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

This is the first time I was invited to a Samsung event, was invited by Daniel, the PR Manager for Samsung. Previously I did two reviews on Samsung products, one is the YP-K3 and the other is a VP-MX10. This event is called Samsung Touch Event. It is to let us have a touch and feel of those Samsung phones that are announced during MWC. The product marketing (mobile) manager, Winston said there about about 20+ phones Samsung phones that is being announced at MWC, but here in Singapore, they picked 7 to showcase to us.

The 7 phones are C3050, Ultra^B, Ultra^S, Beat^Disc, Beat^DJ, Omnia^HD and the last phone which is the flagship product is the Ultra^Touch. They also announced 2 services, Share Pix and Online Widgets. The Share Pix is similar to Nokia’s Share On Ovi but in this case, the pictures are first uploaded to Samsung servers and then in turn the server will upload the pictures to the designated service that the user choose like Facebook or Friendster. The online widget is just an improved version of the famous Samsung Widgets that can be found in some Samsung phones. The online widget will allow you to retrieve RSS feeds as welll as create shortcut to websites.

More Information About The Phones

• Samsung C3050
• Samsung Ultra^B
• Samsung Ultra^S
• Samsung Beat^Disc
• Samsung Beat^DJ
• Samsung Omnia^HD
• Samsung Ultra^Touch

Winston also briefly mention about Samsung Blue Earth. The phone is made up of materials from recycled plastic extracted from water bottles. There is also a Solar Panel on the back of the phone which charges the phone. Accordingly to Daniel, you need to put the phone for 14 hours under the light or sun in order to use it to talk for 4 hours. I wonder will the phone battery melts first before that happens.

Samsung will be launching phones on the Android as well as on Windows Mobile 6.5 sometime soon as well. The Samsung Omnia^HD and Samsung Ultra^Touch will be out in Q2 2009.

Samsung Touch Event Gallery
I wanted to upload the pictures to Nokia’s Share on Ovi, but it feels weird. I wanted to upload to my own gallery but I am too lazy to resize the pictures. End up, I decided to upload to Facebook! I hate the stupid Facebook limit of 60 photos per album!

• Samsung Touch Event – Part 1
• Samsung Touch Event – Part 2