Bamboo Fun Tablet

I’ve never been all that interested in the idea of handwriting recognition on electronic devices. I used early versions of PDA that used Graffiti, and I didn’t like them because even after I’d learned the appropriate keystrokes for letters, it only worked sometimes. (I freely admit it was more because I never had the patience to get really good at it. Will used to swear by it, and he was, in fact, a Graffiti pro. He still laments the demise of the old Newtons that first had it. But I digress.)

Since I’ve had the Macbook Pro, I’ve spent a LOT of time in electronics stores browsing around for some new gadget to play with. Something that frequently caught my eye was the Bamboo tablet. It’s an external tablet and pen system that allows you to write or draw pictures in documents on your computer. It looked interesting, but I didn’t have an application for it, so I always passed it by.

The other day I was in my local electronics store and passed by it again. Maybe it was a moment of weakness, maybe I felt like I’d bought every other possible accessory in the store, or maybe I was just bored. But I decided to give it a whirl.

I’ll interject here that part of the intrigue was Evernote’s impressive handwriting recognition utility. I have been using the heck out of Evernote recently, and continue to be impressed by its ability to read handwritten notes. So I thought “hm, what if instead of jotting notes on paper, taking a picture of them, then adding them to Evernote, I write notes directly to an electronic file that gets added to Evernote.” It would let me skip the middleman — the paper — and get me one step closer to a paperless existence.

(Not that I really believe that a paperless office is realistic — you should see the amount of post-its I go through in a day. But it’s something.)

So with that tenuous possible application, I sprung for the Bamboo tablet.

Wacom, the makers of the Bamboo tablets, have been making tablets for PCs for years and years. Graphic designers use them all the time to make the beautiful pictures and icons that we see everywhere in the world. They recently (in the last year or so) developed some lower-end tablets for the home user to do things like simple picture editing, drawing, and handwritten notes to files.

The Bamboo line has 3 consumer versions. The most basic, called Bamboo, comes with a pen and a small tablet. The other two versions, called Bamboo Fun Small and Bamboo Fun Medium, come with a tablet, a pen, and a mouse. The Bamboo Fun tablets also include older versions of Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop Elements. The Small tablet has a 5.8″ x 3.7″ writing surface area, and the Medium tablet’s writing area is 8.5″ x 5.3″.

I bought the Bamboo Fun Small version which retails for $99. I’m not sure if I will ever end up using it as a primary notetaker, but it is a remarkable little device. It plugs into a USB port, and neither the pen nor the included mouse requires batteries. The mouse works fairly well, but it does have some drag on it, which makes it tiresome to use for long periods of time. The tablet is also much smaller than a normal mousepad, so it is easy to run off the tablet with the mouse.

The real life-changer is the pen, which can also be used as a pointing device. The tablet area represents the area of the computer screen, and wherever you point the pen is where the mouse pointer goes on the screen. You can double-tap to double-click, drag to scroll, and even right-click using the buttons on the pen. It takes some getting used to the eye-hand coordination required, but it is nice to have options besides the trackpad and the mouse.

The tablet itself also has configurable Express Buttons that can be mapped to different functions such as back, forward, or open a specific program. There is also a Touch Ring that allows you to scroll and zoom. Taken together, the tablet and the pen are an amazing combo of navigation.

I will eventually cover how notetaking works using the Bamboo Fun Tablet, and more importantly, how it works with Evernote. But for now, I’ll say that the tablet *is* actually fun, and has potential to be a very useful device.