My Bad Experience with the Wacom Bamboo Touch
What a wonderful idea: take a laptop trackpad, a great input device in context, make it larger, and use it as a primary input device peripheral for your desk.
I was really looking forward to using the Wacom Bamboo Touch. When I saw one on sale (open item) at Best Buy, I snatched it eagerly. I used it for an entire day and was disappointed.
There were two primary problems with this device. Firstly, my wrist and hand got tired quickly. The way you have to hold your hand to use this device (holding it over the trackpad, hovering, with no good place to rest your wrist), gets painful quickly.
Secondly, with the particular unit I had, the fidelity of the tracking seemed poor. I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the tracking speed, sensitivity, acceleration, etc., but with no great improvement one way or the other. This seemed like a cheap device (in the qualitative sense of the word).
In order to be a primary input device, tracking quality and ergonomics have to be near perfect. Anything less is annoying and simply unproductive.
Take a pass on this one. Perhaps they will come out with a higher quality version in the next revision. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong. You tell me.
