An interesting Tweet from the company’s Twitter account. Obviously raises a lot of questions.
Dreaming of a powerful mobile tablet made for creative people? Wacom has one coming.
— Wacom (@wacom) March 1, 2013
Wacom entering the tablet market?
An interesting Tweet from the company’s Twitter account. Obviously raises a lot of questions.
Dreaming of a powerful mobile tablet made for creative people? Wacom has one coming.
— Wacom (@wacom) March 1, 2013
Took them long enough! They have been a step away with the Cintiq for a long time. I always wondered why they didn’t just shove a laptops worth of parts under that screen. Finally!
Running Android? I’m curious if they spent time on a full fledged OS or if they customized Android.
I can’t imagine they’d start from scratch. Nobody does that. Even Apple didn’t do that for their tablet. 🙂
I wonder if they mean a tablet as we think of them now, or if they mean it will be a lightweight, wireless version of the pressure-sensitive drawing tablets that they’ve been making for years. I’d be more excited about the latter.
Definitely didn’t mean from a blank slate but there are other options they could’ve used other than Android.
The “from scratch” part is more about building out an ecosystem, etc that comes with a mobile OS.
Didn’t Samsung just buy a huge stake in Wacom?
Huge might be overstating things a bit. Samsung bought a 5% stake in Wacom, at a price of $75M.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/02/04/samsung-buys-stake-in-s-pen-collaborator/
I’d think for speed’s sake the OS would be specialized, slimmed down to focus on pressure sensitivity and stylus location. iOS and Android both have a lot of other jobs to perform, but screen-event-feedback is crucial for a drawing tablet.
Samsung just bought a 5% stake in Wacom. From what I’ve read, Wacom wants to expand the relationship further, but who knows—that may simply extend technology exchange.
In the end, speed, size, and price will be a huge factor too. Especially with Jot Touch stylus now out, which already gives my iPad pressure sensitivity.
Whoops, did I say the Jot Touch was now out. I’d misread one of the emails of a local retailer. It’s coming “soon”. Whatever that means.
probably that. It would be a version of their Cintiq line with maybe an art app pre-loaded
Most of the digital artists I know love Wacom’s hardware, but they’re also all very picky about their software. Gabe’s Surface Pro review was so fascinating because it fit well into his existing (windows-based) art workflow, and improved the experience over a normal laptop + tablet, as opposed to the very high end tablet + screen add-ons.
If Wacom comes out with a tablet, they’re going to have to support it long enough to win over a viable number of artists to their software, or bring enough developers onto it to make it viable.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this merely meant a partnership of some kind with Samsung.
I’m a digital artist, have been using Wacom stuff for 20+ years.
Since the Surface Pro apparently incorporates Wacom tech, I’m thinking it might just be a Wacom-branded Surface Pro running Windows. Most of us use the desktop versions of Adobe software or Corel Painter or Autodesk SketchbookPro; we’d generally need to continue using those, so iOS or Android wouldn’t work.
Great point.
No.
Waiting for a Wacom display/tablet that doesn’t suck and plugs directly into either a Mac or iPad where all the art tools are.
What fascinated me about Gabe’s review was finding out there is an artist with a Windows-based workflow.
There are a ridiculous number of great art tools on iPad. But you’re right, if you’re doing 40 hours per week you want apps like Photoshop, Aperture, Motion. And you want AppleScript to automate grunt work.
Also, Android tablets do not have color management, like most Windows systems. Whereas the Mac and iPad have it out-of-the-box and it is supported in 100% of the apps.
Several years before the iPad was even talked about I wrote on the Adobe Photoshop forum a long bit of speculation about how badly I wished Wacom would come out with a portable, purpose—built sketchpad. I had looked at the first iterations of the Axiotron Modbook and thought: THIS is something Wacom should look into very hard. I envisioned a custom version of the Mac OS that lived in as small a footprint as possible, just enough to support running Photoshop, Painter, and a few other similar applications. I figured the backside guts could be stuffed with flash memory and a battery that would serve a long day of creation at the beach or wherever, and a port to dump everything to either a portable HD or your main system when you got back home. Of course, me—not being a computer HW/SW engineer—couldn’t fathom all the details necessary to make the whole thing a viable product. I wasn’t visionary enough to imagine the slim profile and brand new OS of the as —yet unborn iPad, and all the features it unleashed on the world, and which set the bar for all other competitors, but the seed of the idea was certainly there. Let’s hope Wacom takes enough time to get it dead right, right out of the gate.