Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch review
By Richard Lai 
posted December 10th 2009 2:10PM
posted December 10th 2009 2:10PM
Multitouch trackpad -- rough to the touch
We had a go with this capacitive tablet's touch mode on both Snow Leopard and Windows 7. While the gestures worked as promised in Wacom's demo video, some failed to work in certain areas of each OS. For instance, on a MacBook and Windows 7 touchscreen device you can natively pinch-zoom the file thumbnails, but this wasn't possible on our Mac with the Bamboo. Similarly, the rotation gesture only worked in Preview on Snow Leopard, but not under Windows. Needless to say this was rather annoying and should've been streamlined before launch. Another issue is the friction against our skin: the tablet's active area is covered by rubber-like material, giving a squeaky touch even with just a moderate pressure applied. It's like petting a dry dolphin. See for yourself in the video below.
Pen and no paper
Technically the Bamboo Pen & Touch has a better pen mode than both the original Bamboo tablet ($75) and the current Bamboo Pen ($69) -- same pen active area size, same 2540 dpi resolution, same pen form factor (with eraser feel and two customizable buttons) but pen pressure levels have been doubled up to 1024. After some doodling in Photoshop we found the same surface that was too rubbery for our fingers to be slightly too slippery for the stylus, lacking the advertised "paper-like tablet surface" as found on the original Bamboo. You might not find this an issue though -- some of us at Engadget do prefer slipperiness like that of Wacom's Cintiq. There's not much else to be found on the tablet: four customizable buttons (for mouse clicks, touch toggle, application launch etc.), an LED indicator (dim white in standby, bright white in touch mode and orange in pen mode) and a fabric tug to store your stylus. It's also nice to see that Wacom's killed off the circular trackpad that we hardly ever used on the original Bamboo.
Functionality
As mentioned earlier, we expected the Pen & Touch to increase productivity by combining two types of input onto one peripheral. We assume most tablet users would be using graphics suites like Photoshop and CorelDRAW, so in this case the pen mode would obviously be used for drawing while the touch mode takes care of zooming, rotation and scrolling on the canvas. This worked out to be pretty handy for us in Photoshop, plus we found it much easier to use our fingers to navigate around the toolboxes, as well as accessing the brush menu using the right-click and scrolling gestures. Great potential, only to be spoiled by the less-than-ideal surface textures in each input mode.
Wrap-up
Wacom should be commended for bringing finger tracking to its product line, which has clearly achieved its goal of making our lives easier, but it's a shame that it hasn't got the surface texture and gesture drivers quite right. The rubbery touch is almost enough to force us back to the good old combination of tablet and mouse. We assume the Bamboo Pen might not suffer from the Pen & Touch's slippery problem, but if it does then it's best to get the old Bamboo -- probably only from eBay these days. It'll be cheaper too.
When I had a good week of photoshopping to do at University I used my small Wacom tablet with my left hand, mouse in the right and my mac trackpad in the middle behind the tablet.
Though i guess I'm a little unusual in that I write/draw left and mouse right.
@decypherSMC I do that, too!
I draw a comic strip in Illustrator that way, and I'm constantly switching between the Pen tool with my mouse and using my Cintiq for CS4's Blob Brush, Eraser, etc., for more naturalistic drawing.
But yes, I think we are both a little unusual that way.
@Gordon & @decypherSMC
Same here
boys have an advantage in that they have one extra digit.
So I guess I'll stick to my trackball until version 2 comes out, eh?
This is very odd. I personally own a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch Fun, so it's basically the medium sized version of this. Having come from the original Bamboo I found the Pen & Touch to be a major improvement. The added real estate, the intuitive multitouch, etc. all made it much better than the original.
The drivers are not perfect, and a few things in the multitouch do not work properly. The surface of the tablet however felt fine, the texture was good and my finger drags over it with no difficulty, and the pen feels great. I primarily use it with Photoshop, and occasionally with 3D work, but I usually prefer a mouse for that. I'm still in school, so I'm by no means a professional, but I think it's great. Maybe it's just because I got the Medium size, but personally I love it.
