Forever willing to try new things, we readily accepted when Wacom offered to send us their latest offering. Whilst it must be said that I haven't lived my life waiting for the opportunity to use a graphics tablet, it turned out to be quite an enlightening experience and I can actually see what some of the fuss is about.

The Graphire Mouse and Pen set comes with an A6 sized tablet that acts as a working area for the mouse and pen that come with the set. A very nice touch is that it comes with a thin transparent cover that you can slip a drawing or other piece of paper in and then use the pen to trace the image into the computer.

Using the pen you can do things like handwrite notes, annotate text and add comments, highlights, underlines etc. to existing text. The Pen is comfortable to hold and use and supports 512 different levels of pressure.

The mouse can basically replace your standard mouse but without having the constraints of the cable. Again, the mouse is comfortable to hold although not up to Microsoft standards. On the plus side it does have a build it wheel and supports the intellipoint commands.

We used Windows 2000 for testing, partly because rumour has it that most 'professional' people will be using it, and partly because that's what was installed on the system we were using and we couldn't be bothered to reformat. Forever taking shortcuts, we totally ignored the manual and tried just plugging the tablet in. Amazingly enough Windows saw the tablet and even more amazingly installed a driver on the fly and didn't crash. The fact it was the incorrect driver is neither here nor there; it's the thought that counts. To be fair, Windows did identify it as an input device and was perfectly happy, it was just that it didn't work. A quick trip to Wacom's website (www.wacom.com) and a download of there latest driver cured all those problems. All we had to do was remove the devices Windows had found and run the downloaded file. We unplugged and plugged the tablet back in and away we went. Even more impressively, without a reboot in sight! From that point on we could control the pointer with a choice of our normal PS/2 mouse, the cordless mouse supplied and the cordless pen supplied, switching between them all on the fly.

The Graphire also comes with a variety of applications that integrate with packages such as Word and Photoshop. It's these that fall over a little but, not in the applications themselves but in their usability. The printed documentation is very sparse, with it just giving general installation guides without being specific on the individual applications. The applications aren't very straightforward but somebody with experience of using this type of product (i.e. not us), would probably have much better experiences.