BERLIN -- Our paperless society still has a lot of paper and a lot of people scribbling notes on them. The worst part is when we have to combine our digital notes with the ones we sketched on napkins at our favorite diner. Wacom feels your pain, and now it thinks it has a solution: the new Wacom Bamboo Spark.
This new pen and notebook system, which Wacom unveiled just before IFA 2015 and showed off for the first time at the annual ShowStoppers event, is nothing like Wacom's original Bamboo stylus. Instead, the Spark Bamboo looks and feels like a real pen and it writes on paper like one, too. The difference, though, is that what it writes can be captured and digitized -- if you use it with its partner notepad holder. It includes a special electro magnetic resonance infused A5-sized pad that sits under a similarly sized, yet otherwise average note page.
The electro pad reads everything you write on the pad (through up to 50 pages or 7 mm) and captures it (up to 100 pages of notes). All scribbles are then transmitted over Bluetooth to a connected iOS or Android Device and then sent to the Wacom cloud. That means you can access notes written with the Bamboo Spark through any device.
Wacom's Bamboo Spark software will also let you use a slider to play back through your written notes. Wherever you stop, you can split the notes into separate pages. You can also combine pages and upload the notes to other services, including Evernote and Dropbox.
The ink pen lasts through roughly three months’ worth of writing. A pack of three refills costs $9.99. There are no other pad sizes, but Wacom could develop different sizes in the future. Things that are definitely on the Bamboo Spark roadmap include vector output and convert to text.
In the demo we saw, the note capture was accurate and instant. The pen, which only comes in silver, felt solid and comfortable.
Wacom Bamboo Spark, listed at $159.95, ships in early October.