This month's gadget is Steve's Wacom Graphics Tablet. For some reason, Steve is not fond of mice. In fact, he has spent his entire computing career in search of the perfect substitute for the mouse, and has tried many weird and wonderful (and extremely superfluous) gadgets in his time. This is the latest. And the weirdest.

Steve swears by it. The rest of the Plokta cabal swear at it. Clicking on a button while keeping it in one place is nearly impossible. Double clicking while keeping it in one place is impossible. Moving the cursor right to the edge of the page involves moving the pointer right to the edge of the tablet, which is fiddly in the extreme.

The pen is mightier than the mouse

However, Steve may now have been converted to the majority view. His brand new printer wouldn't print graphics. The only clue to the cause of this aberrant behaviour was the strange query that popped up a couple of times when installing the printer asking if he wanted to uninstall the graphics tablet. Sure enough, as soon as the tablet was replaced with a conventional mouse, the problem disappeared (and everyone except Steve breathed a sigh of relief at having a proper mouse to use for the rest of the weekend).

Behaviour of this kind exemplifies all that we find most characteristic of superfluous technology, and eminently qualifies the tablet as gadget of the month. Now if we can only nobble his Microsoft Natural Keyboard as well, the PC will approach usability.

-- Mike Scott

[Humph -- Steve.]

For some reason, Steve has never been fond of mice.