The mouse. An icon of computing. An crucial tool of the workplace and the residence. It can show off great style, be purely functional or be an out and out gaming plaything. It can boast two buttons, seventeen buttons or be buttonless. The mouse can be a huge, hunch-backed beast, or a svelte thin-as-a-PC Card travel buddy.

The laptop or computer mouse, in other words, can say as much about you as anything else you attach to your PC or Mac. The latest mouse to enter this throng is the cautiously stylish Microsoft Touch Mouse, and it’s a freak of nature.


Let us backtrack a little. Those sober lines could be observed as the height of style to some. Plus there are some neat little tricks and concepts on display to make you want to rub its sleek form.

There is a major issue that requirements voicing for this chunky rodent though. It fails on one key level, and that’s that it is horrible to in fact click anything with.

The quantity of force required to click an icon, menu or application with the Microsoft Touch Mouse is much more than any other mouse we’ve come across. It is extremely frustrating, and this alone had us reaching for any other mouse we could lay our hands on rather than attempting to interact with this monstrosity.


The gestures themselves on the Microsoft Touch Mouse are welcome adequate.

Smoothly slide two fingers to the left and you’ll snap the existing window there. Two to the right and it’ll snap that side instead. Lay three fingers on its textured surface and push forward and you’ll see all the current open windows, while three down will minimise all.

The problem is, whilst messing about with your window arrangements you’ll also locate you are scrolling about inside those Windows, and typically performing points you do not actually want to do. Combine this with not becoming able to effortlessly click on anything, and you have an input device that fails at its most simple level.


There are some good style selections – the tiny USB wireless dongle can be stowed in the belly of the mouse when not in use, for example, which is very neat indeed.

Wireless mice do boast a particular freedom compared to their long-tailed brethren, though their reliance on batteries weighs against them.

If we have to use a wireless mouse then we’d a lot prefer to have one that recharges when plugged in, or has the choice of getting wired or wireless, such as with Microsoft’s own Sidewinder X8. 


Overall, this is a poor excuse for a mouse. It is attractive adequate (if not very for everybody), and an important addition to the Microsoft stable (it did require to show that anything Apple could do, it could do… badly), obtainable for about £50, but it is not the winner it could have been.

It is horrible to use, and prone to randomness. Microsoft is responsible for some of the most essential mice in history of PCs. This, regrettably sufficient, really is not one of them. 
 


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Whatever you do, don’t mistake the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse for a replacement for a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch graphics tablet, or even Genius’ own G-Pen M609. This isn’t a device for graphical artists to replicate their brushstrokes on the computer, and if you bought one thinking it was, you’d be disappointed.

What the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse actually is, is a pen-shaped mouse. Dragging the tip of the pen across a desk, we were able to control Windows pretty well. Pressing down on the nib replicates a left mouse button click, and there is another button on the shaft for right mouse button clicks.

It works rather well, with the familiar shape of a pen allowing you to get used to the new input device pretty quickly.

We found that the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse is best suited for working on large and multiple monitors, as you can move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other quickly, in a small space. You might find the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse a bit over-sensitive when you first use it, with its 1200 DPI sensor, but changing the mouse cursor speed in Windows can make a big difference.

It’s a device that works well, and we can certainly see the appeal of it. It’s not quite good enough to completely replace the traditional mouse for most tasks, however.

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The Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse is yet another innovative addition to the long-line of classic designs that the Microsoft Hardware group has blessed the world with over the years.

The Arc Touch Mouse attempts to take style and function to a new level in the modern mouse world by combining a wireless portable mouse with touch-sensitive features and the BlueTrack sense system.

The result is the Arc Touch. The name partly gives away its key design feature: a flexible rear section that doubles as the main wrist support and also folds flat turning the mouse off and leaving it perfect for carrying.

Beyond its physical design, the Arc Touch mouse uses an Apple Magic Mouse besting touch-sensitive wheel.

With built in haptic feedback this adds a sense of style beyond just its design through unobtrusive technology.

But the real question is it any good to mouse with?

The centrepiece to the Microsoft Arc Mouse is its folding rear, beyond just being a fancy way to turn the mouse on or off, it provides a physical support to the rear of the mouse and offers an ergonomic grip.

Despite a potentially flimsy slim-build it’s more than sturdy enough and offers a pleasant wrist rest in use.

Attached to that fancy switch is the main body of the Arc Touch Mouse, which is mostly the twin mouse buttons and that touch-sensitive scroll wheel.

