I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought this Uni Jetstream Prime 3 plus 1 (buy via Amazon).  I mean seriously, look at that odd shape and awful blue jewel on the clip.  You think I would have learned my lesson when I reviewed the Uni Jetstream Prime (3 colors, but sans pencil) and couldn’t have hated it more.  I guess because I love the regular non-fancy pants, plastic version of the Jetstream Multi Pen, I’m obsessed with finding a high end metal version.

So right off the bat, the odd shape is um, well just odd.  I saw this before I ordered it but its still odd, and to top off the weirdness of the body flaring towards the top almost like a white wine glass, the edge of it is just not smooth at all.  Unfortunately this not quite sharp, but nowhere near smooth edge rests right in the webbing between my thumb and index finger which means that it can get a little uncomfortable at the wrong angle or just holding it in a non-ideal way.

One thing I do kind of like is the look of the cap that covers the eraser, although the fact that it twists off rather than pulls off makes it a little clunky to use quickly.  Speaking of twisting though, thats how you select your red, black, or blue pen, or your .5mm mechanical pencil.  Twisting the top half of the body points the clip to a round dot representing the color of the ink you want or in the case of the pencil its a grey diamond.  I was OK with this until I realized that at each of the stops along the way when selecting your writing implement, there is no neutral option other than just stopping half way between two options.  For someone like myself that can be a little OCD sometimes, I hate the feel of leaving the pen outside of one of the four pre-determined slots as if its just in some multi-pen purgatory.

The Uni Jetstream Prime 3 plus 1 Writing Experience

The writing output with the Uni Jetstream Prime 3 plus 1 is everything I’ve come to love about the Jetstream.  The problem however is the same as what I found with the three color version, which is the rattle.  Its not as bad as the awful rattle in the 3 color version, but its still pretty bad.  Although the metal construction and “Prime” name implies a certain amount of quality, the annoying rattle immediately negates any of that.  I’d like to say I’ll never buy another Uni Jetstream Prime offering, however I know thats a complete lie and as soon as a newly designed version shows up I’ll snap it up quicker than I care to admit.  So yeah, learn your lesson from me and save your money, skip this one.

©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.