Wacom’s new MovinkPad 11 is a compelling alternative to the iPad for serious digital artists looking for a portable sketching tool. It’s not as powerful as a full workstation or even an iPad, but the battery life is good, the drawing experience is best in class, and you can take it with you.
Whether you’re a confirmed digital fan or, like me, still prefer paper and pens or pencils but want to dabble in digital art, the MovinkPad is a compelling alternative to the iPad. An iPad is more likely to suck you into the internet or disrupt you with messages from friends. You can put such distractions on the MovinkPad (don’t!), but out of the box it’s a more focused device designed to get out of your way and let you get to drawing.
A Digital Sketch Pad
Your standard digital art setup is a computer, ideally a powerful desktop with a nice monitor, a drawing tablet, and some sort of desktop software. Alternatively, many people use an iPad, but in my experience you really want an iPad Pro for the ProMotion display, or at the very least an Air for the M-series chip. Neither of these are cheap.
The Wacom MovinkPad 11 seeks to combine these experiences into a single device. It’s a tablet-first drawing device with a screen that’s like what you’d use with a desktop drawing pad. Indeed, drawing on the MovinkPad is the closest thing to drawing on paper that I’ve tested.
The MovinkPad 11 is an Android 14 tablet, with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 128 gigabytes of storage. Unfortunately, there’s no microSD card slot. The screen is an 11-inch, 2,200 x 1,440-pixel LCD display with an anti-glare treatment and a surface texture that does a good job of mimicking paper. The display is directly bonded to the textured surface so you don’t have that drawing on glass feeling that you get with iPad. The actual drawing area is 9.6 inches by 6.3 inches.
The MovinkPad runs Android and ships with the Google Play Store so you can use it as you would an ordinary Android tablet: watching movies, browsing the web, and so on. The focus however is very much on drawing. Think of the MovinkPad as your portable digital sketchbook.
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