Hasta La Gadget!

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The touch-wheel and four touch buttons along the top of the previous generation Bamboo have been replaced by four buttons on the side (you can flip it to left or right-handed orientation).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]

See Also:

• Wacom Tablets Get Multi-Touch, Gestures
• New Wacom Intuos Official, Feels Like Pen and Paper
• Wacom Bamboo Replaces Graphire

The Spooklight brings iPhone-style accelerometers to your bike, along with turn-signals for those too lazy to lift an arm. And the lithium-polymer battery-powered setup has a special surprise inside.

The kit consists of two parts: a lamp unit which goes at the back and a handlebar-mounted control unit, used to activate the turn-signals wirelessly. But it’s when you slow down that the magic happens. The accelerometers detect when you slow down and switch on the red light, just like when you brake in a car. And because the lights are all LEDs, they are bright and last for 60 hours (the control panel manages ten).

And here’s the surprise gift. The Spooklight charges via USB (it is detachable from the bike) so you can hook it up to a computer whilst working, but it also lets you charge gadgets while you are out and about, juicing an iPhone to use some GPS software perhaps. Very handy indeed, and alone almost worth the price: £55 ($88).

In fact, the only thing we don’t like about the Spooklight is that indicators are kind of pointless on a bike: As we mentioned above, you can just stick out an arm. And as for a brake-light, motorists just aren’t used to seeing them on bikes.

Product page [50 Cycles via Bicycle Design]

Exercise bikes are dull. Unless it is raining, there is no excuse not to just go outside on a real bike: it’s both better exercise and way more fun. There would be one exception. Say you were playing a video-game so good you didn’t want to stop, but at the same time felt the need to get the blood pumping. That would surely be the ideal time to use this stationary bike controller for the Wii and its companion game, Cyberbike.

Sadly, the game itself looks horrible, little more than an afterthought tagged on to justify buying a giant plastic bike to further clutter your home. In it, according to the gamers at Kotaku, you save the planet, cleaning up pollution by flying your bike over things. Wake me up when you’re done.

The controller is at least compatible with Mario Kart. Alternatively, go down to the basement and dig out the exercise bike you already have and sit on that while playing Mario Kart with a normal WiiMote. The price of the Cyberbike has yet to be announced ahead of its 2010 launch, but you can be sure that it will be more than the zero dollars my solution will cost you.

This Could Be The Biggest Wii Pack Shot Ever [Kotaku]

This is the precursor to Apple’s iconic white earbuds, a symbol so, erm, symbolic that despite there being no white iPods on sale anymore, Apple has yet to replace them with something that actually matches the machines they accompany.

If you are under, say, 30 years old, you probably won’t remember the the single white (or ivory) earbud, which was then called an earphone. It was a low quality plastic earpiece which usually came bundled with a transistor radio or even a whole “music center”. In this manner it was kind of the USB cable of its time — while you could buy them separately, there wasn’t much point as you would acquire a drawer-full of them over time.

Their main use, as far as I know from both experience and TV comedy shows, was for men to listen to football games (that’s the football played with the feet, or “soccer”, not the US “foot”ball played with the hands) in church during Saturday afternoon weddings, inevitably shouting out loud when a goal was scored.

I had one which came with my portable radio but it was pointless. The tinny sound actually hurt my young ears and pretty much everything back in the 70s that made a sound came with a big, heavy, half-decent speaker built in.

So you kids don’t know how lucky you are, with your pocket-sized gizmos and stereo earbuds. In my day, etc. And get off my lawn!

Pre-iPod Shiny Plastic Earbud [Retro Thing]
Photo credit: Retro Thing

Computer keyboards are not a hotbed of innovation. That’s why Asus’ attempt to add some pizzaz to the keyboard by stuffing an internet-enabled computer inside it is interesting.

In the last few months, Asus has shown a prototype device that crams a computer and a small touchscreen display into a keyboard. The display allows for quick access to widgets such as weather and email.

Now an FCC filing by the company has revealed the details of this device. The Asus Eee keyboard, model EK 1542, has a 5-inch 800-by-400-pixel touch panel with a stylus. It will run Windows XP Home edition on an Intel Atom N270 CPU and a Broadcom video processor. The keyboard will have 1GB of on-board memory, a 16 GB or 32 GB solid state drive, Wi-Fi, gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth connectivity.

The keyboard claims up to to four hours of battery life and includes one HDMI port, three USB ports and two audio jacks. The Ultra Wide Band antenna and receiver setup means a wireless connection to devices within a five- to 10-meter range and includes the ability to send 720p videos to your TV.

Asus hasn’t indicated when the keyboard will be launched or what it will be priced at. But the FCC filing is an indication that Asus is serious about bringing this device to the market soon, and it could be on retail shelves in time for this holiday season.

Check out the FCC filing for specifications and photos of the Asus Eee keyboard.

See Also:

• Video: Asus Crams Eee PC Into a Keyboard
• Eee PC-in-a-Keyboard Coming Soon
• Asus Unveils Dual-Panel Touchscreen PC
• Asus Shows a Tablet-Style Eee PC