In use it does make for comfortable mousing, though occasionally your fingers might fall short of the buttons and this can almost tip the mouse over. We know this is designed as a portable mouse but it’s this type of flaw that means this is no gaming mouse.

It’s not going to stay standing in any rigorous deathmatch situations.

The touch-sensitive wheel provides clever haptic-feedback, give it a flick to start scrolling with ‘gravity’ and the scroll plate actually vibrates in line with the speed of the scroll.

It’s clever and works well, though it’s questionable if this is actually better or more precise than a physical wheel.

Powered by two AAA batteries, Microsoft claim a six-month battery life.

The wireless transceiver is one of the smallest we’ve seen and magnetically sticks to the back of the mouse for transit. Finally the tracking is pretty impressive, the best we’ve seen in a wireless mouse with no sign of lag and it even wakes from rest as quickly.

We liked:

The action is very smooth and the tracking is excellent. It’s certainly an eye catching design and eminently portable.

The wireless ability works excellently and is highly responsive.

We disliked:

Despite its beautiful design the Microsoft Arc Touch isn’t perfect, making it lightweight and so more portable has its disadvantages.

It’s certainly not going to be embraced by the gaming community, even those looking for something with more style than substance.

It also lacks side navigation buttons, which we’ve come to rely on.

Plus the price is horrendous, you can pick it up for almost half the original price but even so we’ve like to see a dedicated Li-ion rechargeable pack at this price.

Final word:

If you want to be flash this is a mouse you have to have, for others it’s something to miss

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Mickey Mouse and his crazy cast of Disney cartoon characters you know from you childhood (or your child’s childhood) aren’t only an American phenomenon – they’re popular all over the world. So popular that in Japan, Disney Mobile is launching their very own Android smartphone in Mid-February called the DisneyMobile DM009SH:

They do an amazing job of making it look appealing, but when push comes to shove, what’s it all about?

• 3.8-inch screen
• Android 2.2
• Flash
• Wi-Fi / GPS / Bluetooth
• CCD960-megapixel high-definition camera
• Infrared
• 3D Display

I had a little bit of trouble digging deeper as the page is in Japanese, but Android 2.2 on a 3.8-inch screen is a solid start. And as you may have guessed, the phone is packed with Disney content both inside and out. Check out that “Mickey” logo on the bottom and back of the Disney Phone:

Some of the in-phone elements you can expect are a boat load of Disney Wallpapers, Disney Widgets, Disney Emoticons for TXT & E-Mail, Disney Photo Decoration, Disney calendar including the birthdays of Disney characters, Disney App Store and much, much more.

I don’t know of a Disney phone available in the United States and find it pretty amusing that Japan gets one first, but I suppose even the adults there are crazy about cartoons. Case and point? Hello Kitty.

Are you jealous Japan gets the Disney Phone? Is this something you would get for yourself? Who am I kidding… is this something your girlfriend/wife would get for herself or your kids? In my mind, the type that would want this are too young to use a phone and I’m hoping there aren’t enough adults that would want this unless they’re just getting it to amuse their children. That being said, this is probably the reason it’s headed to Japan – where Disney is more popular among adults – and not the United States.

But that’s just my guess… I haven’t personally touched the magic. Doesn’t it look a bit like Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10 or Arc? Hmmm.

[Thanks Junna!]

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Toys that are secretly alive, with emotions and desires and fears. A mob boss-like villain who rules over a bunch of castaway toys with cruel efficiency. Daring escapes, close calls, last-minute saves and a climactic double-cross at the city dump.

Sounds like a great story, right? But this isn’t one that you saw on the big screen this summer. It’s a book from 1967 by Russell Hoban and if you thought Pixar could tell a good story you should put this one on your list.

I found my copy of The Mouse and His Child about a decade ago, when a local video rental-slash-bookstore was going out of business. At the time, I hadn’t heard of Hoban and I wasn’t yet familiar with Caldecott-winning artist David Small, but I liked the look of the book right from the start. Something about it gave the impression of a book that was ostensibly a children’s story but was really written for adults—much like Toy Story 3 — and my first reading of it confirmed it. (I should mention that the back-cover blurb from Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, didn’t hurt.)

