While Microsoft has experimented with a number of ways to ensure you do not loose the 99$ Surface Pen that come with its line of 2-in-1 and laptop, form loops on the cover type to magnetic link on this side of device, neither has been as well received as simply adding a storage compartment inside device would be.
Reviewer’s and users alike have questioned Microsoft’s decision with each iteration of the Surface Pro but the company has persisted, giving precedence to ergonomic comfort of having normal sized pen over the difficulty of storing large accessory. While Samsung simply include a small storage compartment in the chassis of its phone and tablet, the trade-off there is having to resort to much smaller size pen, making it difficult sometimes painful to write with its for long period of time.
Microsoft isn’t deaf to the criticism, however, as a new patents show the company is considering a number of novel ideas that would allow them maintain the ergonomics of current design while still allowing user’s to stuck to stylus into chassis itself.
The First of this design concept is a bow-shaped cross section shell that would house half the external chassis within it, and can be rotated to get full sized pen. This would allow the pen to be reduced to smaller thickness in one direction and easily stowed into a device in that orientation.
The second is similar concept but the shell to give normal stylus. Once you are done with writing it can be then be stowed back into shell and stored in tablet chassis.
The third image is a play on second idea, but instead of shell enclosing half the circumference of pen chassis, the chassis is simply divided into two equal semi circles which can be linked to a hinge when writing and separated when storing the pen. The implementation, however, does not require the use of two storage compartment on device to store each half of pen. There’s no guarantee that Microsoft will ever adopt these ideas into commercially available product, but it would definitely be a relief if the company can use these, or other, designs to finally fix the storage issues so user’s dont have to worry about their stylus falling off the magnetic clamps getting lost all time.
