The stylus has an active digitizer by Wacom, with the first generation having 128 levels of pressure sensitivity.

[5][6] A button on the side of the pen can be used to activate special pen-oriented features and gestures in the system software.

[5] The second generation S Pen on the Galaxy Note II is slightly thicker than in the original Galaxy Note, and a feature marketed as Air View allows a user to preview content by hovering the pen over the content, similar to the hoverbox feature of a mouse in some desktop computers, such as thumbnails in the gallery and a preview tooltip on the video player's time seek bar, and zooming in the web browser (Samsung Internet)[7][8] and for scrolling.

This includes changing the camera settings and exporting the handwritten text to Microsoft Word remotely.

[16] The S Pen on the Galaxy Note 20 features a faster response time than previous models and an extended battery life.