Unboxing the XP-Pen G640

So here's it - the thing I ordered from Lazada a fortnight ago. A 6x4'' drawing tablet that was sold at RM99 - a price that shocked my friends. Normally, you don't get drawing tablets below RM200. So here's a life hack: Always watch out for deals on online shopping malls, normally they will give huge discounts AND a few discount codes that you can make the most out of it. The original price of this thing is about RM250 so... :3

Looking at the price you already know that it is some budget drawing tablet, but whatever, I am going to use it for note-taking in class and some drawing. Beginners don't need insanely expensive stuff. Plus, it has a sufficiently large 6x4'' active area with up to 8192 levels of pressure detection and a battery-free stylus that comes with 20 replacement nibs. That should be enough for two years...? I feel that it is pretty good for its price, let's go on...

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The package was delivered by Ninja Van, and it indeed looks like some mysterious ninja package, with the exception of having my details included on it. With my friend's help (forgive me for having 0 experience unboxing stuff, I almost never buy new stuff), we tore the package open, here~

Quite a neat box I will say :3

I'm slightly more interested in what is inside it. With his fingernails, we managed to remove the plastic and stickers and whatever that kept it intact. It's in the library and we didn't have cutting knives and stuff like that...fingernails OP.

So let's see what we have here...

Ah REEEEE the smiley face is SOOOOO CUTEEEEEEE

I need to install the drivers first, but it actually works out of the box if you do not care about the pen pressure and compatibility with other drawing software and only use it as a mouse replacement (such as playing osu!). I will be using it as a drawing tool and note-taking tool, so obviously I need the drivers. After some configuration, this felt right for me. Using absolute positioning for mouse somehow causes the cursor to wiggle a lot. Probably it's due to my screen being 16:9 while the tablet's active area is 4:3. Absolute positioning is more for osu! players - I am one, but I'm not using it to play the game so it doesn't matter for me. It's also quite hard to reach any reasonable high pressure that is required in drawing software to create visible strokes, so I just tweaked the curve so I can reach the required pressure level with minimum force applied. That's a good thing in the long run too, since pressing lighter prevents the nib from wearing out too fast.

It comes with a fairly long USB cable that I can happily put at wherever I placed my mouse. I probably won't have that amount of space in a class, so I might just put that tablet on my laps and write from there. The USB cable is long enough anyway. Talking about USB cable, it is quite worth mentioning that this tablet uses a micro USB port. This means that I can just simply use my phone's charging cable for it. One less thing to bring and one less thing to worry about breaking is always good.

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It is quite some effort trying to learn using the tablet. After some learning and tweaking here and there, I finally catch how to control the pen pressure to my needs and use the two buttons on the pen to my advantage - in Krita, one of them can be used to drag the canvas around while another one summons a colour palette and allows you to switch brushes and rotate the canvas to any degree required. I can say that a tablet finally unlocks everything a drawing software gives :D

P/s: My friend described this image as a "galactic fishball"...

I can say that I am pretty happy with this tablet. It's sufficiently slim and easy to bring around, nicely designed, no charging or battery required, etc. Guess I will be finally able to draw something on the computer again after so long.

Alright, this wraps up! See you next time!

--Lilacse