XPPen to release Magic Drawing Pad 12.2-inch Android tablet on 22 Jan 2024

Photo from Dovendraw

XPPen will be releasing a portable 12.2-inch Android tablet called the Magic Drawing Pad on 22 Jan 2024. You can read the press release here.

Here are the specs for the tablet:

• 12.2-inch matte touchscreen display
• 8GB RAM + 256GB storage
• 2160 x 1440 resolution (3:2 aspect ratio)
• 16K levels of pressure sensitivity
• Pen: X3 Pro pen
• 8000 mAh battery capacity
• Android OS
• Price: Unknown

This tablet will be competing with the iPad with Apple Pencil, Samsung Galaxy tablets with S Pen, Xiaomi Pad 6 and pen, OnePlus Pad and pen and the recently released Huion Kamvas Slate 10.

There are a few things I like just by looking at the specs.

This tablet has a matte textured display which is incredibly rare for Android tablets. This means you won't have to apply your own screen protector and the display is highly unlikely to scratch.

The 3:2 aspect ratio is great for using the tablet in either landscape or portrait orientation.

The tablet will be using XPPen's own X3 Pro pen so hopefully the pen performance will be on par with both Apple Pencil and S Pen, or even better.

The tablet runs on Android OS and will probably come with XPPen's own custom UI on top of Android. There are no details on whether there will be any pre-installed drivers to customise the pen, e.g. pressure levels and shortcut button. If there is no driver, pen customisation will come down to whether your drawing app's settings.

One advantage of using Android over Windows OS is battery life. Windows tablets rarely have battery life over 6 hours while Android tablets usually can reach 8 hours easily. But the Magic Drawing Pad only has 8,000 mAh battery capacity compared to iPad Pro 12.9 and 12.4-inch Samsung Tab S9+ that have 10,000+ mAh.

It's a good choice to go with Android because if it's a Windows tablets, the price will be higher for some reason and battery life is much shorter.

There's no info on whether there's any microSD card slot.

There are many good drawing apps available from the Google Play Store. Clip Studio Paint, Infinite Painter, Krita, Sketchbook, Medibang Paint, Ibis Paint, Concepts, etc. Main downside of Android for visual content creators is there's a lack of graphic design apps that handle vector, text and layout.

Price is unknown at the moment.