The Inkling is a digital sketching tool from Wacom that lets you create drawings in a notebook, sketchpad or even the back of a napkin and transfer them directly to your Mac.

It uses a clip-on receiver, which you attach to your drawing surface. This then picks up signals from a digital pen, similar in design and feel to a Wacom graphics tablet stylus, and turns them into digital lines.

You can work on a variety of surfaces, up to A4 in size, with the Inkling's receiver holding up to 2GB of files in its native file format. These can then be viewed and exported via the dedicated Wacom Sketch Manager software with files exported as rasterized JPEG and PDFs or editable SVG vector files so you can finetune them afterwards. You can even create layers while you draw by tapping the button on top of the receiver.

What makes the Inkling different to a graphics tablet is that the pen also has a ballpoint nib in the end, so you create an actual drawing in your notebook as you use it. This makes sketching incredibly intuitive as the physical sensation of drawing on paper is much more familliar to artists than working on a tablet or iPad.

Although working with a biro removes some of the subtlety that you would have with a pencil or ink pen, the Inkling's stylus offers 1,024 degrees of pressure and so the amount of detail it picks up is comparable to high-end Wacom tablets.

In our tests the detail that was transferred was very impressive, picking up all but the subtlest of pen strokes with excellent accuracy. However, if the receiver is knocked or moved in any way then images can slip out of alignment, which you do not discover until the sketch is finished and on your Mac.

The same is true if you block the sensor with your hand while drawing or using a ruler and so this may prevent it from being used for more intricate images.

At the affordable price of £149 it is cheaper than a high-end Wacom tablet and so should be more than enough to tempt gadget-loving artists.

Thanks to OS X Lion we're all getting used to the idea of using gestures to do things on the Mac, but you can quickly hit the limit of what multi-touch can do – especially when you want to paint, draw or customise your photos. And that's where Wacom's Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch comes in.

Designed to match the MacBook's look and feel, the Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch is a family-friendly graphics tablet that combines the usability of multi-touch with the precision of pen.

The small version of the tablet we tested includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Art Rage 3.0, which are available for download once you register the tablet with Wacom. Children will love the growing range of fun creative apps and games available too.

Other goodies include a new wireless option (£35) so you can doodle USB cable-free. The supplied driver software also includes a good range of customisation options, including the ability to change the firmness of the pen's eraser and tip.

In use, the Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch works very well and it can be easier to find your way around OS X than with a mouse or Magic Trackpad. But it's with creative apps that the Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch really comes into its own.

The amount of control you can get with the pen is staggering – applying more downward force on the pen applies more ink or pencil to the 'paper' just like the real thing.

Unfortunately the same can't be said of the multi-touch capabilities of the tablet, which can be slow to respond to gestures like pinch-to-zoom. But overall the Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch is a winner.

Calling your graphics tablet the Art Master certainly sets a high benchmark, especially in a market already dominated by a company like Wacom.

With the Intuos4, Wacom not only made several technical leaps forward, they also vastly improved the aesthetics and ergonomics of the graphics tablet. Clearly this didn't go unnoticed at the Hanvon workshop.

But how does the Art Master 3 perform? You can judge a graphics tablet on one key technical feature: sensitivity. Here Hanvon claim to match the Intuos4 surface sensitivity with 2,048 levels of pressure. This can be a very tricky claim to verify, and difficult to determine as a user.

In a direct comparison to the Intuos4, and using Photoshop brushes we're familiar with, the Art Master seemed to falter too often. However, this felt more like an issue with the pen build and it's nib housing than the tablet's surface tolerance.

Opening the pen stand (in the same way as the Intuos4's) reveals six identical replacement nibs – which is fine if you like the way the nib feels across the tablet's surface, but we would have liked some alternative nibs.

Not only that, there's no nib remover, but worry not: the manual suggests you use tweezers to remove worn-down nibs. Yes, tweezers.

These are minor criticisms, and yes, we've been spoilt – the Art Master still has all the functionality of 'that other' graphics tablet. It too has eight programmable express keys, which once set up to suit your requirements, really help speed up your workflow. There's also a jog wheel and pen buttons, but which you can't use if you own a Mac.

