A few days ago, my brother gave me either an early Christmas present for this year, or a late one for last year--an Apple Bluetooth wireless mouse. He did this because we were in the Apple store in Cincinnati, and I was complaining about the wireless mouse I had been using.
The wireless mouse I've been using on my alBook for the last couple of months is the Memorex MX4400RF. It requires a little USB dongle hanging out of one of the USB ports on the left side of the alBook, and works well with Mac OS X, but it's really annoying in a couple of ways. First, the dongle is a little wide, so, more often than not, the second USB port can't be used. In particular, it has a rechargeable battery that's charged through a second USB cable. The dongle and the cable can't both be plugged in at the same time. The mouse could be used while charging, so this is a problem when the battery gets low. And the battery gets low very quickly because there's no switch on the mouse to turn it off when it's not being used. In particular, the poor little thing just keeps flashing away whenever it's jostled in my laptop carrying bag. This is a very bad design for a mouse that's designed to be used with a laptop. Second, it just isn't designed for me to use with the alBook. I write with my left hand, so I mouse with my right. The dongle that talks to the mouse is on the left, and the mouse only has a communications range of about eighteen inches. I'm constantly getting it out of range. I started using a USB extension cable to bring the dongle over to the right, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a cordless mouse. In fairness to Memorex, the mouse does have more range on my wife's iBook, so it may be the metal carapace of the alBook that's causing some of the problem. The Apple mouse is a Bluetooth device, and the alBook has Bluetooth built-in, so there's no dongle. I can use it at least ten feet away from the computer, so the right-handed mousing problem is solved. It also has a switch on the bottom to turn it off when it's in the carry bag. There are only two possible drawbacks I can see, so far, in comparison to the Memorex mouse. First, the mouse runs off two standard AA cells and has no built-in way to recharge the battery. I don't know if this is good or bad because I don't yet know how long it can be used before it goes dead. After three days of heavy use, it's still as good as new. The mouse looks and feels just like a regular Apple mouse--except for the missing tail--and this is both good and bad. The good is that its size and weight are pretty good, unlike many other cordless mice that are too light. The bad is that it has no scroll wheel and only one button, unlike the Memorex model that has the Windows standard two buttons and a scroll wheel--which is really a third button too. In Mac OS X, the scroll wheel and right mouse button are very addictive. I wish Steve Jobs would finally admit that most of us have more than one finger on the mouse hand. One other problem arises that's actually some kind of bug in the mouse driver or Mac OS X. With either mouse, the trackpad still stays enabled even though I checked the box to turn it off when a mouse is present. It's not a big deal and I'm waiting to see if it's fixed in the imminent Panther. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be October 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
