Review on Westcott iPoint Ball Battery Pencil Sharpener: 🖍️ Red/Black (15570) - Efficient Sharpening for Precision Writing Instruments by Shantel Griffin

After our old electric sharpener broke we were looking for an affordable, fully functional pencil sharpener. This one went pretty well! Pros: Battery operated: so it can go anywhere kids ever work. Durable: It doesn't move all over the table when in use. Sharpens: Perhaps the most important feature, this little machine does an excellent job. As with most automatic sharpeners, we find that gently twisting the pencil in the opposite direction of the blades means an all-round sharp point. It sharpens well even with crappy cheap pencils (which I'm still trying to get rid of) - except for pencils with a thin plastic decorative "sleeve" - but that seems to be a problem with EVERY sharpener we've tried. .Easy cleaning: The shaving bowl is secure, yet easy to remove and swap out.Portable: You can take it anywhere and it doesn't weigh a ton.Battery life: Runs on the first set of batteries - and we use it a lot Price: Great Cons: None that we have found yet REVIEW UPDATE: February 27th, 2014 Still on the first set of batteries. One thing we found is that while it's small enough to fit in your hand, it actually works MUCH better if you place it on a hard surface and press your stylus into it. Holding a sharpener was an inefficient method of sharpening. REVIEW UPDATE: December 2014 She died a year later. I tried cleaning it gently, new batteries - but it was gone. We've gone back to hand sharpeners and are quite happy with the 'old fashioned' method. I'll be singing a different tune in August when we get ready for school, but for now we're going to stick with the version without batteries.