Actually, that's not entirely true – the jog wheel's been defaulted to moving the canvas up and down, but surely zoom would have been more useful?

Hanvon is developing Tablet Setting software for the Mac, but for now it's only PC users who can get full functionality. At this price a graphics tablet should be a long-term investment and everything should work, but it's just not enough to look the part.

Can you remember the review of the Wacom Intuos4 we wrote a year ago? If so, all you need to know about the Intuos4 Wireless is that it's everything the Intuos4 is, plus Bluetooth. (Or 'minus a cable' if you like.)

That's not to dismiss it. The Intuos4 range from Wacom is genuinely brilliant. Never mind the sensitivity of the tablet, Wacom has done a sterling job in making the device very usable.

It's partly the hardware: as well as the Touch Ring that you can configure, say, to scroll through a document or change brush size, the Intuos4 Wireless has eight hardware buttons that can be set up as anything from modifier keys to triggers for cascades of actions.

The best bit, though, is the embedded displays next to these buttons that show their current function. (It's almost impossible to see the display hardware, and it looks like white glowing characters are embedded directly into the black glossy plastic, which is neat.) These soft keys come into their own, though, when you start tinkering.

Despite them being useful as soon as you take it out of the box, you can configure how the ExpressKeys and Touch Strip behave. The latter itself has four different states, even switching their behaviour automatically depending on what app you're using. Seeing their function on the embedded displays – or by triggering the on-screen cheat sheet – is invaluable.

All graphics tablets have a learning curve, and the sheer richness of this range's configurability means it can take especially long to start getting the very best out of it, but it's an investment of time worth making.

Only you can decide whether you're happy to pay the extra (around £55 online) for the convenience of a wireless Bluetooth connection, compared to the essentially identical wired Intuos4 M.

The Li-ion battery easily lasts for a day of very active use – and thanks to its power-saving features, much longer if you use it only infrequently. And while we occasionally saw some glitchy lags, it generally performed well.

Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch: Overview

Multi-touch applications are everywhere.

Popularised by the iPhone, being able to pinch your fingers together to zoom, or flicking left or right to navigate the internet, is more intuitive than using a mouse, to say nothing of offering a frisson of Star Trek-like enjoyment to your PC.

Windows 7 is multi-touch ready as soon as you install it – buy a suitably-equipped PC or tablet and you can use its handwriting recognition and gesture recognition straight out of the box.

The problem is that touchscreens are expensive. The nearest consumers are likely to get is something along the lines of HP's all-in-one Touchsmart systems which isn't much use if you're looking to retrofit your current PC.

Instead, you could try Wacom's Bamboo Pen & Touch. Wacom has been a significant player in the consumer-grade graphics tablet market for a long while, building small but perfectly-formed pen and tablet combos for creative types.

The Pen & Touch builds on the formula. It costs under £100, and while you get a pen and three replacement nibs in the box, the headline is that it works as a multi-touch work surface. Forget clicking and dragging! You fingers are the future.

Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch: In use

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The device itself is sleek-looking, finished with plenty of shiny black surfaces.

The pressure-sensitive area measures a little over 7.5in diagonally, and there's a quartet of buttons – ExpressKeys – on the left hand side. Left-handed users can set it up to essentially work upside down, so you're not reaching over the buttons.

By default, these buttons work, from bottom to top, as left click, right click, back, and the top one works as a toggle for the Bamboo's multi-touch features: press it and the Bamboo will stop recognising any input that isn't from the pen.

There's a tidy fabric tab sticking out of the other side of the tablet which is a handy place to deposit the pen when you're not using it.

The pen is a little light for our liking, and there's no way to adjust the weight. A pair of buttons work, by default, as right-click and scroll buttons, although this can be changed in the Bamboo's preferences software.

The only slight hardware disappointment is that the pen only comes with three replacement nibs, all the same as each other – nibs that replicate other types of pen, such as felt-tips and pencils, would have been interesting inclusions for beginners.

SOFTWARE

It's only when you start following the Bamboo's included tutorials that the multi-touch shine starts to come off a little.

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It works as advertised – pinch your fingers together to zoom in and out, or place one fingertip on the tablet and drag another around it to rotate an image or object, depending on the application. The Bamboo is effectively a large version of the trackpad that comes with a new MacBook.

