nice to be able to eliminate an implement such as the mouse and have the proposed surface pen do the job for both a stylus and a mouse, but the pictures don’t make it look very convenient.

Your Thoughts

What are your thoughts on this proposed stylus pen? Do you think it could replace your mouse? Do you think it’s in danger of revolutionizing the way we use peripherals in that it could eliminate all mice from the market? Do you find it an interesting idea that needs a few more tweaks to be fully implemented? Or do you think Microsoft is going in the wrong direction with this one? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Sinchen.Lin via Wikimedia and Wikimedia. Other images are public domain.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.