Penoval MPEN4 (review): A $40 Surface Pen alternative

Review unit provided by Penoval

The Penoval MPEN4 stylus is a US $40 alternative to the $99 Microsoft Surface Pen and $129 Microsoft Slim Pen 2.

Inside the box, there's a USB-C to USB-A charging cable, one pen nib replacement and the pen. Replacement pen nibs are not available at the time of this review.

The pen body is metal and has solid build quality. It's quite comfortable to hold with the matte textured surface. Shown above is the size comparison with the Surface Pen and Slim Pen 2.

The pen has one side button and an eraser at the back. The pen supports USB-C charging and according to the company you can get 12 hours of use with 5 minutes of charging. The full battery life is not listed and I wasn't able to test that.

The pen supports palm rejection, tilt sensitivity and 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity.

There's no mention whether this stylus is actually using the Microsoft Pen Protocol 2 (MPP2). My guess is it is MPP2 because Penoval actually sells another stylus with USI tech.

The line tests above were created with Medibang Paint Pro on the Microsoft Surface Pro 8. Penoval MPEN 4 suffers from diagonal line jitter and wobble just like the older Surface Pen. In other words, this pen is not suitable for drawing.

The writing performance is quite good though. The pen is able to capture my handwriting style quite accurately. Palm rejection works reasonably well, and with apps that support pen-only input you can get perfect palm rejection.

To conclude, this is a well designed pen with solid build quality. Drawing performance is bad but writing performance is good. The pricing of US $40 is good too.

Availability

You can find the Penoval MPEN4 on Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP)