Customer Reviews

Wacom Bamboo Touch Tablet

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

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.

I am really tired of mice and after 14 years as a software engineer, the gripping, clicking, and scroll-wheel-rolling are starting to bother my hand. I really like the pads on Apple laptops and wanted something like that for the desktop.

I saw all the other negative reviews here and I agree with the complaints that the buttons are not usable, the surface has too much friction, and the way the cord comes out the left side is annoying.

But I can live with those things, especially since I like to tap the pad rather than click the buttons. One-finger tap is left click. Two-finger tap is right click. Double tap to start drag. Two finger scrolling. These are all the gestures I care about and the Bamboo supports all these idioms in the same way a Mac does.

Nope, the problem for me is that it is indisputably not as accurate as a Mac trackpad. It's possible this is because it isn't glass so you don't get the nice glide with your finger, I don't know. What I do know is I have been using it every day all day for almost 2 weeks, and I just do not have quite the command over the pointer that I do with a macbook pad.

That said I am still using it. I still have a mouse hooked up and sometimes I grab it when the pad frustrates me. I marginally prefer this pad to a conventional mouse, but I look forward to the day someone builds a better one.

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.

I have a stupid tick that makes me slam a mouse on the table repeatedly. It sucks but it's what I do so for the last few months I was researching touch pads and the like. I've seen the write-ups on the Apple touch pad on their macs and having spent 4 hours with them yesterday at a work training I can safely say I prefer the bamboo.

Really for the simple reason that I just need to lightly tap to select something, not press hard. The magic whatever on their macbooks you have to press and even after 4 hours I didn't like it, I got used to it but it wasn't fun.

The bamboo arrived earlier today and after doing an initial configuration for how I like it, it works exactly how I expected it to. The best part is I can put it below my keyboard and simulate a laptop interface which is easier on my wrists and more intuitive (for me.)

I also like that is is left-handed or right-handed so if I cut my finger or hurt my arm I can switch. Using this device either way works fine for me, that could be because I'm naturally left-handed but am adept at using my right-hand with mice since so many of them are for right-handed people.

The only thing that bothers me and it's Chrome's fault since I just tested it. If you are trying to scroll within a form like this one it scrolls inside of the form but then also the whole page. It's a little disorienting but when I tried it in IE9 (beta) it worked perfectly.

The surface isn't too rubbery like other people have mentioned. At least not for me. I do have super soft hands...I really do, not trying to gloat here. Best advice: go to a Best Buy and try it hands on (if they have a display or an open item.) It's also the same price there so you can pick it up today if you like it as much as I do!

I was hoping for something to take the stress off my forearm and reduce the risks of CPS. I have a vertical mouse already. This product created more stress than a regular mouse. I was surprised by this ...and disappointed. I would look for a way to try it before buying it.

Use as my primary device never going back to the standard mouse. As a sound engineer I use this in the studio all the time it makes working on my computer daw work station a breeze. with the easy zoom features, moving around is simple and my productivity has increased 10 fold. I recommend this item for anyone who wants to step away from the traditional mouse and try something different.

It is well built and does what it is supposed to do. The description is quite clear about what Wacom means by multitouch, and if in doubt, Wacom has video demos of the multitouch in action on their web site. It doesn't claim to work like a Mac tablet, so I don't know why people ding it for not working like a Mac tablet. The 5' cable is too is a bit short for me, so I'm getting an extension cable D-Link DUB-C3AE USB 2.0 Extension Cable (10 Feet).

Note: with Win7 64-bit, do not use the 521-6 drivers from the Wacom site - not stable! The drivers from the CD work fine.

My tweaks:
- I put a patch of blue painters tape on the second and fourth buttons so I could distinguish them by feel.
- I kept accidentally touching a second spot, so I disabled right and left second-touching. Otherwise I really like multitouch.
- I enabled drag lock. Trying to select w/out it will drive you batty!
- It is easy enough to use the multitouch right click, so I switched that button to be middle click.
- The button config options are limited, so I use X-Mouse Button Control to get the button functionality that I want.

A few dings:
- It should have better button config options so I don't have to use X-Mouse.
- It would be nice to be able to adjust the touch sensitivity. I am inclined to hover my hand over the tablet at times, but I had to stop doing that because sometimes it would register a touch even though I didn't feel a touch.
- The tablet doesn't work for UAC popups, so I switch to the keyboard for those.

IMO 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.

I bought the bamboo tablet because of all the good functionalities that it offered. The size seems big which is something I wanted, and the price seemed reasonable. After using it for a couple of days here are my thoughts:

Pros:
+ Good size
+ Good set of features
+ Price

Cons:
- Quality!!! I cannot emphasize how bad the quality of this product is. The touch area is not smooth at all. You have to press hard to it to that you get a smooth scrolling on your screen. Clicking the buttons is also a pain, you have to press a little harder than you do with other trackpads. In my opinion the quality of this product is by far worse than anything else I've tried. This is the reason why I had to return it to Amazon, it's just not usable for me.

I really hope they create a better quality trackpad even if it's more expensive.

As a software developer I use computers extensively and full time. Having used a mac book pro for a while I found the multitouch gestures to be extremely productive, but I am in a Windows dominated world. After finding the Bamboo Touch at engadget I figured I would order one and give it a shot, especially for the price they have it here and the fact that it supports (limited!) multi touch in Windows (unlike the stupid Apple Magic Touch or whatever it's called). Having now used it for several days now, I must say that I am extremely disappointed, and it is not entirely Wacom's fault.

The hardware itself is rock solid, very sleek looking and is more than sensitive enough. The 'rubbery' feel that other reviewers have stated is not that inhibitive to me, maybe because I don't touch the pad with enough force to make it irritating. If this really bothers you I would consider putting an IPad screen protector on the touch sensitive part of bamboo. That would make for a much smoother touch surface and you could do it for cheap.

Unfortunately, things go downhill from here. The buttons are nice and elegant looking but Wacom really missed the whole point here and that is to move away from buttons like you find on the mouse by USING YOUR FINGERS! This is where the three and four finger gestures would have prohibited the need for any buttons. Even if Wacom couldn't decide on what the other gestures should do, at least let me use the three and four finger gestures with custom keystrokes, etc. like they do with the buttons! The buttons are pretty useless if you ask me, because with the large touch pad, you never know where your hand is in relation to the buttons, so you either have to look down to push them (terrible) or guess with your thumb and hope you hit the right button. This single design flaw is enough for me to stop using the tablet and it will be going up on Ebay soon enough.

The additional issues I have with the touch stem from Microsoft's inability to support touch properly in Windows 7. Scrolling and zooming throughout windows is jittery just like your using the mouse wheel. This is a bad combination that takes away from the natural feel of using your fingers. This could easily be fixed! Smooth scrolling is already in Windows! Look at what happens when you drag the scroll bar on the right with your mouse! smoooooooth. I don't think there are any custom touch gestures in Windows, and even if there were, I don't think this tablet will support them.

I do believe Wacom could fix 90% of the issues I have with the tablet through a decent driver update. Unfortunately I don't believe they will. I will be sending them an email with my issues and I hope all of you do the same. The lack of three and four finger touch takes this product down from an everyday usable excellent product, to a mediocre piece of hardware that requires you to take a large hit in productivity to use everyday. Hopefully Wacom is listening (and doing more end user product testing before release next time!!!).