I've always wanted a graphics tablet, but I've never been able to afford one - as Judith Hann would say - UNTIL NOW.

As soon as I read the MacWorld review of the Wacom Graphire A6 graphics tablet and cordless mouse, I knew I had to have one - a snip at around £80 including VAT.

But hang on, you say, A6??? Isn't that, like, incredibly small???

Well, yes and no. For starters, this baby costs well under a hundred quid, what to you expect? And secondly, when you think about it, the average mouse covers an area not much greater than A6 and I've been using a mouse to work Illustrator and Photoshop for long enough.

So I got the thing home (I plumped for graphite, but all the usual lurid, dated colours are available), and booted it up.

No response. Nothing at all. Bugger.

I swiftly realised the power cable had fallen out of the back of my hub, then all was well.

It comes with some Photoshop plug-ins - I thought they would make the thing work, but they just seem to be PenTools - normal plug-ins that frankly are of little use. It also comes with the Eraser Tool plugin in case you don't already have it (I did) - this lets you flip the pen over and use it as an eraser.

And, fragile reader, I have to tell you that this little graphics tablet has changed my whole relationship with my computer.

I have even unplugged the hockey-puck mouse - and I was one of the few people who liked it!

I do everything with the pen now, even navigating the Finder. The best fun - of course - is using the airbrush in Photoshop, but every day retouching is so much easier. It seems very responsive to pressure, but can get sluggish if you're using a thick brush and you're mucking around alot without saving the file.

I've had a few more problems with Illustrator though, when using the brush for freehand drawing. I often get a -1336 error - "Can't create a brush definition point". Strangely this doesn't happen in 'Calligraphic' mode. It transpires - thanks to Wacom's FAQ - that this is a known problem with Illustrator 6, fixed in later versions. Oh well, I'd better upgrade then.

The pen has a two-position rocker switch, and as with the two button (plus wheel) mouse, you can define the function of the buttons on a global or application-by-application basis. I have had some problems setting certain functions, though, like making the rocker activate 'Option' - possibly I'm doing something stupid, it doesn't like my OS8.6 RevA iMac, or the driver is faulty.

Anyhoo, a damn fine product all the same. I'd say it was worth buying just as a replacement for a mouse.