@Chatboy 91
The pen surface is fine to me. The touch is a bit rough, but certainly not rubbery. Not sure why it feels like a dry dolphin.
Wacom pens work through materials, so you can just put a piece of paper on top and draw on that, at least you can with old wacoms, so that would take care of any issue with the surface material, put a sheet of material on it that you think feels good and done.
Only thing is that I guess for the touch interface it might not work? What can you tell us richard? Does touch work through other materials?
@Wwhat Good question. I've just checked and only the stylus worked on paper, while both worked on top of a plastic bag. Must be a different type of capacitive technology as the iPhone's screen works even when under a piece of paper.
Interesting results, and good to know before a purchase, thanks for checking.
You could get a regular pad and a separate wacom touch (sans pen), but for that the price difference is just a smidge too small, it's like 70% of the pen&touch, if it was %50 or even %60 you would be more inclined I think.
holy shit. asian guy with british accent. 1000x hot.
His accent does sound like he's been out of britain a while at some point, been to the US a while maybe?
@(Unverified) lol time to move to London. Or join a good Hong Kong law school - Asia guys with British accents are the norm there.
Strange... I got a message on my mail that Richard Lai had posted a reply on my critique of using computers that are not strong enough for drawing with the tablet in his review. And when I tried to see the answer of my post, I was surprised to see that my post had been removed.
I just can't understand why engadget removed my post. Maybe my comment wasn't silly enough.
The wacoms are great tools. They could have worked more on the drivers on some devices though.
@rhesusplus Weird. I did personally send you an email about the mistake -- I was trying to delete someone's duplicate comment and pressed the wrong button. Can you check your inbox again please?
Loving my Macbook's trackpad madly, I hoped this could be something similar for home. However, while the tablet works as well as any other Wacom tablet, the trackpad portion is relatively unrefined, very much in line with cheap trackpads I have tried on notebook PCs before.
Some of the downsides that eventually made me return the thing:
-as mentioned the surface feels sticky and uncomfortable
-the broad edge around the tablet means it'll be uncomfortably far away from your keyboard
-the active trackpad area is smaller than the matte surface and its edge has no tactile markings, so sometimes you just drag out of it and lose whatever you were dragging
-the trackpad cannot handle moisture at all, use after washing hands and the thing goes completely nuts until you have dried of every tiny trace of moisture (and I mean tiny)
-as mentioned already the pad cannot handle more than 2 fingers, so gestures are unchangeably different than those on macbooks
-gesture support feels clunky and as mentioned does not work in all apps. Usually it's just mapping to key events, so rotating/zooming is not smooth at all
-tracking precision is so and so. if you want to nudge something a few pixels, forget it. (the trackpad often does not respond at all to slow/small movements. If you go slow enough, you can move the finger all across the pad without moving your mouse pointer)
-you cannot change from pointing to two-finger-scrolling (and vice versa) without lifting all fingers off the trackpad first
All in all: Yes, it does what it says on the pack. No, it doesn't do it as well as I would have expected. The mixture of input modes is a gorgeous idea and I really hope they get this right in a future iteration. Make it slimmer, integrate the software properly and get the trackpad near Macbook-quality and this thing is a killer.
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@pnuding
Thanks for your impressions, honest and helpful too.
Not that it's completely unexpected, the touch is just an added feature bonus for a standard wacom tablet, and you might not be happy with the touch in the end but hey the wacom pen part of their pentablets are good enough value on their own really.
So you should not view it as a touch surface with a pen, but a pen-tablet with a bonus touch gimmick, and for roughly the same price as their old tablets without touch (and with this you get double the pressure levels compared to old too).
@pnuding
One advantage it has over the MB trackpads is the 2 finger drag. You can even reposition your fingers without breaking the drag.
They have been selling these things at Staples for a few months now. If it ever goes on sale I might get one.
I'll buy one of these as soon as they allow for 3 and 4 finger gestures.
I assume the slipperiness can be dealt with by buying some felt pen nibs from Wacom's website... this is what I use to do with my Toshiba M200 tablet pc.
Made the writing feel much more natural.