The Wacom Bamboo Connect is a decent basic drawing tablet that shows how far prices have fallen over the past few years. At just $79.99, it gives you everything you need for simple collaboration or sketch work. But that's it. Thanks to the lack of an eraser or second programmable button on the pen, it's tough to recommend as an actual drawing tool, and its relative lack of features make it a poor deal overall.

Design, Product Line, and Setup
The Bamboo Connect measures 6.9 by 10.9 by 0.4 inches (HWD). Wacom streamlined the design, but only partially; while it's slimmer, and there are fewer cut lines and buttons than on the older Bamboo Pen & Touch CTH460 (4 stars), there's now extra space on one side for no appreciable reason. The entire tablet is still made of black plastic, with a glossy plastic bar over the "wasted" space, a blue LED light indicating a live connection, a hard textured surface around the tablet's edges, and a fluorescent green nylon pen holder.

The pleasantly tacky drawing surface measures 5.8 by 3.6 inches, which is the same as before. This time around, you can detach the USB cord, which helps if you need to move the tablet on your desk for some reason, although there's no wireless option on this lowest-cost version.

Speaking of which, Wacom broke the Bamboo line into three new tablets. The Bamboo Connect CTL470 ($79.99) is a basic model intended for collaborating, sketching out ideas, marking up documents, and taking notes. It includes Autodesk SketchBook Express 2011, and is the subject of this review. The Bamboo Capture CTH470 ($99.99, 3.5 stars) adds multi-touch, compatibility with the company's Wireless Option and full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Nik Color Efex Pro Filters 3.0, which is a good deal for the software alone. The Bamboo Create CTH670 ($199.99) is a larger version that doubles the size of the drawing area, in order to accommodate broader brush strokes. The Create also adds an eraser to the stylus, and you get a copy of Corel Painter Essentials 4.0, plus all of the above software (with Photoshop Elements bumped to version 9, presumably thanks to a licensing issue).

All three tablets are compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP, as well as Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later. Installing the Bamboo Connect is dead simple: with your PC booted on and at the Windows desktop, connect the USB cable, insert the bundled DVD, and follow the on-screen instructions. I had no problem installing the Bamboo Connect on a Lenovo ThinkPad L420 Core i3-powered laptop with 8GB RAM and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 installed.

Drawing, Testing, and Conclusions
Wacom has been producing drawing surfaces for the better part of two decades, so even the inexpensive Bamboo Connect works reliably. At 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, the Bamboo Connect offers twice the precision as the Pen and Touch, at least in terms of how hard you press down the tip. Otherwise, position accuracy remains about the same as before, which is to say good, if not quite as crisp as the company's higher-priced Intuos and Cintiq lines.

If you've never used a drawing tablet before, be aware it takes some practice. When you bring the pen close to the surface, but don't actually press down, you'll see the cursor move on the screen. That lets you use the pen as a suspended mouse for selecting user interface elements on screen. It also lets you see where you are about to lay ink down. Once you begin pressing the pen tip down on the surface, it begins to draw on the screen. It's not like a mouse, in that it lays down the same length of ink no matter how fast or slow you move the pen. With a mouse, if you move it slowly, it will take more of your actual desk or table to bring the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, depending on how you have the mouse sensitivity calibrated.

On the other hand, the pen's ability to control the cursor without touching the screen means you'll need to expand the drawing surface window to cover the full desktop. Otherwise, you'll constantly select text in other windows or move desktop icons around by accident, unless you're extremely careful (I couldn't pull it off). Worse, there's no multi-touch on the Bamboo Connect either, unlike with last year's Pen & Touch.

Our favorite lower-cost drawing tablet remains the Wacom Intuos4 ($239 and up, 4 stars), which has still finer pressure sensitivity, an eraser, more programmable buttons, and a larger drawing surface. All told, the Bamboo Connect's lack of multitouch and the eraser are big downsides, ones that essentially remove its ability to work as a drawing tablet, or as a proper mouse or trackpad substitute. Wacom admits this in the advertising copy, by saying the Connect is for sketching out ideas and collaboration, rather than drawing. But it's still a drawing tablet, and it's still $80 for something that feels artificially crippled. The bundled software is also much less valuable. Manufacturers normally create tiered product lines to give more demanding users incentive to buy the higher-priced models, but in this case it's tough to come up with a compelling reason to buy the Connect.