Lenovo USI Pen sloppy design & low quality

After waiting for many weeks, I finally received the US$39 Lenovo USI Pen to use with a Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5 (which I will admit to liking a lot). Unfortunately, my first experience with it, literally out of the box, was a poor one. The pen ships with a AAAA battery installed. That’s Lenovo’s first mistake. They should have simply shipped it with the battery packed outside of the pen. Since the battery is shipped inside of the pen, Lenovo has you tug on a piece of plastic to allow the battery to make contact and power on. Unfortunately, it reveals Lenovo’s second mistake: The coiled metal in the top half of the pen popped out too. There might be a way to twist it back into the top half of the pen, but I had neither the patience nor the dexterity to do so. I ended up just shoving the battery up against the spring to have it touch the negative side of the battery and twisted the pen together. It seems to work after a fashion. It is not as good as, for example, as the Wacom EMR Stylus that ships with the Acer Chromebook Spin 13 at no additional cost.

I hope other USI pens are not as poorly designed as Lenovo’s. In general, if using a stylus with a Chromebook is important to you, I recommend getting a Chromebook that ships with a Wacom EMR stylus included. It not only works better, it doesn’t require a battery, or searching for hard to find USI styli.