If you're looking at a new phone, Samsung's high-end Galaxy S22 Ultra might be on your list. It's a stellar phone with great hardware, a fantastic screen, excellent camera, and Samsung's extra features to give it a leg up on the competition, but one thing really sets it apart: the S Pen.
This year Samsung essentially turned the Galaxy S22 Ultra into a next-generation Galaxy Note. It comes with an S Pen in the box and slots right inside the phone, just like the Note line from a couple years back.
And that S Pen is definitely worth the price of admission if you can utilize it. It works much better than a regular old stylus, and even has some cool features that you can't get anywhere else. So whether or not you already have the phone or you're just checking out what you can do with the S Pen, we've rounded up the best apps that use Samsung's stylus or are simply better with a fine stylus.
Samsung has its own small social network in Penup, which is almost exclusively designed around sharing S Pen works and projects. You can browse what other people are creating and uploading even if you're not an artist yourself, but if you do want to dive into the creative part of the app, it's just a couple taps away.
You can draw up works from scratch, upload images you've created from other apps, or import pictures and sketch over them. Samsung has an entire section of tutorial drawings, too, so you can actually follow along with videos to learn to draw other things. There are a variety of different lessons, too, whether you're a seasoned sketch artist or just starting out.
And if you needed more, there's even a section for coloring. You can grab some black and white templates and color everything in with the S Pen, which is pretty relaxing and takes full advantage of this phone's features.
Switching gears to something a little more social and fun, Draw Something is a perfect game to take advantage of Samsung's S Pen.
The premise is pretty simple, and works kind of like a faster, mobile Pictionary. You play against a friend drawing a prompt and they have to guess in asynchronous gameplay, so the two of you can pick it up whenever you have a free moment instead of having to coordinate a time to play.
But whoever you're playing against, you're going to have an advantage with your drawing skills, since you'll be using an S Pen instead of your finger or some other clunky stylus. It won't help you guess what they're drawing if they aren't doing a good job, but your sketches will look great and be a little more fun to draw.
Sketchbook is another extremely popular app for drawing, sketching, and more. It packs in a professional suite of tools, so whether you're making illustrations as a professional or hobbyist.
You get a ton of options to pick from ranging from all kinds of brushes, pens, smears, blurs, and more, with each option being individually customizable to get exactly the look you're going for. The interface, despite being very clean and unobtrusive, still supports all the things you'd need from this kind of setup like layering support and gridlines.
Once again, though, you're guaranteed to have a better experience here using Samsung's S Pen. No fiddling with zooming in and using your finger or other clunky styluses when the Galaxy S22 Ultra handles it all out of the box.
If you're looking for something more for note-taking and less for drawing, Wacom's Bamboo Paper app might fit the bill. It'll still function if you're into sketching and drawing, but the UI works much more like a regular journal instead of just something for illustrating.
You can draw, sketch, and even import photos for annotations or notes, simulating something like a real journal. It also integrates with Wacom's Bamboo notebooks and the like, too, so if you're already using those the S Pen will integrate into your existing ecosystem and let you take notes on the go without your full notebook.
This app includes a quick notes widget and support for syncing across your Wacom account, filling out a pretty solid feature list if you're trying to get into a modern take on old-fashioned journaling.
You can't talk about a list of creative apps without mentioning Adobe in some way or another. It does fit here, though, because Adobe's mobile apps actually feel much better using an S Pen to navigate and create.
Creative Cloud includes tons of apps, and some of them, like Photoshop and Adobe Sign are much more convenient with a finer tip. Signing PDFs is a breeze (and won't look like a first grader signed your work application) and you can make smaller tweaks to the details in your Photoshop or editing endeavors.
Obviously not everything takes advantage of the S Pen, like video editing, but more often than not the granular control is nice to have. If you're already subscribed to Adobe's Creative Cloud, try those apps out with your S Pen next time, or just download a couple of the apps and see if it speeds up your workflow.