The protagonists of the book are the eponymous mouse and child, a set of wind-up toys we first meet in a toy store shortly before Christmas, as they’re put on display by a magnificent dollhouse presided over by an imperious wind-up elephant. As they dance in a circle and talk about the world outside the toy shop, the little mouse makes an impulsive wish: he wants to live in the dollhouse forever, with his father the mouse and the elephant as his mother, and a wind-up seal as his sister. The elephant scoffs at this ridiculous notion; the next day the mice are purchased, boxed up and wrapped for Christmas.

What makes the mouse and his child so fascinating as protagonists is that, unlike Woody and Buzz and their friends, they are inanimate objects. They speak and think, but they cannot move on their own and therefore must rely on others to wind them up. You might think that this would make them rather uninteresting characters to follow, but Hoban takes them on an amazing journey, passed from one character to the next on their quest of discovery.

The villain is one Manny Rat, king of the dump, who uses discarded wind-ups for hauling all the scraps he forages and “commissions” he collects from other animals in the dump. He has quite a nice setup, but everything changes when the mouse and his child arrive in the dump one evening. After they somehow slip from his grasp, he is overcome with a single-minded urge to track them down and smash them to pieces.

Hoban’s writing is beautiful and magical; throughout the story there is always a sense of something larger happening beyond the understanding of the various characters and their own machinations. At each turn of the tale, you wonder how these helpless wind-ups are going to find their way on, but you never doubt that they will. And the final showdown is so ingeniously planned that I almost wish Pixar would acquire the rights to the book so I could see it on the big screen. (Apparently there was an animated film made in 1977; a copy of dubious legal status has turned up here on YouTube, but I just discovered this today and haven’t watched it yet.)

Although The Mouse and His Child was written so long ago, the writing still holds up remarkably well — you may have to explain to your kids about wind-up toys, I suppose. It might not be appropriate for very young kids, because there are some pretty gruesome battle scenes, but generally they depict the natural order of things: animals eat other animals and are in turn eaten by others. (I should note that although the toys behave like real toys, the animals in the book are more anthromorphized and humans play a very minor part in it.)

The copy I have includes David Small’s illustrations which are of a more recent vintage than the story, but they fit the book well. His charcoal and ink wash drawings are haunting and belong to an earlier era. There are just enough pictures to give you hints of the characters and add some visuals without becoming the focus of the book.

I just re-read it over the last few days, and enjoyed it as much as before. Though it starts and ends with Christmas, it’s not really a Christmas story — it takes place over a long period of time and the mice experience all the seasons of the year. If you’re looking for a story with some great characters, action and adventure, unlikely heroes and a dastardly villain, look no further than The Mouse and His Child.

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When we reviewed the Gyration Air Mouse GO Plus, our main complaint was that although its base functions worked on a Mac, the drivers needed to configure its programmable buttons were Windows-only.

Now Gyration’s MotionTools software has been released for OS X, we can get the most out of this new Air Mouse Elite.

Gyration’s Air Mouse range is based on a similar motion-sensing technology as used with the Nintendo Wii’s hand controllers. You move your pointer by waving the mouse through the air, holding a trigger button so it only moves when you want it to. It’s very responsive and easy to control.

There’s a laser in there too, so you can also use the device as a desktop mouse. Left and right buttons are catered for, as is a scroll wheel. Three ‘media buttons’ can be programmed with separate functions for different categories of software – volume control and pause for media apps, or navigation when using an internet browser, for instance.

Unfortunately, you can’t add apps to MotionTools’ pre-defined lists, so (for example) a Media Player profile only works for iTunes and VLC; and Presentation settings only for PowerPoint and Keynote.

Swiping gestures also can be assigned, and triggered by holding the circular button as you wave the mouse.

The Air Mouse Elite is certainly more comfortable than the GO Plus when used as a desktop mouse, but some might find it less ergonomic in the air. Try before you buy if you can.

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Tron: Legacy, Disney’s upcoming movie sequel to the 1982 original, will arrive in cinemas next month, and to celebrate, computer peripheral maker Razer has…

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JumiMouse Plus enables near total control of your PC. For Windows machines a user can control the mouse, enter text, or take over other programs.

JumiMouse works well at working as a touch-mouse remote for a computer, which is an ideal way to control things such as media playback or simple scrolling. Getting started involves both downloading the iPhone app from the App Store as well as a free download from the JumiTech web site. There is a scroll bar on the right side of the screen for quickly scrolling through pages.

