But the A5 pad is quite limited, it moves around causing issues for notes and drawings and the app-side of the pairing, where all your digital notes are processed, is not up to scratch. The idea is sound - make the back of the pad smart so you can use any paper. The Wacom Bamboo Spark is just a few features away from being great. It comes with two replacement ink cartridges and a 30-page notepad of relatively poor quality.Ĭompeting systems such as the Livescribe Smartpen 3 Black Edition cost £120, but require special paper starting at around £3 for a notepad and refills costing £1 each.

The Wacom Bamboo Spark costs £103 with either a gadget pocket, sleeve for a smaller tablet or a snap-fit case for an iPad Air 2. Sketch by Cheryl Pilbeam Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian Price The exported image clearly lacks most of the lighter pen strokes, while the paper has shifted slightly while drawing, making some lines appear out of place. It’s a lot simpler than competitors, which is both good and bad in equal measure. The LED turns blue when the pad has detected some scribbles and bright blue when the pen touches the paper. It is the Bamboo Spark’s biggest differentiator over other similar technologies: most require special paper to track your motions.įlick the switch on the bottom and the LED shows green to tell you it’s powered on and nothing has been recorded on the page. You can use practically any A5 pad that isn’t too thick - the supplied pad is 30 sheets, but a 50-sheet pad will also work. Then you can turn the page and start again. You do your work with your pen on the page, hit a button and the image is digitally saved for later. It works by detecting pen movements and some pressure sensitivity on the page, storing them in memory and transferring them via Bluetooth to the Bamboo Spark app an iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. Unlike the Livescribe Smartpen 3, it isn’t the pen or paper that’s smart, but the pad underneath the paper: it mirrors your scrawls as digital strokes. The pen behaves like any normal ballpoint pen it’s just a little bit thicker.

Bamboo notebook paper