squibby, do you have any pros/cons on the bamboo tablet to share? i'm considering purchasing one for my netbook before i decide to get a lenovo tablet
Hi. Well, I wish the bamboo tablet would have turned out better than it did.
As far as functionality goes, it behaves exactly as it should. One thing I didn't realize is that the tablet actually represents a miniature layout of your screen; so if you pick up the pen and put it to the tablet, your cursor goes on the screen to the spot the location of the square on the tablet represents. So, you pick up the pen and put it to the upper right corner of the tablet, your cursor moves to the upper right corner of your screen. I would rather have liked to be able to just put the pen on the tablet and have it take control of the cursor where the cursor had been. This feature kinda puts an extra step in transitioning between typing/trackpad use and tablet use, because you have to take a second to orient yourself on the tablet and get the cursor to where you need.
Another thing I didn't realize, and don't like, is that the tablet actually senses the pen up to a few cm away from its surface, so you can control the cursor by just hovering over it. This sounds cool, but, I found that it would actually mess me up more than anything because you have to be sure to lay the pen down off to the side of the tablet when not using it.
Also, the pen has two buttons on it that you need to use to use all of its features, which just adds another step and another thing to remember when you are already juggling switching back and forth between your laptop and the tablet.
Lastly, the tablet is too large to be able to reasonably fit it and the laptop on a classroom desk. There may be smaller versions, I got the $70 version, but I actually think the pad gets larger as they get more expensive. And, not even all of the surface is useable, it is really only a much smaller rectangle in the center of the pad that can be used.
I will be returning my bamboo tablet. In the end I realize that it is much easier to just use the trackpad on my laptop; my fingers are already right there, I don't have to jump back and forth all of the time, and I don't have to constantly reorient myself on the screen.
The bamboo tablet does not really offer anything you can't do with your laptop's trackpad, unless you would rather use a pen than your fingers for the basic trackpad functions, or unless you need to be able to write freehand into files, (the tablet wasn't very good at that, I could definitely see why having a "real" tablet system would be an advantage because you wouldn't be writing on a pretend screen, which makes it difficult to write clearly), but I'm faster at typing so I don't want to hand-write all of my notes anyway.
I wish that I could have a tablet, but I was dreading dealing with a PC again so I just got a better MacBook Pro than the one I already had. Had I been able to actually try out a tablet and see how I liked it, maybe I would have made a different choice. I dunno. I hope this helps.
