If I could have only one peripheral plugged into my PC, it would be a Wacom pressure-sensitive tablet. There is simply no substitute for its intuitive natural input functionality and feel when drawing or painting in programs like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter (read the review of Painter IX here), Pixologic's Zbrush, or even Alias Maya. The latest model, the Intuos3, is the most sophisticated version yet, although it sacrifices some of the elegance and clean surface of earlier tablets.

Button Up
Like other Wacom tablets, the Intuos3 features a 6-x-8-inch drawing surface mounted on a rectangular slab of plastic (4-x-5- and 9-x-12-inch units are also available). This edition has an 8-foot USB cable that, at least in theory, frees me to slouch comfortably in my high-back office chair with my feet up while I paint. The latest wireless Intuos pen is shaped differently than the previous version but is functionally indistinguishable. It supports 1,024 levels of pressure with tilt sensitivity, meaning there is never a sudden transition from the gentlest touch to the firmest pressure.

Flipping the pen over pencil-style switches it to eraser mode. Like previous versions, this pen has a two-button finger switch, and like other versions, I disable the switch with the included control panel, since I can't manage to use the pen without constantly pressing these buttons when I don't mean to. (Blame my claw-like grip, not the stylus.) The tablet also comes with a cordless mouse that works only when employing the tablet as a mouse pad, and I tossed this in a desk drawer to gather dust along with previous generations of Wacom mice, since this tablet also doesn't fit on my ergonomic, adjustable keyboard/mouse tray.

Previous Wacom tablets all featured some kind of control buttons along the top edge of the drawing surface, and these could be used to perform various operating system functions (such as cut, copy and paste) with a touch of the stylus. But the Intuos3 has upped the ante in terms of on-tablet control. Gone is the top row of explicitly labeled function keys, replaced by four substantial programmable buttons on either side of the tablet -- called ExpressKeys -- that can be set to perform any keystroke combination or launch any menu item (see Figure 1). The control panel lets you set up different preferences for various applications.

Figure 1: Four programmable buttons called ExpressKeys have replaced the standard function keys of previous versions.

While these programmable buttons are useful, I prefer the smooth seamless surface of the Intuos2 for lugging with my laptop. The keyboard-like keys of the new function buttons were prone to collecting crud inside my briefcase even after a few days' use. The new tablet is at once heavier (by half a pound), bulkier, and more fragile feeling with its glossy, sharp-edged lexan frame, than the Intuos2 (which has a comparatively pedestrian-looking semi-matte finish and soft, rounded edges.)

Programmable Palettes?
The most compelling new feature in the Intuos3 is a thin vertical Touch Strip on each side of the tablet that can be used to perform common functions requiring variable input. For example, you can slide your finger up the strip to zoom in and slide it down to zoom out. (Zooming and scrolling are such common uses that they're set as the default functions for the Touch Strips.) In Photoshop CS, I was able to easily re-program one of these pads to control brush size and the other to let me scrub up and down in Photoshop's history stack to quickly undo and redo one or more previous operations, but this required sacrificing the zoom and pan functionality.

Other application features I was able to invoke and control with the Touch Strips included setting brush size and softness in Photoshop and Painter, stepping through layers in Photoshop, and choosing Image Hose Nozzles in Painter. However, there's no easy way to use each Touch Strip to control more than a single feature in an application.

Any one of the tablet's buttons can be set to open a user-defined pop-up menu, and this menu can be populated with any commands, key strokes, or menu items. When you push the designated button, the pop-up menu appears under your cursor, wherever it happens to be on screen, allowing you to quickly select the desired command. With some investment in customizing this feature, you could include almost every conceivable menu item or keyboard command to the pop-up menu -- which in theory would obviate the keyboard -- and truly justify the 8-foot cable. However, the pop-up menu is currently limited to a single long column of commands and it's unwieldy to have more than a dozen or so listed in the menu. What's really called for is the ability to create some sort of organized hierarchy of commands, a la the Hot Box menus in Alias Maya. And it would be a time saver if the Wacom software came with customizable menus pre-configured for some of the more popular painting applications.

Moreover, the pop-up menu would be far more useful if your menu selection would let you set different states for the Touch Strips, so that they could perform different functions, such as adjusting a brush shape or size, scrubbing through opacity or color brightness values, or walking through the history or layers stacks, depending on the context. With the ability to support only a single function each, the Touch Strips and buttons are one-trick ponies that just don't live up to the great flexibility of the drawing tablet itself.

I'm Touched
The ergonomics of the Intuos3's new input features aren't all that great. If you're right-handed and you enable the buttons and touch pad on the right side of the tablet, you're likely to inadvertently activate the Touch Strip and button controls as your hand brushes past the right border of your artwork. The buttons and track pad on the left side, meanwhile, require reaching with your left hand between the keyboard and the tablet, with substantially greater repetitive stress implications than using the keyboard and drawing surface alone. You can set the Touch Strips to respond only to input from the pen, however, a single toggle applies to the pair of Touch Strips, which is unfortunate. Turning this setting on prevented unwanted input from my right hand, but in order to touch the left-side's Touch Strip with the pen to change the brush size, for example, the brush has to leave the canvas which deactivates the brush and prevents brush-size adjustments.

In practice, I found myself rarely using the function buttons and Touch Strip on the right side of the Intuos3, since I prefer to keep my drawing hand on the work as much as possible. And I found myself frequently wishing that all eight buttons and the two touch strips, could be removed from the tablet altogether and placed just to the left of my keyboard where I could get at them as easily as the still-quite-necessary keyboard keys. Come to think of it, I wonder why Wacom didn't simply change its software to allow keyboard combinations, combined with a quick pen gesture on the tablet's surface, to do what all these new buttons and Touch Strips are meant to.

Conclusion
While the Intuos3's new input features are useful, and the variable input of the Touch Strips is very intuitive, Wacom's software doesn't come close to pressing the new features to full advantage. In particular, the new pop-up menu functionality doesn't offer a viable alternative to using the keyboard. And the two Touch Strips are hamstrung by being allowed only a single function each.

To be fair, the Intuos 3 is still a pressure-sensitive tablet that works as well as any that came before it. Furthermore, the reasons for using a Wacom are somewhat enhanced by the new input features. On the other hand, I suspect the function buttons will result in shorter tablet life in the long run, since this is the first Wacom tablet in recent memory with moving parts. With an overhaul of the control panel software that offers more mileage from the new features, Wacom could make a strong case for the tablet's new Touch Strips. But while the Intuos3 is a great product, it's just not a compelling upgrade from the Intuos2.

Read more by Sean Wagstaff.