Hi Josh,
Sorry to hear you are having trouble with your current RIP, I believe that it may in fact be a stylus issue. Can you send me your address and I will have a replacement stylus sent at no charge?
Thank you!
Amber Osborne Customer Service Representative Improv Electronics a Kent Displays Company 343 Portage Blvd., Kent, OH 44240 Phone: 330-673-8784 Ext. 163
Now that's what I call GREAT customer service! Thanks Amber!
I take a lot of notes at work. I've got stacks of notebooks with details covering just about everything I do. Most of those notes are totally unimportant but once in a while I have to dig through these stacks of notebooks (which are in no particular order) to find that one invaluable piece of information. Then along came the Boogie Board a writing tablet with a novel extremely low power LCD display whose slogan "Say goodbye to paper!" sounded almost too good to be true.
I bought one of the original versions from Staples and found the writing experience to be acceptable, but the original had no option to save any data so it was more like a digital chalkboard than notebook. After persistent requests the manufacturer Improv Electronics came out with a new and improved version called the Boogie Board RIP (which stands for Record. Image. Preserve). This catch here is that they weren't able to directly capture the image from their novel LCD design, but rather overlaid the LCD with a digitizer like those found in Wacom graphics tablets.
The biggest downside to this approach is that the stylus is no longer any pointy device but now must be the kind designed for this style of digitizer. I haven't tested it but I suspect any Wacom or aftermarket stylus designed for this type of device should work with the BBRIP. Actually to be fair any someone pointy object will make an image appear on the tablet, but won't activate the digitizer thus your image can't be saved. Of course you won't know that this has happened until you've connected your BB to the computer via USB to sync the PDF files.
The other major problem I've had is that the digitizer seems to be far less sensitive than the display. A note which is perfectly legible on the device only captures about half of my pen strokes! This is, in fact, completely unacceptable as it makes this device no more useful than it's OG cousin which cost a third of the price. A ray of hope, however, is that this issue could be related to manufacturing artifacts that will work themselves out over time. I'm currently overwriting the screen completely in an attempt to work out these kinks achieve adequate performance.
Another cool feature of the device is called Virtual Desktop Companion. This nifty piece of software available as a free download from the support section of Improv's site creates a mirror image of the tablet display on your computer screen which updates in real time. Draw on the BB, see it on the screen at which point you can save or email directly. Though the website says "Compatible with Windows OS" my testing on two different XP SP3 machines indicates it is in fact NOT compatible with XP. It works well in 7-pro x64. I haven't tested Vista.
The Improv website also has a section for developers so hopefully we'll see some additional drivers for the digitizer in this device so that it could be used as a full fledged input tablet. If that ability were introduced this would be a far more useful and feature rich version of a bamboo type tablet!
So, I just opened the box yesterday and those are my initial impressions. I'll write up another review after spending some time with it (unless it gets returned first.
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