Friday, October 23, 2009

Apple Magic Mouse


Last night I stopped by the Walnut Creek Apple Store to check out the new hardware that Apple announced this last Tuesday. They had both 21.5 and 27-inch iMacs on display with the included wireless keyboard and the new wireless Magic Mouse.
I picked up the Magic Mouse and the first thing I noticed is that it does have one whole clickable button (I incorrectly called the Magic Mouse a buttonless mouse in my previous blog entry) which I thought worked fine. The Magic Mouse is very sleek, curvy, and slim. It feels good in the palm of my hand, but I do prefer a mouse with

more of a higher rounded area toward the rear of the mouse, for example the Kensington ThinkingMouse (pictured left) felt great in the hand, it fits in the palm of your hand better than any low profile mouse.
I tried out the multi-touch surface and it's very accurate. The different finger gestures worked as advertised. Moving your index finger vertically up and down scrolls a page up and down in Safari and moving your index finger horizontally scrolls the page horizontally side to side. The right-click also worked fine. I was however unable to try the two-fingered gesture that allows you to for example, page through a multiple page document or browsing through pictures in your iPhoto library, but after playing with the mouse I'm sure it works fine based on how accurate the multi-touch surface is. I was only able to test the Magic Mouse on the Apple Store's display table because they had a cable tethered to it, so I couldn't test how good it tracked on different kinds of surfaces.
In comparison to the previous Mighty Mouse, the Magic Mouse is an improvement, hardware-wise, meaning it's electronics are solid state with no moving parts with the exception of the clickable top surface. The problem with the Mighty Mouse was that in a short period of time, the scroll ball would either start malfunctioning or stop working altogether. So, because of that, Apple's solution to the scroll ball is the solid state multi-touch surface technology borrowed from the iPhone and iPod Touch.
I hope that Apple will come out with a wired version of the Magic Mouse because unless you are using rechargeable batteries, batteries could become quite costly over time.

The Apple wireless Magic Mouse retails at the online Apple Store for $69.00 US.

No comments:

Post a Comment