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In our experience the effectiveness of the Bamboo as a trackpad was mixed – it's highly dependent on the application you're using it in. For instance, pinching to zoom worked brilliantly in Picasa, but dragging two fingers around the pad – which is supposed to work the same as clicking and dragging – got us nowhere.

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Flicking two fingers to the left or right navigates you through applications such as Firefox and Chrome, and works well. Rotating images hardly ever worked, though.

But if the multitouch capabilities of the Bamboo are over-hyped, its usefulness as a graphics tablet in undeniable. It recognises 1,024 levels of pressure, which makes it extremely accurate in applications such as Photoshop.

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It can report as many as 133 pen inputs per second, and has a claimed accuracy of plus or minus 0.5mm. It works superbly, and if you're handy with a pen in real life, the Bamboo is perfectly priced for talented beginners to start producing digital art.

There are obvious uses for photo editing as well – cloning and using dodge and burn tools is far more accurate if you're using a pressure sensitive device.

Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch: Verdict

As a multi-touch device the Bamboo leaves us a little cold. There are times when it simply doesn't work reliably enough, and it's a rare computer user who claims a touchpad is a good alternative to a proper mouse. Even with Windows 7 supporting multi-touch this isn't the product to bring it to the masses.

We liked:

Working with the pen is intuitive and natural, despite the stylus' lack of weight.

The pad is incredibly sensitive – with a bit of practice, drawing on the pad feels natural. It's much easier than attempting to sketch lines with a mouse.

The 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity help, and the price is keen as well – this the perfect beginner or hobbyist's graphics tablet.

We disliked:

The multi-touch aspect is over-hyped and under-realised. A lot of the time it simply doesn't work as well as advertised.

We certainly can't see it being as useful in Photoshop as the ability to draw natural-looking lines straight onto a piece of digital canvas.

The small pressure-sensitive area can be a bit restrictive too, although this is something that will only truly niggle if you've already got experience using graphics tablets. A final annoyance is that the Bamboo Pen & Touch only comes with one style of nib for the pen, and even beginners are likely to want to try something new.

Verdict:

As a graphics tablet, the Wacom is a superb first step for those getting into digital art. The pad may not be enormous, but there's plenty of sensitivity, and at comfortably under £100, the Pen & Touch could mark the beginning of a new artistic direction for beginners.

Usually, product names are either a dull series of numbers or some unfortunate, aspirational nonsense dreamed up in a latte-and-biscotti fuelled boardroom; this second generation Bamboo Fun, though, is just that – great fun.

On first inspection, this is just more of the same from Wacom; it's a small graphics tablet with a stylus that you can use both as a tool to draw and write on-screen, and as an alternative to a mouse for general interface tasks.

There are four configurable buttons to the left of the active area, as well as the traditional two-button rocker and eraser tip on the stylus.

This tablet has an extra trick up its sleeve, though: you can use your fingers as well as the stylus, so it's like a giant laptop trackpad.

You can't use both at once – as a warning, the white status light turns orange when the stylus tip is near the surface – but happily, we were able to use our fingers on the tablet surface with the stylus resting in our hand, just as you would instinctively.

In this touch mode, you don't get any pressure sensitivity; it's just about moving the cursor about on the screen and selecting stuff, as you would with a mouse or trackpad.

It is, though, smarter than that: it supports a range of basic gestures, so that you can scroll and pan on pages by using two fingers.

A two-finger tap does a right-click, a two-finger swipe left or right sends a back/forward command, and you can, at least in some applications, do the pinch/unpinch gesture familiar to iPhone users to zoom in and out.

The touch and stylus actually complement each other phenomenally well, and you get a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and the brilliant natural media app ArtRage to help you make the best of the tablet. (The Medium tablet includes Corel Painter Essentials 4 too.)

The decision to position the cable on the left edge seems a little awkward, and even this small model is quite expensive, but overall this is a great, fun package.

The first thing to do when you've just bought a tablet for your PC: draw a willy. The second thing to do is post said willy on forums and ask what people think. You will have to be prepared to answer any police inquiries should you post it somewhere inappropriate though. The Genius tablet is perfect for digital phallus representations, as well as a host of other functions and it's also a fair bit cheaper than them posho Wacom tablets.

