At this year’s IFA 2016, one new, or rather newish, trend that we’re seeing is the digital notepad feature, which marries physical drawing and note-taking and digitizing them to save them on your respective cloud services. One brand that we somehow expected to get into this is Wacom, and true enough, they’re bringing several new products that offer this kind of feature and service. The Bamboo Slate and Bamboo Folio notepads will do just that to your scribbles, drawings, and even handwritten notes.
There has been a renewed interest lately in paper writing, as with journaling and sketching, but you would still want to preserve them by digitizing them of course. But instead of using apps to manually scan your papers or notebooks, which can still take some time, why not have a product that can automatically do that for you? The Bamboo Slate and Bamboo Folio are two such smart pads that are based on the Electro Magnetic Resonance (EMR) pen technology of Wacom and actually uses WILL, the brand’s digital ink. You can use your own paper, use the Wacom pen and with just one push of the button, you’ll turn your handwritten and hand drawn notes and sketches into digital files.
The Bamboo Slate is a slim smartpad that comes in two sizes, small (A5) and large (A4). The Bamboo Folio meanwhile comes with an integrated cover and with space to put in other documents like your business cards, etc. It comes in a large (A4) format. You would need the Wacom Inkspace app to store all your digital notes. You can choose the format to export the notes, like JPEG, PNG, PDF, or WILL. You can also sync them to other cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, OneNote, Inkspace, and Bamboo Paper.
The small Bamboo Slate will cost $129.95 while the large one will be priced at $149.95. The Bamboo Folio has an SRP of $199.95. The Inkspace app is free and will give you 5GB of cloud storage. If you want to convert your handwriting to rich text, you need to subscribe to Inkspace Plus. You can get a free 3-month trial and then subscribe at $2.99/month, instead of the regular rate which is $4.99/month. No word on when the smartpads will be available for purchase, but you’ll be able to buy it at the Wacom Estore and select retail outlets.
SOURCE: Wacom
