BIOS: Technology Means Business

Wacom's PenPartner2 (£29.99 ex. VAT) is a handy portable tablet that allows you to add hand-written annotations to Microsoft's Office documents or, of course, to make scribbles that pass for art. The PenPartner2 is designed specifically for laptops - hence its compact design - and comes in a contemporary, ergonomic design. The device is aimed at business professionals and business travellers, but can be used by anyone looking for an alternative device to navigate their PC applications, make hand-written notes, or doodle in graphics applications.

Successor to the original PenPartner, launched in April 2004, the PenPartner2 comes in black only with anthracite accents. Although the black design looks really cool, it quickly becomes covered in unsightly fingerprints. Thankfully, it has a smaller footprint than its predecessor at just 146x150x8.5mm and 160g (81.2x58mm active area), which makes it even less cumbersome when travelling and also reduces required deskspace.

Unfortunately, the tablet is tethered by a USB cable that is just 60cm long, so it's hardly an ideal solution for controlling your computer from the comfort of your sofa. Having said that, it could help to eliminate potential long-term health risks to your forearm such as the notorious tunnel carpal syndrome, also known as RSI or mouse arm. No additional programmes are required either, since all programs should recognise the pen as an ordinary mouse. If your touchpad or mouse work in the application, the pen should too. To access additional functions or to assign the pen keys, you will need to install the bundled driver.

Wacom has also improved the ergonomics of both the tablet and the pen. The tablet itself is flatter, allowing your hand to lie flat on the surface, which is more relaxing for tendons and muscles when working with the pen over long periods. Wacom's absolute positioning also means that the pen tablet mirrors the laptop screen more accurately and allows you to navigate with the pen with shorter and more precise movements. The tablet has a coordinate resolution of 1000-lpi and the pen has 512 pressure levels.

The pen now features a rubberised grip area for increased comfort and boasts an improved ergonomic shape, although we still found it uncomfortable compared to a regular pen. There are now two separate buttons on the pen, which are set as right and double-click by default. The top button works as double-click, which supersedes tapping twice with the pen tip on the tablet, but there's no eraser function. The pen works on the tablet using Wacom's patented 'penabled' technology, which means that it is cordless and battery-free and doesn't need docking or charging.

The PenPartner2 comes bundled with JustWrite Office, a plug-in to Microsoft's Office. Wacom has recently bought JustWrite Office from Alphatek Global PTE. Designed for use with Wacom's pen tablets, the software, in combination with the PenPartner2, enables you to directly add hand-written notes, comments, figures and signatures to a Word, Excel and PowerPoint document, just like using pen and paper. Passages in text can also be highlighted and sticky notes pasted into documents. The PenPartner2 is also compatible with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 or higher and allows you to benefit from the features of 'Advanced Commenting', such as annotating hand-written text or highlight words or sentences in PDFs.

A neat feature of the PenPartner2 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. Unlike the original Penpartner, the new model sports a clear plastic sheet under which you can slip a small photo or sketch for tracing - or just for decoration.

Generally speaking, the PenPartner2 is fun and practical. It suits right- and left-handers equally well, and should prove a more ergonomic solution than a traditional mouse, or a laptop's touchpad or pointing stick. Having said that, we found that the PenPartner2 made navigating through Windows and application menus difficult. Persistence did pay off and we found that annotating documents and creating scribbles became more intuitive the more we used the device. Even so, editing still photographs and creating graphics files was a non-starter and proved very frustrating. [8]