Tuesday, 21 November 2017

A new tablet

The Lenovo Miix 700. 

Core m7 passively-cooled tablet PC, with 256 GB of storage, 8 GB of RAM, with Windows 10 Pro. 

Not the fastest PC, but it was never meant to replace my PC. It was meant to replace my aging iPad 4. 

With a Wacom pen, it positions itself as a capable drawing tablet at a pretty great price. I paid 985 USD to Singapore including S&H. Of course I don't intend to draw on it as much as my digital art friends would, but it is worth knowing that I could pick up drawing any time I would like. 

But this comes at a catch. 

The Lenovo Miix 700 is not officially Wintab-supported, and despite having a Wacom pen, its Elan screen means that it is not supported by Wacom Feel either. This means that officially there is no support for pressure sensitivity for Photoshop. However, this does not mean that it cannot work with Wintab. It is possible to still download the Wintab drivers for the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 series and have them work with the Lenovo Miix 700, thus enabling pressure sensitivity for Lenovo Miix for Photoshop or other non-Lenovo applications.

You will also need to open the Window > Brush panel, and under Shape Dynamics, select Pen Pressure under the Control tab.

Because this pen is not Wacom Feel enabled, you will not be able to re-map the pen barrel buttons from the defaults. The barrel buttons are for right click (front button) and erase (back button).

Palm rejection isn't perfect, and the pen is slick on the screen due to the hard nib that it uses, but otherwise this is a great pen to use.

At the current point it's actually more economical to buy the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 tablet (1st generation). It costs around the same price on Amazon, has the same processor, memory and hard disk space, but it also has USB-C charging, a longer battery life, the detachable keyboard has similar quality to the full-sized Thinkpads, and the stylus is Wacom Feel compatible. Basically it's everything a Miix 700 is, but better everywhere else.

I'm only a bit salty Amazon decided to tell me about the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 tablet after I paid for the Miix 700 and I have been using it for a week. 

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