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Wacom Bamboo Touch Tablet
See it at Amazon.com for $79.95Average Customer Rating
(2.5 out of 5)
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Reviewing the Bamboo TOUCH
(4 out of 5) by Michael Long on Oct 1, 2009 (Denver, Co USA)I own both a new 17" MacBook Pro and a 24" iMac, and with the advent of gesture support on the MBP trackpad I've often wished for a multitouch trackpad I could use on the iMac.
And with the Wacom Bamboo Touch, my wish has been granted... mostly.
The Bamboo Touch is a multitouch trackpad, not a pen input device as is most of Wacom's line. If you want pen capabilities, order the Bamboo Pen and Touch instead, but be advised that the pen-enabled version is much larger than the Touch by about 2" in both directions. That may not sound like much, but it takes up significantly more desktop real estate than does the Touch.
The Bamboo Touch supports all of the standard single finger and two finger gestures: clicking, right clicking, dragging, scrolling, zooming, and rotating. It does not, however, understand three and four finger gestures and swipes. This lack is compensated somewhat by the addition of four custom buttons on the side of the trackpad. The additional buttons are helpful, but inexplicably covered with a glossy black plastic that attracts fingerprints like mad.
Build quality is very good, though I miss the silky smooth feel of the glass trackpad on the MBP. Tracking is fast and accurate, though the surface is somewhat sensitive. As such, one must place it off to the side since (unlike the MBP) there's no setting that tells the device to ignore "accidental" inputs. One other nit is that if you're dragging something and pause, the operation seems to time out, often dropping the item where it wasn't wanted. This is a pain when attempting to drag items into spring-loaded, automatically opening folders.
Also on the negative side, the device has a very long USB cord that just piles up on your desk if you have a Mac or other keyboard with built-in USB. Better to have shipped with a foot long "tail" for desktop use, and added a USB extender should one need to reach further.
All in all, the device is recommended and hopefully many of my small nits will be corrected in a future software driver update.
[EDIT]
After using the pad (and talking to Wacom support) it turns out that the "timeout" issue mentioned above isn't a timeout issue at all, but stems from two problems: First, the "active" area of the trackpad is smaller than you think, delineated by the light gray lines in the photo. Thus it's fairly easy to drag something past the line and lose control of it.
Second, unlike the trackpad on the MBP you can NOT pick up your fingers and reposition them during a drag lock. Pick them up and you're done. Period. This means when dragging you have to be careful where you start from on the pad, otherwise you can easily run out of room.
And with the Wacom Bamboo Touch, my wish has been granted... mostly.
The Bamboo Touch is a multitouch trackpad, not a pen input device as is most of Wacom's line. If you want pen capabilities, order the Bamboo Pen and Touch instead, but be advised that the pen-enabled version is much larger than the Touch by about 2" in both directions. That may not sound like much, but it takes up significantly more desktop real estate than does the Touch.
The Bamboo Touch supports all of the standard single finger and two finger gestures: clicking, right clicking, dragging, scrolling, zooming, and rotating. It does not, however, understand three and four finger gestures and swipes. This lack is compensated somewhat by the addition of four custom buttons on the side of the trackpad. The additional buttons are helpful, but inexplicably covered with a glossy black plastic that attracts fingerprints like mad.
Build quality is very good, though I miss the silky smooth feel of the glass trackpad on the MBP. Tracking is fast and accurate, though the surface is somewhat sensitive. As such, one must place it off to the side since (unlike the MBP) there's no setting that tells the device to ignore "accidental" inputs. One other nit is that if you're dragging something and pause, the operation seems to time out, often dropping the item where it wasn't wanted. This is a pain when attempting to drag items into spring-loaded, automatically opening folders.
Also on the negative side, the device has a very long USB cord that just piles up on your desk if you have a Mac or other keyboard with built-in USB. Better to have shipped with a foot long "tail" for desktop use, and added a USB extender should one need to reach further.
