Jam on your iOS device with the Woodees iPic Stylus

See how the iPic compares to other styluses: Check out our in-depth iOS stylus charts.

I’ll give the wide variety of iOS styluses on the market one thing: They keep on coming up with new ways to intrigue me. The latest to cross my desk is Woodees’s $15 iPic Stylus, a quirky guitar-pick-with-rubber-nib hybrid designed to aid users in their quest to become digital music masters.

The stylus looks as much like a guitar pick as a mermaid might look human: From the waist up, the iPic looks and feels like your average 99-cent pick, though perhaps a bit more difficult to bend. Instead of a point for its end, however, the iPic sports a 6mm rubber-nib stylus, similar to that on the Kuel H10.

Despite being an on-again, off-again guitarist who abhors using any kind of plastic when playing, I actually found the iPic quite comfortable for virtual picking of touchscreen instruments. The stylus doesn’t get in the way, and the iPic's shape makes it easy to accept the impression that you’re playing actual strings, rather than kludgily tapping your way through an app.

I found the stylus especially useful in apps, such as Apple’s GarageBand, where you play individual strings and frets. With the iPic, you don’t feel like you’re tapping on strings; instead, you’re strumming and picking them.

Outside the realm of music apps, on the other hand, the iPic stylus feels relatively silly. It’s not a drawing pen, obviously, and while it works decently for basic navigation, I wouldn’t recommend using a guitar pick for opening apps—at least not over the long term. That being said, the iPic strums all the notes it needs to, and I can imagine music-makers everywhere picking up one of these for their kits.

I've made a short video of the iPic, below.