Wacom Pen Partner
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A lot of the blurb about this small unit says its ideal for use with a notebook and indeed I used it with one for some of my tests but I do not see why the traditional desktop user should not be included as it takes up less space than a mouse and pad and can do everything a mouse can do as well as its tablet tasks.
The units footprint is 15cm wide and 16cm deep, this includes the tray for the pen while the actual writing area is 8x6cm. This is small, and, will take quite a lot of getting used to, it maps to screen so a 17 or 19inch monitor means an extremely small movement on the pad will be quite large on the screen. Like other larger Wacom Tablets the writing area is also traceable rather like using tracing paper where you place the map or whatever else you want to copy under it to get an approximate copy but again be aware that a small traced area will appear rather large on the screen.
One of the selling points for this small tablet is the ability to notate documents, spreadsheets or presentations as to this effect Just Write Office software is supplied this gives extra toolbars in Word, Excel and PowerPoint allowing you ease of use of these three packages. For instance if a document is emailed for your signature rather than printing, signing, scanning and resending you can simply sign and resend. However as the tablet is small you will need some practice to get a small signature.
Annotations can be in colour and this is useful to draw attention to changes or remarks. With practice handwritten comments can be made, but this will require a lot of work. Wacom made their name with A4 and larger tablets and these mapped very easily to screen sizes with a small movement on the tablet being all but the same size on the screen. A number of higher end packages like Adobe PhotoShop CorelDRAW etc can take advantage of the abilities of a graphics tablet to be pressure sensitive, press harder and you get a thicker line etc. While these facilities are within Pen Partner I think you would need to be a very skilled artist to use them on such a small tablet.
If you need this and still want a smaller unit then I would refer you to the Wacom Graphire 3 that I looked at last October, this was if my memory serves me right an A5 unit and while still small it was possible to use with the various specialised graphics products.
Installation was straightforward, install the software plug the unit into a USB port and you are ready. My notebook is far from new being a rather slow P3 and the whole process took less than five minutes, now whenever I plug the Pen Partner in its immediately ready for use.
Perhaps this unit is just to small, certainly the tray at the back of the unit for resting the Pen is too shallow with only a minute touch enough to send the Pen off the back. If you have to sign a lot of emails you could find a use for the unit, if you have to annotate documents then this works well, however as a graphics tablet it is simply to small and even using it as a mouse replacement requires the sort of skill to make you a winner every time at Pick Up Sticks Around £29 either direct from Wacom or from dealers.
Link: http://www.wacom-europe.com/uk/products/penpartner/index.asp
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