As a person who spends many hours a day in either Photoshop or Illustrator, I like to use a tablet on my Mac when drawing. However, unlike other artists and designers I know well, I don’t like using tablets beyond that. I had always found using the pen for navigation to not be so great and the mouse that is generally bundled with Wacom tablets generally isn’t very good either.

That's a spiffy tablet!

So, when I heard that Wacom had created tablets that included multi-touch, I was very intrigued. I had been using a 4×6 Intuous 2 for many years. When I purchased that back in 2004, it had cost me a cool $250. The new Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch with it’s huge surface space retails for $199 (you can possibly find it on Amazon.com for cheaper than that). Smaller ones can be had for under $100, but I wanted the big daddy!

When I opened the box from Amazon, I was impressed right off with the packaging. A lot of thought went into this and it made me feel as if someone from Apple had been kidnapped and made to create this packaging for Wacom. From this, I knew I would be in for a special treat.

Setup and installation was a snap. Just plug it in and install the drivers and you are off. I would recommend, first download the latest drivers from Wacom’s site. I had a little problem with the tablet recognizing touch input and the updated drivers solved this issue. Second, watch the tutorial video. It goes through the explanations of how to use the multi-touch functions of the tablet and how to set up the buttons on the left side of the tablet. I fumbled for a little bit with the tablet until I realized that I should watch the video. Once I did, I was zooming around.

If you’ve ever used one of the newer Apple laptops that have multi-touch touchpads on them, then you will feel right at home with the Bamboo. Two-finger drags for scrolling, pinch and zoom, rotate… they are all in here. Using these functions is revolutionizing the way that I’m interacting with my Mac daily. If I’m in another office that has one of the older pen tablets, I keep finding myself reaching to do touch input on it constantly out of habit.

There are 4 programmable function keys that run down the side of the tablet. These are programmed from the preference pane in the system preferences. I keep one of the keys set as a switch to turn off the touch functions of the tablet. This is very handy when you are using the pen input and don’t want to accidently touch the tablet with the palm of your hand and have an errant movement of the cursor.

The Wacom preference pane

There are some out there that will say the Bamboo series of tablets is for consumers and not for “real” designers. To those people, I say “Bull”. The Wacom Intuous 2 that I’ve been using for years has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity built in. While the older versions of the Bamboo only 512 levels, the newest version has 1024… just like the pros like.

After using the Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch for a month now, it’s easy to see that Wacom put a lot of thought into the design and function of this great new entry into the world of pen tablets. If you are looking for an affordable, well-designed and easy-to-use tablet for drawing or just regular everyday navigation, I recommend that you give the Bamboo Fun Pen &Touch a try. I think you’ll like it!