u/nuclearbananana

I jest but sometimes to make something better, you need to figure out what specifically would make it worse.

Model is qwen3.5-397b. The prompt I used is:

You are a narrator in a deep roleplay environment.

<formatting>

Dialogue in quotes. Markdown when needed.

Text inside square brackets [] are top level system/narration commands, and used to write OOC (out of character) comments, e.g. [OOC: <comment>] which you should respond to in OOC, freely breaking immersion. You should also use these liberally and unprompted to add commentary

Make heavy use of em-dashes and astersisks.

</formatting>


<prose>

Vivid, dramatic, attention grabbing prose. Use heavy use of metaphors/similies

Present tense unless specified.

Repeat sounds, environmental details, hums and other background with every response to keep atmosphere. Tell us what is happening around the scene as well e.g "outside, a branch fell off the tree" "somewhere, the sun shone a little redder"

</prose>

<writing structure>

**Emphasis:** Restate, summarize, or exaggerate what just happened frequently for emphasis. Make heavy use of negative-positive construct aka contrastive negation (it wasn't x, it was y). Have characters repeat others dialogue to show disbelief or questioning

**Omnipotence protocol:** The user loves knowledge breaks where characters know things they shouldn't. You should frequently establish things as secrets then wittily have characters not-privy reveal they know them (and the consequences thereof) to make scenes fun. You can also have them use things like smell to deduce them. 

Because this is roleplay, allow for a bit of main-character-syndrome and positivity bias. Don't have too much arguing or unpleasant things, you can hype them up but don't actually let them happen

Advance the story until the user can step in, brief in important, action packed or dialogue moments -- down to a few words, but long, up to a page or two for slower scenes. At the end prompt the user to continue.


</writing structure>


<diversity & culture>

Use American/Eurocentric names, places, ideas etc. as that's what the user knows best.

</diversity & culture>

Now loading story world...

This is only the second message, so slop is less than it would be with a bunch of context

I've found that reviewers often focus on things like stylus jitter, general application performance and a "paper-like" feel, but rarely latency, which is odd because I find latency is perhaps the most important part of a stylus feeling nice to use.

I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE. I've been trying out a lot of note-taking and drawing apps to decide on one and among other things, I compared latency.

Let me declare upfront I have no affiliation with any of these. I have not been paid, there are no affiliate links and I gain nothing from this.

Scoring: Everything is scored 0-4. Here's a rough idea what each means

0. excellent feeling, almost no lag, not noticeable in regular use, will not effect writing/drawing
1. good feeling, minimal lag, not noticeable in regular use, will not effect writing/drawing except some extreme scenarios
2. okay feeling, some lag, noticeable in regular use, will mildly degrade writing/drawing but fairly functional overall
3. unpleasant feeling, decent bit of lag, easily noticeable in regular use, will degrade writing/drawing and is worth seriously considering changing apps for lower latency
4. very unpleasant feeling, large amounts of lag, always noticeable in regular use, will noticeably degrade writing/drawing and is worth seriously considering changing apps for lower latency

Methodology: I turned off any smoothing/stabilizer settings where I could find them. Then I did both

• a bit of regular drawing, writing, squiggling
• very fast pen strokes while watching the tip

Each app I naturally tried a few times until I was fairly confident in scores.

Note Taking Apps

1. Samsung Notes

Latency: 0

Smooth, no jitter, line follows pentip almost perfectly.

No surprise here. Samsung's own notes app, fairly simple, well optimized.

2. Star Note

Latency: 0.5

This is a pleasant surprise. Start Note is fairly affordable and cross platform and despite that it has very low latency.

The only reason StarNote and Notewise get 0.5 and not 0 are

1. There is a bit more lag compared to Samsung Notes. I could see it, it's there
2. They have some "jitter" near the tip of the pen especially around curves. I'm guessing they have some sort of fast path/prevew at the tip of the line before it is properly integrated into the smoothed curve to get that lower latency.

2. Notewise

Latency: 0.5

Note that to get this score you have to enable the experimental "Fast" mode under "Latency Optimization", which is marked as unstable. Without it the latency drops to around 1.5.

3. Myscript Notes (formerly Nebo)

Latency: 1

5. Orion Notes (aka NoteIn)

Latency: 1

6. Saber

Latency: 1.5

Is this the only open source one?

It's currently a little basic, otherwise I would use it more.

There seems to be almost a max speed or something, cause the latency seems to increase more dramatically at higher speeds. Or maybe I'm just seeing things.

7. Squid Notes

Latency: 2

8. JNotes

Latency: 2.5

9. Noteshelf 3

Latency: 3

10. Inkredible

Latency: 3

Latency is a bit better if you use no ink effects, but given the whole point of the app is ink effects...

11. GoodNotes 5

Latency: 4

This app was preloaded onto the tablet and even came with a free year of the premium version.

I have no idea why. It's hot garbage. From what I can tell it's actually a web app in disguise.

The actual average latency is ~3 but the fps is so low that it feels a lot worse. Everything in this app is jank.

I tried both the Samsung store and Play Store version. The Samsung one was marginally better, but still awful.

Art Apps

1. Concepts

Latency: 0

OhMyGod this app is amazing. Feels even smoother than Samsung Notes despite being way more featureful (though it is less featureful compared to most of the apps that follow).

Note you have to enable "Low-Latency Mode" under performance to get this.

2. PenUp

Latency: 1.5

Samsung's own. Seems good for basic drawings.

3. Infinite Painter

Latency: 1.5

Very competitive with PenUp.

4. Clip Studio Paint

Latency: 2

5. HiPaint

Latency: 2

A little inconsistent while drawing.

6. Sketchbook

Latency: 2

Bad FPS. Might bump this to 2.5

7. Krita

Latency: 3

This is clearly a desktop UI squashed down. It also glitches for ~30s every time I open it and lag is consistent, sometimes 2 sometimes 3. The sheer amount of options tucked away in different places also means I may have missed some setting that could make this worse/better.

8. Infinite Designer

Latency: 3

Note this is a Vector application which probably makes it hard to have the same latency as raster.

That said, Concepts also uses vectors under the hood afaik so who's to say.

---

If you notice something that looks off let me know, I can test again.

No AI was used in this. This post is also on my blog: https://blog.coship.fyi/blog/spen-latency/