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Reviewing the Bamboo TOUCH, October 1, 2009

By 

Michael Long (Denver, Co USA) – See all my reviews

  

I own both a new 17″ MacBook Pro and a 24″ iMac, and with the advent of gesture support on the MBP trackpad I’ve often wished for a multitouch trackpad I could use on the iMac.

And with the Wacom Bamboo Touch, my wish has been granted… mostly.

The Bamboo Touch is a multitouch trackpad, not a pen input device as is most of Wacom’s line. If you want pen capabilities, order the Bamboo Pen and Touch instead, but be advised that the pen-enabled version is much larger than the Touch by about 2″ in both directions. That may not sound like much, but it takes up significantly more desktop real estate than does the Touch.

The Bamboo Touch supports all of the standard single finger and two finger gestures: clicking, right clicking, dragging, scrolling, zooming, and rotating. It does not, however, understand three and four finger gestures and swipes. This lack is compensated somewhat by the addition of four custom buttons on the side of the trackpad. The additional buttons are helpful, but inexplicably covered with a glossy black plastic that attracts fingerprints like mad.

Build quality is very good, though I miss the silky smooth feel of the glass trackpad on the MBP. Tracking is fast and accurate, though the surface is somewhat sensitive. As such, one must place it off to the side since (unlike the MBP) there’s no setting that tells the device to ignore “accidental” inputs. One other nit is that if you’re dragging something and pause, the operation seems to time out, often dropping the item where it wasn’t wanted. This is a pain when attempting to drag items into spring-loaded, automatically opening folders.

Also on the negative side, the device has a very long USB cord that just piles up on your desk if you have a Mac or other keyboard with built-in USB. Better to have shipped with a foot long “tail” for desktop use, and added a USB extender should one need to reach further.

All in all, the device is recommended and hopefully many of my small nits will be corrected in a future software driver update.

[EDIT]

After using the pad (and talking to Wacom support) it turns out that the “timeout” issue mentioned above isn’t a timeout issue at all, but stems from two problems: First, the “active” area of the trackpad is smaller than you think, delineated by the light gray lines in the photo. Thus it’s fairly easy to drag something past the line and lose control of it.

Second, unlike the trackpad on the MBP you can NOT pick up your fingers and reposition them during a drag lock. Pick them up and you’re done. Period. This means when dragging you have to be careful where you start from on the pad, otherwise you can easily run out of room.

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 Comments (2)

Not quite, May 28, 2010

By 

Michael Newton (Seattle, WA USA) – See all my reviews

  

I am really tired of mice and after 14 years as a software engineer, the gripping, clicking, and scroll-wheel-rolling are starting to bother my hand. I really like the pads on Apple laptops and wanted something like that for the desktop.

I saw all the other negative reviews here and I agree with the complaints that the buttons are not usable, the surface has too much friction, and the way the cord comes out the left side is annoying.

But I can live with those things, especially since I like to tap the pad rather than click the buttons. One-finger tap is left click. Two-finger tap is right click. Double tap to start drag. Two finger scrolling. These are all the gestures I care about and the Bamboo supports all these idioms in the same way a Mac does.

Nope, the problem for me is that it is indisputably not as accurate as a Mac trackpad. It’s possible this is because it isn’t glass so you don’t get the nice glide with your finger, I don’t know. What I do know is I have been using it every day all day for almost 2 weeks, and I just do not have quite the command over the pointer that I do with a macbook pad.

That said I am still using it. I still have a mouse hooked up and sometimes I grab it when the pad frustrates me. I marginally prefer this pad to a conventional mouse, but I look forward to the day someone builds a better one.

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Bamboo Touch Works Well for Me, October 13, 2009

By 

Timothy W. Graf (Dublin, California United States) – See all my reviews

  

I have a MacBook Air at home and I use a PC at work. I’ve become very accustomed to using a touch pad with multi-touch and gestures at home and decide to get the Bamboo Touch for work. I also have a Bamboo Craft touch pad and pen tablet that I use for drawing with my MacBook Air so I was somewhat familiar with Wacom products.

The Bamboo touch works just as advertised. I am quite happy with it at work on my Windows XP workstation. My only criticism is that it’s not quite as smooth as the touch pad on my MacBook Air. Scrolling seems a little more “choppy” with Windows and the Bamboo Touch. It’s not bad however and having the two finger swipe gesture is well worth the purchase of the Bamboo Touch. Also the pinching and rotate gestures work well in application that will use them but just not quite as smoothly as they do on my Mac. Also for some reason it tends to inadvertently select text on occasion when I touch the pad to move the mouse pointer. This could be just me getting used to using the touch pad but this almost never happens on the Mac for me.

All in all, with those minor caveats, if you are looking for a decent touch pad on a desktop system with mutli-touch and gestures this will do the trick. It works quite well, just not as smooth as the touch pad on a MacBook.

[Edit] OK I would increase my rating to 5 stars if I could. Modifying the “Double-Tap Time” settings has pretty much eliminated the inadvertent text selecting I mentioned. Also adjusting the “Scrolling Speed” setting has made window and browser scrolling seem much more smooth and responsive. The Bamboo Touch works excellent.

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