Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Dell Laptop Battery
First off I should tell you I've haven't seen a graphics tablet I've liked in more than 20 years, and I've tried quite a few in that period. When the new Wacom Bamboo Fun came in I was ready to make another mark in my 'Hate it' column. I did struggle with it at first but that was more to do with problems with Snow Leopard than anything wrong with the Bamboo. Adobe Update kept crashing. (I've had nothing but similar problems with Snow Leopard. Sorry Apple, you released SL before it was ready for prime time) By the way, I had no problems with Windows 7, either 32 bit or 64 bit, on my 3 ?year old Dell laptop nor my 2 year old, home built PC. (I don't want to sound like some Windows Fan Boy, I'm not that fond of any of the OS's that have been introduced this year. Even my love of Linux has been watered down because of Ubuntu 9.10). For this review, I'm reviewing the larger sized Bamboo Fun.
First off, the tablet is very good looking. I was sent the silver/white version, which fits perfectly with my 2008 24" iMac and Dell E1505 laptop. There are also black/charcoal versions.
Simply install the driver (and check Wacom's site for the recent updates for Snow Leopard and Windows 7), plug it in and you are ready to go! My version of the Bamboo also came with Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows, Elements 6 for OSX. Also included is a pared down version Nik Software's excellent Color Efex 3 as well as Corel Painter Essentials 4. After you install Elements and Essentials go to the company's respective websites and download the updates you'll find there. (I never could get Color Efex installed on the Mac Adobe Update kept crashing too. Windows worked fine though.)
During the driver install you'll be asked if you'll be using it right-handed or left-handed. You can flip the tablet to fit your needs.
The tablet is USB powered, and the pen doesn't need a battery such as Dell Latitude C540 Battery , Dell Latitude C600 Battery , Dell Latitude C610 Battery , Dell Latitude C640 Battery , Dell Latitude C800 Battery , Dell Latitude C810 Battery , Dell Latitude C840 Battery , Dell Latitude CPi Battery , Dell Latitude CPX Battery , Dell Latitude CPXH Battery , Dell Latitude D400 Battery , Dell Latitude D410 Battery . The edge of the tablet tapers down so it won't cut into your wrist. It sits rock solid on the desktop. There are 4 programmable buttons along the shorter side of the tablet.
The best feature of the tablet is what's missing. No mouse! From now on you let your fingers do the work. No more monkey paws after a day of image retouching using a mouse. (I've had quite a few times where I suffered from stiffness in my mouse hand after marathon sessions over a weekend retouching 500 images.) Many of you have track pads on your laptops and gotten tired of running off the edge while using it. No more of that with the Wacom Touch series of tablets. Having a large working area is wonderful. Some of you might like the smaller models since they take up less real estate on your desktop and hand movement will be a little less. If you are a photographer, graphic artist or do a lot of craft projects then I think you'll get along better with the larger tablet. My first stint retouching a photo using the pen worked perfectly with much finer control than what is possible with a mouse.
Think of the Touch series of Bamboos as having a track pad on steroids. Lots of room to move around. On my larger size tablet I might have had too much room. I noticed you can downsize the work area of the tablet using the control panel to something requiring less hand/arm movement.
The Touch version of the new Bamboo tablets supports multi-touch gestures. You use one and two finger control to navigate, pan, scroll, rotate, and zoom. There are 9 gestures in total. Its possible that Wacom will offer an update in the future that will support the 3 and 4 finger gestures on some of the latest Apple products.