Jul

Acer C301XMi Tablet PC

Got my Acer C301XMi tablet PC yesterday. Boy is it nice!

tablet in laptop mode

It came with Windows Tablet Edition installed and with Alias Sketchbook to show off it’s pressure sensitive screen. I installed Corel Painter X (above) on it and it seemed fine but the pressure sensitive stuff wasn’t happening. After a quick bit of Googling, I found that you have to install the Wacom drivers to get the pressure sensitive stuff working in some apps (like Painter) so all is good now.

tablet in easel mode

The screen can rotate through 180′ and fold back to give a sort of ‘drawing table/easel’ mode which is nice. It does mean that the keyboard is hidden but one tap gives you access to an on-screen keyboard.

Painter X is reeeeeally nice though, you can see in the above photo (top right of the screen, the brown square) the little mixing area where you can put paint then mix the colours as you would with real paint then ‘lift’ a colour. With the paint looking ‘marbly’ you can ‘lift’ the marbley colour and paint with that, again, like you’d do in real life with paint. Even better: rather than just let you guess colours by moving sliders, it can list all the different colours by name! So I can scroll through the list and choose ‘Cobalt Blue’ or ‘Burnt Sienna’. A really nice touch that.

tablet in book mode

And when you fold the screen right back and clip it in to place, the screen automatically rotates into vertical mode to give you a ’sketchbook’ mode which is nice. The buttons to the side of the screen let you rotate it back to landscape format if that’s what you want.

All in all, I’m VERY impressed with it. I have updated Sketchbook to the new Adobe Sketchbook 2009, this is nowhere near as powerful as Painter X but is excellent for just knocking out quick pencil/pen sketches. Painter is king for the real media stuff such as chalk, oil paint, watercolour etc. It means that I can now also do digital painting and print it out on my nifty HP Photosmart C3180 printer that I just recently bought.

I’m giving it two thumbs up, it is WELL worth the £200 I got it for on eBay