All in all, the device is recommended and hopefully many of my small nits will be corrected in a future software driver update.
[EDIT]
After using the pad (and talking to Wacom support) it turns out that the "timeout" issue mentioned above isn't a timeout issue at all, but stems from two problems: First, the "active" area of the trackpad is smaller than you think, delineated by the light gray lines in the photo. Thus it's fairly easy to drag something past the line and lose control of it.
Second, unlike the trackpad on the MBP you can NOT pick up your fingers and reposition them during a drag lock. Pick them up and you're done. Period. This means when dragging you have to be careful where you start from on the pad, otherwise you can easily run out of room.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Bamboo Touch Works Well for Me
(4 out of 5) by Timothy W. Graf on Oct 13, 2009 (Dublin, California United States)I have a MacBook Air at home and I use a PC at work. I've become very accustomed to using a touch pad with multi-touch and gestures at home and decide to get the Bamboo Touch for work. I also have a Bamboo Craft touch pad and pen tablet that I use for drawing with my MacBook Air so I was somewhat familiar with Wacom products.
The Bamboo touch works just as advertised. I am quite happy with it at work on my Windows XP workstation. My only criticism is that it's not quite as smooth as the touch pad on my MacBook Air. Scrolling seems a little more "choppy" with Windows and the Bamboo Touch. It's not bad however and having the two finger swipe gesture is well worth the purchase of the Bamboo Touch. Also the pinching and rotate gestures work well in application that will use them but just not quite as smoothly as they do on my Mac. Also for some reason it tends to inadvertently select text on occasion when I touch the pad to move the mouse pointer. This could be just me getting used to using the touch pad but this almost never happens on the Mac for me.
All in all, with those minor caveats, if you are looking for a decent touch pad on a desktop system with mutli-touch and gestures this will do the trick. It works quite well, just not as smooth as the touch pad on a MacBook.
[Edit] OK I would increase my rating to 5 stars if I could. Modifying the "Double-Tap Time" settings has pretty much eliminated the inadvertent text selecting I mentioned. Also adjusting the "Scrolling Speed" setting has made window and browser scrolling seem much more smooth and responsive. The Bamboo Touch works excellent.
The Bamboo touch works just as advertised. I am quite happy with it at work on my Windows XP workstation. My only criticism is that it's not quite as smooth as the touch pad on my MacBook Air. Scrolling seems a little more "choppy" with Windows and the Bamboo Touch. It's not bad however and having the two finger swipe gesture is well worth the purchase of the Bamboo Touch. Also the pinching and rotate gestures work well in application that will use them but just not quite as smoothly as they do on my Mac. Also for some reason it tends to inadvertently select text on occasion when I touch the pad to move the mouse pointer. This could be just me getting used to using the touch pad but this almost never happens on the Mac for me.
All in all, with those minor caveats, if you are looking for a decent touch pad on a desktop system with mutli-touch and gestures this will do the trick. It works quite well, just not as smooth as the touch pad on a MacBook.
[Edit] OK I would increase my rating to 5 stars if I could. Modifying the "Double-Tap Time" settings has pretty much eliminated the inadvertent text selecting I mentioned. Also adjusting the "Scrolling Speed" setting has made window and browser scrolling seem much more smooth and responsive. The Bamboo Touch works excellent.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Multiple Design Issues
(2 out of 5) by wildwoodnc on Nov 14, 2009IMO the product has four issues that kind of work together AGAINST usability (or at least the way I wish to use it which is one handed as a mouse replacement.
