I’ve always been a user of the good old Wacom tablets (or its various knock -offs). Unfortunately, my outcry for a better, more hands-on digital drawing experience was never quite answered – Wacom continued to replicate the same user experience across multiple incarnations of basically the same thing.

Until they released the Cintiq 21UX. This was a whole different ball game: a 21-inch touch sensitive on-screen drawing experience, basically a haptic extension of your monitor. With one flaw: the price tag. The current model will set you back a whopping $2.000!

Admittedly, the professional matte painting artist will make that his daily weapon of choice, while my occasional doodle can certainly be done with an old school Intuos. Well, it seems like I won’t have to make that “compromise”no more: The Tablets are coming!

HTC is back with a surprise

While this seems to be becoming the year of the invasion of Android Tablets, Nokia’s Microsoft dilemma or the iPad 2, one trend appears to be occurring quietly: the evolution from the touch screen to the “draw screen”! Can you imagine the ease with which one could doodle away, using apps like AutoDesk’s “Sketch”, preferably on a 10-inch Tablet PC?

One manufacturer is currently making a gutsy move of turning the Tablet PC into a canvas for a digital pen: HTC. The company just entered the Tablet market with a bang, introducing something rather unexpected to the competition, where everything else just seems to revolve around what version of Android one should release their Tablet with. At MWC 2011, the handset maker showed off his new device called “Flyer”, a 7-inch Tablet PC with a pressure-sensitive touchscreen that communicates with a stylus pen!

Apparently, the pen is an active unit, unlike other digitizers. That means the device doesn’t need to be pressed hard to follow your command, the resulting user experience is supposedly very smooth.

Now, I thought that touch screen was all about one-finger usage, and so did all the makers of operating systems for tablets. Result: Android, for example, does not natively support a pen device – which is why HTC, in addition to his refreshed version of its UI called “Sense”, included a technology called “Scribe”.

It allows for HTC’s Tablet to take full advantage of the digital pen for all sorts of usages and applications, such as “Notes”, a software specifically for stylus use, where one can can paste and annotate photos and text and then sync them to Evernote. The stylus is pressure sensitive and allows for sketching and handwriting recognition. HTC’s Tablet will be released in Q2 of 2011 and will be running Android Honeycomb.

Another option

While HTC might be on to something, a company called Nomad Brush has brought a different approach to the digital pen idea: a brush that looks and handles exactly like a real brush, but works on the iPad and other Tablet Pcs.

The brush actually sports bristels and apparently allows for a true painting experience, using Apps like Artrage, Brushes, Auryn Ink and Zen Brush. The brush can be purchased now on the company’s website for $24.00 and currently only ships to the US and Canada.

Last but not least: the Irony. Nomade’s brush does NOT work with Wacom tablets!