Hardware
Wacom Bamboo Multi-Touch Tablet Spotted
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Engadget received an anonymous tip about multi-touch input coming to Bamboo line of Wacom pen tablets, complete with blurry spycam photo.
Presumably it uses the same Wacom technology going into the Fujitsu T5010. No sign of pen input in the verbiage, so I would guess it’s purely touch input. (Either that or their packaging designer made one major oversight.)
I’ve been tinkering with my own Wacom tablet and enjoying the added pen input ability (more on that soon), so I appreciate the value of an external tablet, as opposed to one built into the monitor. I can only hope it will get desktop and laptop users to try and get excited about touch input.
Kenrick
09/15/2009 at 6:56 pm
There might be some interesting possibilities with five-finger one-handed multi-touch inputs. That could naturally replace the mouse by just laying your hand on the device and moving your hand/fingers around.
Nameless
09/17/2009 at 6:15 am
This is apparently a touch-only tablet, killing the appeal for me. Everyone buys Wacom tablets to get a pressure-sensitive pen to do art work with. (Maybe when they integrate multi-touch into the Intuos4 lineup…)
It also can’t replace a standard mouse for me because there’s no way I’d be able to play FPSs and such well with a trackpad. (This is why I still leave a Logitech G5 connected to my desktop as well as a Wacom Graphire4 tablet, even though I have the mouse for the latter.)
However, if there was a touch+pen version, that could raise some…interesting possibilities. Imagine using your free hand a good distance away from your pen hand to rotate and resize the canvas!
Sumocat
09/17/2009 at 7:45 am
Nameless: I must disagree with you on everyone buying Wacom tablets to do art. I bought my Graphire Bluetooth for remote cursor control and handwriting input. I’d also prefer pen+touch, but I can see multi-touch alone being quite handy for multimedia control and web browsing. Regardless, nothing wrong with Wacom expanding their appeal beyond the art crowd.