A writing instrument worthy of 007

The first time you pick up the Hard Candy Stylus and Pen, you’ll be struck by how it feels in your hand. It’s solid and has great balance—and sure enough, it levels perfectly on your index finger. By the time you put it down, though, you’ll be struck by how smudgy your silver stylus has become. That’s the nature of the chrome beast, we’re afraid, and this one is so great-looking that you may never want to touch it.

But don’t assume this stylus is just another pretty face; its built-in pen makes it handy for quickly switching between iPad scrawls and paper-based notes. The pen takes Parker ballpoint refills, which are thankfully easy to replace when the time comes. And though the stylus doesn’t have a pocket clip—making it slightly harder to carry and more likely to get scuffed up in your pocket—we wouldn’t have it any other way. The smooth, tapered pen feels great to the touch—the kind of substantial writing instrument you’ll roll in your hands while you’re reading.

The stylus’s large, squishy tip looks imprecise at first glance, but it worked fine for note-taking and quick sketches on an iPad. We even composed emails and texts on our iPhone’s tiny virtual keyboard, finding it to be accurate for text entry. Despite seeming far thicker, the tip is only slightly larger than the tips on other iPhone & iPad styluses we’ve tested.

The Hard Candy website says that its stylus is compatible with the iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod touch, but we tested it on our iPhone 3G and it worked just fine. Our biggest gripe is that when you remove one of the caps to use either the pen or the stylus tip, there’s no place to put it, which means we’ll lose them eventually.

The bottom line. The Hard Candy Stylus is what James Bond would use with his iPad. It’s solid in your hand, and even in its inevitably smudgy and scratched condition, it makes competing styluses look and feel like toys.