Bought the Power Support Smart Pen for Li Xiang from Challenger for SGD$39.90. There are 4 colors available, Pink, Black, Brushed and Stainless. I got the Brushed one.

It is made in Korea and felt pretty solid in my hands. I will not be using it because I don’t or rather I can’t draw on my iPad. I think it is suited more for designers as they can draw better with a stylus than their fingers on an iPad. You can’t control the thickness of the stroke though just by using the pen, if not that would be perfect!

There a 3M logo at the top tip of the pen, I am guessing it is made by 3M but package under Power Support.

Packaging Front

Power Support Smart Pen

The Tip

3M?

I Can’t Draw For Real

Got myself the new Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch for SGD$179 which was released by Wacom on the 24th September 2009. Wanted to get it even earlier but it was either out of stock at certain places or the stock was not in yet.

I went to Funan’s Challenger and they are left with Wacom Bamboo Touch and Wacom Bamboo Fun, the Pen and Pen & Touch model was sold out. Went into a few shops and they have not brought in. Finally, I found it being sold at Multimedia Integrated (MMI). The price is controlled so it doesn’t really matter where you buy from.

Here are the prices for the respective models:

• Bamboo Fun – SGD$329
• Bamboo – SGD$179
• Bamboo Pen – SGD$129
• Bamboo Touch – SGD$129

I have used it for 2 days now. I find the pen is pretty much the same as Li Xiang’s Intuos 3 so nothing much to comment. The most attractive part is the multitouch. It only support 2 fingers and not more than that. I have no idea whether it is a hardware limitation or a software limitation. I hope it is the latter as that can be fixed through firmware updates.

The multitouch is not as smooth as a regular laptop trackpad. If you compare it with my MacBook Pro multitouch trackpad, my MBP’s one is much smoother. There is some jerkiness in the cursor when you move it with your fingers. The motion gesture like 2 fingers scrolling, zooming, rotating all works fine except for the text selection. When I move my cursor with one of my fingers to a certain point and if I decided to continue moving it again, sometimes it mistaken me for wanting to select the text and hence when I do that, some portion of the text near my cursor will be selected. It is kinda irritating. But of course this can be disabled in the Pen Tablet control panel. Hopefully future firmware will fix both of this issue.

But for SGD$179, it is very worth getting it.

Here are some unboxing pictures:

Box – Front View

Box – Back View

Box – Inner View

Box Opened

Box Contents

Tablet Wrapped

Tablet