Hungry pandas will have to forage elsewhere, but here’s a wireless multi-touch tablet
The third generation of Wacom’s consumer-level graphics tablet range, the Bamboo, brings several enhancements, the most significant being a new wireless mode that enables you to use the tablet without it having to be plugged into the computer. This is Wacom’s first foray into wireless input.
To use take advantage of the wireless function, you have to spend an extra £35 on the wireless kit, which consists of two hardware dongles: a tiny USB device that plugs into your Mac, projecting less than a centimetre from the socket; and a slightly larger dongle that plugs into the tablet itself. When not in use, the Mac dongle slips into a storage void inside the tablet itself.
The freedom of being able to operate the Mac at a distance, even if it’s only sitting back in your chair, is a liberating experience. Since this is the major innovation in the new Bamboo range, it’s surprising that the wireless kit isn’t bundled with it as standard, but is available at extra cost. This also means Wacom has had to build in an extra socket and plug to enable the internal wireless component to be inserted and removed.
The tablet is powered by a lithium-ion battery that takes roughly six hours to reach full charge. Charging it, though, is a transparent procedure: you simply attach the tablet to your Mac via a USB cable as normal and it charges the battery while providing a regular wired connection. The battery should last several days of regular use. The tablet turns itself off after a period of inactivity and must be turned back on using the hardware switch – simply touching the tablet, like with a mouse, won’t do it.
Wacom has a history of trialling new technologies with the Bamboo rather than its higher-spec Intuos tablets. The Bamboo 2 brought a multi-touch surface, which has yet to be implemented in the Intuos range. This capability is still present in the new Bamboos, except for the bottom-of-the-range Pen model, and means you can use the tablet both as a pen-driven graphics surface and as the equivalent of Apple’s Magic Trackpad. You can put down the pen and use your fingers to drag straight on the tablet for such activities as web browsing or general computer tasks – dragging files in the Finder, for instance.
The Bamboo’s multi-touch function doesn’t follow the conventions established in OS X with the Magic Trackpad, which can lead to some confusion. Where you’d use two fingers on the Trackpad to swipe through recent web pages in Safari, on the Bamboo it takes three fingers – and this operates the forward/back buttons, rather than smoothly swiping the page as the Trackpad does. And where Trackpad users can swipe with four fingers to move between Spaces, on the Bamboo the same action produces two different results: the first four-finger swipe is the equivalent of pressing Cmd+Tab, showing a selectable row of icons of current apps (a one-finger swipe will move between them); but the second time you perform a four-finger swipe, the Mac scrolls to the next or previous Space. The two actions alternate with each swipe, and while it’s easy enough to get used to, it does mean you never know quite what’s going to happen next.
The best thing about the multi-touch implementation is that it doesn’t behave the same way as the pen. When using the pen, the tablet offers a 1:1 mapping of the tablet’s surface to the screen – so the top-left corner of the tablet, for instance, will always map to the top-left corner of the screen. When using your fingers, it behaves like a regular trackpad – that is, the cursor moves relative to the position it already occupies on screen, no matter where you first touch the tablet’s surface.
Wacom has also redesigned the pen, making it lighter and smoother, but still with 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. There are four user-definable buttons on the tablet itself, as well as two buttons on the pen, all of which can be configured to double-click, scroll, hold a modifier key or perform just about any function you want, all set through the Preferences pane.
There are four models of the tablet to choose from, each of which comes bundled with a different selection of software. This is where things get confusing. The medium size of the Bamboo Pen & Touch ‘Fun’ tablet, with an A5-sized active area, comes with Photoshop Elements 9, ArtRage 3 and Painter Essentials 4; the small version, curiously, comes with Elements 8 and ArtRage, but not Painter Essentials. The Bamboo Pen & Touch (note the absence of the word ‘Fun’) and the basic Pen models don’t come with any of these extra apps.
All the Pen & Touch tablets are bundled with Bamboo Dock, a selection of small apps designed to show off the capabilities of the pen and multi-touch system. This consists of a small dark grey panel, in which you draw a horizontal stroke to reveal the default apps: Landmarker (a version of Google Maps that enables you to draw directly on the map); Mona Lisa (image distortion similar to Photoshop’s Liquify filter); Bamboo Paper (a drawing/notepad app); and Feed the Bird (a physics-based puzzle game).
It’s an odd selection. The three tools in Mona Lisa are absurdly difficult to use, with a brush slider that gives no indication of the size of the brush and – unforgivably – no pressure sensitivity to control the degree of distortion. The Bamboo Paper app suddenly draws a horizontal line and switches to Full Screen mode without warning and for no apparent reason; and in the Feed the Bird game, all drawn shapes are converted to either circles or rectangles whether you want them to be or not, and it’s accompanied by probably the most irritating soundtrack we’ve yet heard (pan pipes and woodblock). More apps are available for download, but this selection does little to show off the Bamboo’s capabilities.
The Bamboo 3 is a great tablet, and the wireless capability is a must-have; but the latter really should have been built in, and the bundled apps need a serious rethink.
Steve Caplin
Price: From $49.99
From: wacom.eu
Needs: OS X 10.5.8
Pro: Wireless performance + Multi-touch surface
Con: Bizarre software bundles + Occasionally erratic multi-touch performance