1. the touchpad has sensitivity issues
2. the touchpad is too big
3. the buttons are placed incorrectly
4. the multitouch works, but comes with a slight delay
The sensitivity issues I experienced on my thinkpad running windows 7 were that the pad would pick up errant touches and do things like jump around the screen or select large blocks of text. I was not ale to adjust sensitivity in the settings to eliminate this behavior completely. The next thing I tried was to turn off the tap functions within the settings and use the physical buttons. This brought to light my other two issues. The size of the touchpad and the placement of the buttons. You simply cannot use it one handed productively. The buttons are placed far on one side out of reach of your thumb so you need to pick up your hand or stretch your fingers to hit a button making lots of functions like selecting text or drag-drop a contortionist event. I simply cannot imagine the usability study that concluded that this was a good idea. The solution to this is to use the device two-handed, which means in front of your keyboard. I suppose it works fine in this configuration if that is what you prefer. Being a person who works in a lot of spreadsheets, I need to be able to move the pointer a make a keystroke in cell on a repetitive basis without having to move my hands back and forth.
As far as the multitouch delay goes. It is that simple. When using a gesture it seems like it takes the software/touchpad 1/2 second to register that you have two fingers down. It was noticeable to me though not debilitating. Other than that, gestures work as advertised.
1. the touchpad has sensitivity issues
2. the touchpad is too big
3. the buttons are placed incorrectly
4. the multitouch works, but comes with a slight delay
The sensitivity issues I experienced on my thinkpad running windows 7 were that the pad would pick up errant touches and do things like jump around the screen or select large blocks of text. I was not ale to adjust sensitivity in the settings to eliminate this behavior completely. The next thing I tried was to turn off the tap functions within the settings and use the physical buttons. This brought to light my other two issues. The size of the touchpad and the placement of the buttons. You simply cannot use it one handed productively. The buttons are placed far on one side out of reach of your thumb so you need to pick up your hand or stretch your fingers to hit a button making lots of functions like selecting text or drag-drop a contortionist event. I simply cannot imagine the usability study that concluded that this was a good idea. The solution to this is to use the device two-handed, which means in front of your keyboard. I suppose it works fine in this configuration if that is what you prefer. Being a person who works in a lot of spreadsheets, I need to be able to move the pointer a make a keystroke in cell on a repetitive basis without having to move my hands back and forth.
As far as the multitouch delay goes. It is that simple. When using a gesture it seems like it takes the software/touchpad 1/2 second to register that you have two fingers down. It was noticeable to me though not debilitating. Other than that, gestures work as advertised.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Don't bother
(1 out of 5) by Mixerman23 on Nov 5, 2009 (Burbank, CA United States)Hoping to emulate the multi-touch trackpad on my Macbook (which works extremely well), I purchased this for my MacPro - I shouldn't have bothered. Mouse pointing is far too imprecise/jittery/finicky to be useable. Using the pad to click is noisy - usually clicks much too easily. Fingers close to the pad disable the one touching the pad, and to top it off, if you disable the touch to click feature to use it only as a pointing device, the switches on the left of the pad are in a very inconvenient location and have a vague tactile feel, making it uncomfortable to do regular selections, and almost impossible to click and drag, etc...
IOW, this thing is very disappointing - I'd stay away.
IOW, this thing is very disappointing - I'd stay away.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Doesn't work with Mac OS X Accessibility Zoom
(1 out of 5) by Joseph Turner on Oct 30, 2009 (Seattle, WA United States)If you need to use Mac OS X's Accessibility Zoom you should be aware that this input device does not work at all while Accessibility Zoom is engaged.
The pointer acts as if it is magnetized to the upper left corner of the display. You can attempt to drag it away from the upper left corner but it always snaps back to the upper left.
As soon as you un-zoom the display the pointer works correctly.
I've contacted Wacom and they presently have no plans to fix this issue and suggested I get an Intuos 4 instead (without offering to refund my money for the Bamboo).
The pointer acts as if it is magnetized to the upper left corner of the display. You can attempt to drag it away from the upper left corner but it always snaps back to the upper left.
As soon as you un-zoom the display the pointer works correctly.
I've contacted Wacom and they presently have no plans to fix this issue and suggested I get an Intuos 4 instead (without offering to refund my money for the Bamboo).