Wacom’s latest consumer graphics tablet, the Pen and Touch, is probably the best entry level pen tablet the company has yet made. The multi-touch functions, though, are way behind. I’ve been putting the tablet through rigorous paces for the past week. Here’s how it fared.
Wacom is the undisputed king of tablets and I have been using them for years, partly to combat wrist trouble (a pen is just more comfortable) and partly because they work nicely for digital drawing and photo editing. The latest Bamboos are sub-$100 models which improve on the last Bamboos and the previous Graphires in almost every way. The Pen and Touch model also mimics the multi-touch trackpad of the most recent MacBooks, with somewhat limited success.
First, the basics. In the box you get a tablet with an integrated USB cable (the previous models had a mini-USB socket so the cable could be removed) and a pen. The pen is more comfortable to hold than the old one, and you can now use the rocker-switch on the side without deforming your fingers into a rictus-claw. The “eraser” end is now a flat-ended cylinder instead of a rounded bump. This makes it feel better in use, but doesn’t change the functionality.
The touch-wheel and four touch buttons along the top of the previous generation Bamboo have been replaced by four buttons on the side (you can flip it to left or right-handed orientation). The buttons can all be assigned in the driver software, just as before. Finally for the pen, the surface is slightly smoother than the last gen, and feels a lot like paper. As I said, the pen tablet is Wacom’s best consumer model yet.
But the multi-touch isn’t quite there. You get most of the gestures you do with the MacBook pad, and the preference pane for configuration even has small animations to demo them, just like the Apple pane. You can scroll with two fingers, pinch to zoom and twist to rotate, but you don’t get to use any more than two fingers. There is one interesting extra, though. When using a finger to move the cursor, if you put another finger (or thumb) down next to it, it acts like you pressed the click button and the first finger than drags anything that it was over. In practice, it is just like clicking Apple’s full-pad buttons.
But the feel is slightly off. The larger sized pad is welcome, but somehow it always feels slightly wrong. It’s hard to describe, but it feels like the pad isn’t quite reading your fingers. Add to this the acceleration curve as your movement is translated (very different from the native trackpad) and it all feels a little jittery.
But this could easily be down to the software. I have had to reinstall the driver twice this week. A couple of days ago, clicking stopped working. Both the button assigned to left-click and tap-to-click with a finger were broken, although the pen worked fine. And a few minutes ago the cursor for the pen was stuck in the top-left of the screen, and even the picture in the preference window reflected this. Both times a reinstall corrected this, but it’s a little flaky.
Should you buy it? Sure. At $100 for a pen tablet, its a bargain. Add in the good-enough multi-touch pad and its a steal. It’s also one of the best ways to keep your wrists and shoulders injury free, the reason I bought this one even though I had the previous gen on the desk already. You can also buy touch-only and pen-only models for $70 each, or the double-sized Bamboo Fun for $200.
Product page [Wacom]
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