Jot Mini stylus looks good, but fails to impress

Adonit has taken a shrink ray and a steel cutter to its popular Jot stylus to produce the company's newest—and most-diminutive—offering, the $22 Jot Mini. The 4.5-inch Mini is tinier in barrel diameter, length, and tip diameter than the 5-inch Jot Pro—an iPhone-sized model for those with little bag or pocket space—and includes a recessed clip, carved out of its aluminum frame, to satisfy those who like to attach their pens to pockets, lanyards, and other convenient locations.

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

Like its fellow Jots, the Mini uses a metal tip attached to a clear-plastic capacitative disk, rather than the standard rubber nib, to interact with the screen. Though the Mini features a smaller disk diameter than its brethren, which I like, I still had the same problems with tapping that I had with the Jot and Jot Pro. While the Jot Mini excels at precision and drawing, tapping with the Mini is a real bother—in my testing, roughly half the time I had to vigorously tap the disk against my iOS device to get it at the correct angle to register. I gave the Jot Pro some slack here, as it was clearly designed as an artistry tool first and foremost, but the Mini claims to serve as an all-purpose iPhone stylus, and it just can’t do that when its use as a navigation tool can be so frustrating.

Additionally, there are currently no iPhone artistry apps that support Adonit’s Jot Ready SDK, which is designed to improve the stylus’s precision. The Mini does a fair job in apps such as Sketchbook Pro and Brushes without the support of the SDK, but you sometimes lose finer details when not zoomed into the canvas. So unfortunately, while the Jot Mini is a beautifully constructed offering from Adonit, it left me wanting more in the useability department.

The Jot Mini is available in red, green, purple, or turquoise.