Most of the creative types in the audience will swear by their Wacom tablets, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay full price to get one. In fact, the full range of Intuos5 Touch Pen Tablets is now on sale for $100 off each. This includes the small, medium, and large variations.

All three versions of the Wacom Intuos5 touch pen tablets come bundled with Corel Painter 12, so you can start getting creative right out of the box. The multi-touch surface makes it easy to pan, zoom and navigate and, as can be expected with Wacom, you get a surface that is sensitive to different levels of pen pressure. Indeed, it supports 2048 levels of pressure for even more precise control. The ExpressKeys can be user-defined for shortcuts too.

Further aiding in the navigation is the finger-sensitive Touch Ring. This gives you intuitive control of brush size, scrolling and other functions. The interface shouldn’t get in the way of your creativity; it should accentuate and complement it. The Intuos5 Grip Pen also comes along with ten replacement nibs, including a flexi nib, stroke nib, and three hard felt nibs.

The small, medium, and large versions of the Wacom Intuos5 touch pen tablet come with pen active areas of 3.9 x 6.2 inches, 5.5 x 8.8 inches, and 8.0 x 12.8 inches, respectively. Find them on the Amazon page for $100 off, getting you down to $229, $349 and $469 for the three sizes. And yes, that includes free shipping too.

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I’m pickin up good vibrations. She’s giving me excitations…

Okay, this Qualcomm ultrasonic pen really has very little to do with the Beach Boys, but that’s immediately what came to mind when I first heard about how it works. We’ve seen other pen products that are able to transcribe actual scribblings into a digital notepad, but the ultrasonic pen works with vibrations.

From the user side of things, the experience will be much the same. You whip out the special pen, which can be equipped with regular old pen ink, and start jotting down what you need to jot down on an actual piece of paper. Meanwhile, the battery-powered transceiver inside is sending that information over to your nearby smartphone, tablet, or notebook.

What’s interesting is the receiving device, whatever it may be, can use standard off-the-shelf microphones to pick up vibrations from the pen with a radius of around 30 centimeters. Using the Epos software, the data is coordinated into text, which can then be easily imported into just about any text app. You can even import it into a translation app to take your English scribblings and convert them into whatever language you’d like.

It’s just a concept being shown off at MWC, but it could prove interesting for, say, college students taking notes in class.

[engadget via Anandtech]

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Tablets have become a pretty big deal and Google Android is featuring prominently on this front. Capitalizing on this rising trend is N-trig. They’ve now adapted the DuoSense technology over to the Android platform and we should start seeing the tech implemented in Android tablets early next year.

What is DuoSense? From what I can gather, the tech combines a digitizer pen (like the one you would use with a Wacom graphics tablet) with multi-touch capabilities. We all know that these pen-based solutions are more accurate than our chubby fingers, but rarely do you find pens and multi-touch going on at the same time.

The idea, then, is to use the N-trig hardware to open “up new windows of opportunity for the Android pen community to utilize the N-trig Digital Pencil to expand functionality from traditional media consumption and create pen-based applications for more precise and creative on-screen user interaction.” I guess you could start drawing up your own webcomics on your tablet, rather than just reading them.

The press release doesn’t make mention of any specific hardware partners, but it does indicate that the N-trig DuoSense solution will be “integrated in a number of Android slates due to be launched in 2011.”

In an interview with Mobilized, N-trig VP Gary Baum says N-trig technology adds about $50 to the cost of the device. Which could make a budget version of the Wacom Cintiq line of LCD tablets. Adding pressure sensitivity and sub-pixel accuracy to a device like the iPad would change alot of things, but the average user wouldn’t see the benefits themselves. The Cintiq brings users 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, while the 256 levels of pressure sensitivity in DuoSense would be more along the lines of a Windows Tablet.

But in the end it will allow them to stand out in the crowd of Android tablets flooding the market to look more like a Windows tablet.

[Mobilized via PR, N-trig]

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