| Pros No cord Cons Lag when moving or clicking the mouse The Bottom Line This mouse doesn't have enough going for it to warrant a recommendation. I much prefer the Gyration optical that I use at home. |
| Full Review |
| General This IBM-branded mouse is made by MICRO Innovations. It appears to be relatively well-made and the price is fairly low for a wireless optical mouse. When I bought mine, there was a $20 rebate offered which made them even cheaper. It works with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT Workstation, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I'm using it with Win2K on an IBM desktop and I also have one on my IBM laptop. Setup The base station, which is about 1" high, 2" deep and 4" wide, plugs into the PC either through a USB port or, with the included adapter, to a PS/2 port. (My connection on both machines is via USB.) One real plus for my cluttered desktop is the absence of a power cord of any sort. The mouse itself takes a couple of AA batteries which are supplied. Just put the batteries in and it's ready to go. When I plugged the base station into the USB port on my laptop and put the batteries in the mouse, it just started working. I didn't have to install the setup software or do anything at all. On my desktop, I had to install and run the setup software before it recognized the mouse. No big deal, it took less than 5 minutes. With the two mice within 25 inches of each other, I soon realized that whenever I moved one mouse, the cursor on both my PC and laptop would move. Luckily, the manufacturer allows you to run in what it calls ID mode. That way you can isolate each mouse to work with its own base station. Enabling ID mode is very easy. Simply push a button on the base station and then push a button on the mouse. Within a couple of seconds they synch up and no more interference between devices. One annoying aspect of the ID mode is that you have to reset it when you change batteries. I'm sure I'll forget to do that and wind up controlling both machines for a while. Performance The mouse itself is a little bit larger than an MS mouse and a good deal larger than the Gyration cordless mouse. (See my review at Liberating mouse.) It has a good feel to it with a decent amount of heft. I prefer a mouse with a little weight to it and this one has that. It's an optical mouse and as such it doesn't suffer the problems associated with a trackball. It does, however, have a few problems of its own. When not in use, the mouse enters 'sleep mode' to save battery power. The manufacturer claims that simply moving the mouse is enough to wake it up, but I find that I often times have to click a button in order to get it to move. This could be a problem if I inadvertently clicked a button (say an inappropriate URL link) while trying to wake up the mouse. It seems to go into sleep mode very frequently and I'd like to be able to be able to increase the interval, but that's not configurable. When it's awake, the mouse responds fairly well to my hand movements. It usually acts as I expect it to, but there is a little lag, at times, when I wind up waiting for the cursor to catch up with my hand. Features It comes with the standard feature set. You can adjust the double-click speed, motion, etc. It also allows you to set the orientation - a plus for lefties. One nice feature is the ability to assign a function to the scroll wheel click. I have mine bring up a browser. You are limited to the predefined functions that come packaged with the mouse. I'd like to be able to assign my own key combinations to it. Other features include slow motion for more precise movement when you hold down the shift key; pointer vanish which hides the pointer while you type; X-focus makes a window active when you hover over the title bar; and sonar which finds the cursor for you when you hold down the control key. |
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