Wacom Bamboo Spark
Reminding me my penmanship could do with some work.
Shorthand notetaking and penmanship are lost arts to me. I’m far more efficeint and legible with a tablet or laptop. Getting the written word into the computer has also been another hurdle. The Spark looks to make it a little easier.
It works kind of like magic. And by magic, we mean there’s an electro-magnetic resonance board nestled in the folio underneath the drawing pad, which tracks the movement of the pen. The information is stored in the folio and, at the touch of a button, transfered to Wacom’s Bamboo Paper app via Bluetooth. You can then push your digitised notes out to Evernote and Dropbox. The pen itself is nice and weighty and has good girth, but there’s a looseness to the tip and the accompanying noise with each stroke can get annoying really quickly.
There are three slight variations of the Spark to choose from. We looked at the folio with a gadget pocket. It’s big enough to squeeze in an iPad Mini and maybe a few loose documents. There’s also a verison with a dedicated tablet enclosure and, lastly, one with snap-fit to lock an iPad Mini in place.
Replacement paper refill packs (30 pages each) and ink cartridges are of course available, each costing $15 for a pack of three. You’re likely to chew through paper way quicker than ink.
This is a decent solution for people who take loads of notes that need digitising, but feels a bit clunky for anything artsy. As neat as the technology is, if you’re an artist looking to digitise/ vectorise your work, grab a sketch pad and Adobe Illustrator Draw instead.