BIOS: Technology Means Business

With its lightweight silver and flat design, Wacom's PenPartner tablet should match most laptops on the market today. It has a compact form factor (147x160x12mm, 168g) and is designed to be carried with your laptop, unlike the company's desk-bound Graphire 3 Studio XL. The input device is therefore only useful as an alternative way of inputting data compared to a regular trackpad or mouse, and won't suit those looking for a tablet for intricate graphics work. Whilst it allows you to draw freehand in paint programs, make adjustments to images in image-editing applications, or annotate presentations, its small active area and one-button pen will restrict your creativity. Nevertheless, for just £24.99 it may suit you fine.

Pros: Low cost; small footprint; cable and battery-free pen
Cons: Small active area and resolution; non-slip 'feet' don't work

The PenPartner package comprises a plastic silver-and-grey tablet and a matching pressure-sensitive pen (10g). The relatively nondescript tablet conveniently offers a pen rest and a status LED that illuminates when the device is connected to your computer using the supplied 1.5 metre USB cable. A slight design oversight is that only two of the four support pads on the underside of the tablet are rubberised, so the device slips around on smooth work surfaces.

Drivers are supplied on a single CD-ROM, along with software (JustWrite Office 4.0) that allows you to write handwritten notes in Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint - or indeed in any application and anywhere on the screen using the supplied AlphaTek ScreenMarkup utility. JustWrite Office installs automatically within Office applications and appears with its own toolbar. Handwritten notes are saved in the file, so users who have not installed the software on their computer can still read the annotated notes. A 16-page Quick Start Guide is also supplied, although its content is so brief that it's almost pointless (just two pages are in English). Thankfully there's a more useful PDF-based manual on the CD-ROM (Acrobat Reader 4.05 supplied).

Although rather awkward to get used to, the main benefits of tablets is that they allow you to personalise your e-mails by signing them, just as you would do on a standard letter, as well as insert notes and small drawings on the fly. You can, of course, also use them to create freehand drawings in graphics programs. The PenPartner has an active area of just 81x58mm, a co-ordinate resolution of 1000dpi and 512 pressure levels, so it's not much use if you work at high resolutions. By comparison, Wacom's Graphire 3 Studio XL (276x257x18.1mm, 800g) has an active area of 209x151mm and supports a resolution of 2032dpi - double that of the PenPartner.

A neat feature of the PenPartner's tablet is that it can sense the pen's position up to around 5mm away from the surface, but when the pen does make contact with the tablet, it initiates a left button click and the tablet responds by sending information indicating not only the position of the stylus, but its contact pressure. You can also leave your mouse plugged into your computer and use the two input devices side-by-side quite happily. Touching the pen on the tablet overrides the mouse however, and the cursor then appears at the absolute position of the pen on the tablet. In other words, regardless of where you leave the mouse pointer on your screen when using a mouse, it'll appear where the pen presses the tablet. Double tapping the pen tip generates a double click, and Wacom provides a Control Panel utility that allows you to disable the tablet, select the tablet's sensitivity, as well as adjust the minimum distance between double clicks. Unfortunately, the tablet doesn't have a clear plastic sheets under which you can slip a small photo or sketch for tracing - or just for decoration.

Wacom claims that the PenPartner is an easy-to-use input device that enables comfortable and fast navigation through applications, as well as offering an easier and more efficient way of working on a laptop. The company's claims are based on the way that the pen works with absolute positioning, where the active area of the tablet exactly mirrors the laptop screen. While we're hardened PDA users at BIOS, we found that the PenPartner made navigating through Windows and application menus a chore - even though the pen can be lifted up and down because its new position is recognised by the tablet. Persistence did pay off, mind due, and we found that annotating documents and creating scribbles became more instinctive the more we used the device. Even so, editing still photographs and creating graphics files was a non-starter and proved very frustrating.

Links:
PenPartner Web site