So, my Wacom Tablet is here. It arrived on my doorstep, like a brand new bundle of joy, this morning. My first, first impression is that it’s noticeably thinner than the Intuos3; and still feels nice and sturdy. It’s slightly wider, so the Intuos3 case that I purchased from Wacom will not fit this model. This makes my poor, new tablet, feel a little vulnerable. Right now, I’m using the synthetic sleeve wrapping my tablet was packaged in, to store it in my backpack. I will probably purchase a generic laptop container to store it in, for the short term. Wacom currently does not offer a case for this model—rats.

But this is the boring stuff. The good stuff: The tablet’s feel seems exceptionally natural to me, i.e. the translation from what you see vs. what your hand does seems improvedly more accurate. It just feels more “natural” to me than the old Intuos3. The buttons are great. As per my prediction, I love the screens next to each set of buttons. One thing that I liked about the Intuos3 was the tactile feel and positioning of the buttons making them easy to find and press. This new one has a similar effect in that the two middle buttons slope slightly towards one another—enough to tell one from the other without being distracting. This also makes it convenient to find the outer two buttons, as the slope of the inner ones create a “ridge” to feel for. I quite like this. It could have been easy for Wacom to just leave them all equally flat, so nice attention to detail, guys.

What about the touchwheel? Same as the touchstrips only circular, which actually makes the zoom feature in Photoshop easier to handle. In short, I like the new scenerio.
And the button in the middle which changes the touchwheel’s function? Very nice. It will take a little getting used to and possibly some of my own personal customization to make effective, but all and all, I like the options that this button brings to the table. I do wish there was a quicker way to get to the function that you want, rather than cycling through them all; maybe a “head’s up” UI would have helped. But again, it is an improvement from having “no button.”

Now, the function that is handed over to the second button from the top—by default—is really clever. It gives you a four option wheel to select from, which goes: 1)Web 2)Command 3)Email 4)Media. Click web, and it takes you to your default web browser. Click command and it gives you several more options having to do with copy, paste, cut, undo, etc. Email takes you to, of course, your built-in mail handling client. And then, finally “Media” offers standard controls, including volume up and down, for your media player software. Since, I’m running a mac, it gives me controls for iTunes. Kinda nice. I can see myself being lazy enough to not stretch forward and use my hard keys on my keyboard for these tasks, and use my Wacom, instead. So, again, good job on adding this feature, guys.

Going back to the “natural” drawing sensation for a moment. After all, that’s really what a tablet is all about, right? In addition to having apparently “better screen mapping,” it also has a rougher surface offering less of a “slick” feel. At first, I didn’t like the feel too much (picture scraping your fingernails on looseleaf paper—it almost gave me the chills), but as I got used to it, it wasn’t so bad. And I recognized that this adds to the new, more accurate feel. So all things considered, a good feature. And some may not be as sensitive, as I was, to the new surface’s feel. Also, remember that this new tablet comes standard with a selection of optional nibs—some smoother than others—so you can change to a smoother feel, if you wish.

The final thing that I want to cover isn’t really as major, but it does have the “wow, that’s cool” factor going on. In fact, the first person that I showed my tablet to noticed it right off, and when I told him what it was for, said: “wow, that’s cool”. On the bottom is a switch that allows you to simultaneously open one usb port and close the other, thus effectively allowing you to choose which end of the tablet you plug your usb cable into. (Note: it just takes a standard mini usb to regular usb cable)

Well, that about covers it, other than saying: it is beautiful. The design is quite nice, and it looks very stylish. So for anyone considering upgrading, I highly recommend. And for those of you wanting to buy your first tablet: get this one, for sure! Nothing that I’ve tried, so far, feels this natural.