There are two types of keyboards for entering text; the standard iPhone keyboard or a Windows-centric that fills the entire screen. (…)
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“The Xai is a tool, not a gadget.” There’s a lot more of this overblown hyperbole in the box for this terribly expensive mouse.

It promises groundbreaking technical specifications and more. There’s even a little LCD screen on the back to aid programming, which impressed us no end with its digitalism.

The bottom has big smooth contact pads and there are eight buttons, which need only the lightest of touches. It’s all finished in a classy matt black. Even the 2m lead is swish, with a braided sleeve.

However, the main selling point is the sensitivity. At 5,000dpi against a more typical rodent’s 1,000 to 2,000dpi, it’s extremely accurate. No more blaming the mouse if you miss. Yes, it’s awfully extravagant.

A tenner will buy a perfectly good mouse, and even Microsoft’s Sidewider costs less than half of this. You’ll need a serious gaming system to really warrant such sensitivity too. But in the heat of online gaming battle you need a good mouse in your hand and we love the thoughtful design in all its black seriousness.

The £20 NP+ ProGaming mouse pad, on the other hand, is not quite as seriously impressive, despite its positioning as the ideal partner for the Xai. The first thing you’ll notice is that this thing is huge: 450 x 400mm is one heck of a mat.

We don’t know about you, but we rarely need to sweep the mouse across a foot of pad to zero onto the next victim. Come to that, there’s rarely that much uncluttered desk space in the first place.

The woven top surface has a “unique rough glide” covering, which may or may not suit depending on your personal preference; the mouse hardly glides effortlessly across it.

We found the surface offers a little too much resistance for our taste. And it was far too big – although you could cut it up and get four small professional gaming mouse-mats for the price of one.

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HippoRemote Pro is a great alternative for controlling your computer instead of the usual mouse and keyboard. While there are plenty of other options in the App Store that offer this functionality, HippoRemote Pro is by far and above the best.

What makes HippoRemote Pro unique is a series of profiles that contain shortcuts to key features. For example if you are a Windows 7 user there is one-tap access to the Start menu. Mac OS users can quickly hit the Exposé button. Popular browsers such as Chrome and Safari also have their own shortcuts. This option is also customizable based on the commands that you find yourself mostly using.

The multi-touch trackpad is great to use and is designed well for tasks like browsing or clicking through a media application such as iTunes. A keyboard button fires up the iPhone’s keyboard for typing, which makes it especially useful when searching online.

The Pro version of the app also contains a browser and Twitter access. (…)
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Years ago, shortly after my wife and I purchased our first house, we discovered we had a mouse. I remember setting out a mousetrap and then really not wanting to deal with the results when it worked. Of course, I’ve heard that glue traps are even worse. As for those “humane” traps? I think this quote from the young adult book ChaseR by Michael Rosen sums it up best:

Everyone in the country has mice, and they’re everywhere, and there’s no trapping in those little humane traps we used to set so you can drive the mice somewhere in the country to be free. WE’RE THE PLACE YOU DRIVE THEM TO!

Eeeek, Mouse! is a new picture book just released today by Lydia Monks, the author of Aaaarrgghh, Spider! My six-year-old says:

This book is about a girl named Minnie. Her mother and father don’t like mice. One time a mouse snuck up and got in the house. Minnie saved it and hid it from her father who was trying to build a trap to catch the mouse. It’s a funny book, especially the cat.

When Minnie’s dad sets to building a super-dooper mouse trap, Minnie puts her own plan in motion to rescue the mouse. Meanwhile, the family cat is hoping to get a bit of a treat, and is easily the funniest part of the book. The illustrations are cute, with a couple die-cut mouse holes to peek through. However, I’m honestly not sure what to make of the message of the book. Monk’s previous book was about a spider (which appears in Eeeek, Mouse!) and the books seem to be encouraging kids to love pests. I had a hard time explaining to my own daughter why it wouldn’t be a good idea to let a mouse run free around the house. (The dad’s complaint, that they give him the heebie-jeebies, isn’t very convincing to a six-year-old who doesn’t know what that means.)

In short, it’s a cute picture book with some humor and clever illustrations, but you might want to consider the ramifications before you read it to your kids. Especially if you have mice problems of your own.

Eeeek, Mouse! retails for $16.99 and is recommended for ages 2 to 6, from Egmont Press.

Wired: Cute drawings and a very funny cat. The dad is a bit of a geek.

Tired: May teach your kids the wrong lessons about mice.

Note: GeekDad received a copy of the book for review.

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