On a more serious note, though, Windows 7 now supports gesture-based control. This means that you can browse the net from the mere flick of your tablet's pen, so if you're even semi-into design related stuff you'll never need to reach for your keyboard and mouse again.

Browsing the net using a tablet is fairly tricky to begin with, but once you get the hang of it it quickly becomes second nature. Windows Paint has also been improved to support pressure-sensitive devices, so before you know it you'll be knocking out Da Vinci-style masterpieces, complete with Tom Hanks-befuddling hidden codes.

The G-Pen also includes a couple of jog wheels, which can be repurposed to zoom in on web pages or adjust your volume. And, for under £90 it's surprisingly solid and well made; making it probably the most recommended of these devices if you're starting out as an amateur artist. Even our (professional) art bods like it. For drawing willies.

While writing tablets are generally used by design professionals, the Bamboo Fun is aimed at the consumer market.

Available in white, silver, black or blue, the touchpad takes up the majority of the device, with four customisable buttons along the top and another, smaller touchpad used for zooming and scrolling.

Installation and setup is simple, and an informative tutorial quickly gets you up and running. As a mouse replacement, it takes a while to get used to, but becomes quickly intuitive.

It is also highly sensitive, so that those needing to draw and design with it should be satisfied with its accuracy. An excellent product all round.

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This latest redesign of the Intuos line is a genuine leap forward, and a hugely worthwhile investment even if you currently own an earlier model.

Let's start with the technology. The pressure-sensitivity has doubled from the last generation, and it will now report a full 2,048 different levels. (Honestly, this alone isn't significant; 1,024 or even the 512 levels found in Wacom's cheap-as-chips Bamboo range is sufficient.)

The big news is that sensitivity has been boosted on the tablet itself. It now responds to an incredibly light touch (bring up the diagnostic mode and try to register a touch lighter than 5% – it's not easy) and it feels just beautiful in use.

The surface and the nibs have changed – the weighted pen holder cleverly conceals different nibs in the base – and for the first time Wacom might have got it just right. There's bite and grip, and if you slot in the more-hardwearing felt nib, it even sounds right!

Touch Ring

Wacom has changed the ExpressKeys and Touch Strip from previous generations, and the result is stunning. The Strip is now the Touch Ring, which is less easy to knock by mistake than the Touch Strips of old, and you can press the centre button to toggle between four modes (zoom, brush size, rotate canvas, for example) that can be configured individually for each app.

The keys have got prettier. Each of the eight has an OLED display, which shows its current function, and updates to the modifiers, keystrokes and so on that you've defined for the active application. Or, you can create your own – though then they're limited to a text label.

An on-screen pop-up Radial Menu takes getting used to, but it will repay time spent configuring it, and we love the on-screen cheat-sheet and new Precision Mode that slows the cursor making it easier to hit the smaller interface elements.

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The Genius G-Pen F610 is a slim, cheap and large USB tablet.

It has pressure levels that compete with the best and even sports the highly useful Hot Key system. For general-purpose use this piece of kit is perfect.

You can customise your hot keys to suit your needs and carry the tablet wherever you go. It'll even support Vista and Apple Macs.

Wireless tablet

One flaw is that the pen uses an AAA battery. This is a shame but at least it's wireless, which gives the user some freedom. Furthermore, the G-Pen requires its own custom drivers; it doesn't work as a basic human interface device.

The G-Pen F610 also comes with Ulead PhotoImpact, suggesting that the tablet is suitable for art purposes.

However, tracing on a 4:3 ratio monitor at a standard resolution reveals that the product is designed for widescreen resolutions and there's no way to change either the active area size or how your pen movements are interpreted.

Widescreen Genius

This lack of features regarding the active pen area to screen transition renders the tablet unusable on a 4:3 monitor for anything other than a mouse replacement. This is not what most users who are willing to splash out a good £70 on a graphics tablet are after.

If you're not a widescreen buff or aren't too fussed with tracing and can handle only watching the screen while you draw then the G-Pen F610 is a sound solution.

If you don't have a widescreen monitor though, then you might want to give this tablet a miss.