The Ci60 is the only true optical mouse in our roundup (all the others are more correctly called laser mice), so you can still see a warm red glow from its underside during use. You also see it when it isn’t in use, because there’s no power switch. Despite this, the AA batteries should last four to six months. It’s also the largest mouse in our roundup by far, being suitable for anyone with very large hands. Textured rubber grips on the sides are a nice touch (and aren’t common on mice in this low price range). The two thumb buttons are placed perfectly and have excellent tactile feedback, unlike some of the other mice.

Kensington SlimBlade Media

The SlimBlade Media is a mouse with many unique qualities: It has a slender form factor, a trackball in place of the conventional scroll wheel (à la Apple’s Mighty Mouse), and a media control pad on its underside. Its shape, which does nothing to support your palm or side-grasping fingers, is definitely more stylish than ergonomic. It’s also devoid of any extra buttons or sliders. The trackball isn’t clickable, either, so this is really a two-button mouse. And because it comes with only very basic software, you can’t use MouseWorks to assign more functions to them.

Turn the SlimBlade over to expose its media controls, complete with Volume Up/Down, Previous/Next, and Play/Pause buttons within a rubber-coated D-Pad. The mouse has a 35-foot range, which is more than enough to sit on the couch while watching a movie.

Logitech VX Nano

The VX Nano laser mouse is intended either for users with smaller-than-average hands or as a “notebook mouse” that can easily be tucked away in a computer bag. (It even comes with a travel pouch.) Its “nano receiver” is only 5mm long beyond the USB connector, so you can leave it more or less permanently attached to your laptop, even when you stow it in a computer bag.

Two small buttons next to the right mouse button perform Back and Forward duties, while a button below the scroll wheel performs Internet searches on selected words. All of these buttons are programmable with the included SetPoint software.

The mouse wheel is new, and common to nearly all of Logitech’s new mice. It’s made of heavy metal and carries significant inertia when quickly flicked, allowing for large jumps in scrolling. Pressing down on it silences its ratcheting mechanism and allows for even longer scrolling jumps, and you can rock it side-to-side for horizontal scrolling.

Logitech MX Air

The MX Air is a desktop laser mouse as well as an air mouse. Pick it up and start tilting it to and fro to move the cursor or perform other tasks up to 35 feet away. (Or just move it around your desk like a normal mouse.) As an air mouse, it works beautifully: Its solid-state gyroscopes register gentle tilting and swinging, letting it work regardless of the direction it’s pointed.

Back on your desk, the MX Air suffers from some usability problems. The typical scroll wheel is replaced with a touch-sensitive surface. Gliding your fingertip along it performs the customary scrolling action, complete with a tiny speaker that generates clicks to simulate a ratcheting wheel. Unfortunately, it never seems to scroll as smoothly as a regular wheel, and the extra buttons running along the mouse’s spine all feel the same and are a little awkward to reach, basically requiring you to take your eyes off the screen in order to use them. A desk charger serves as a home for the MX Air when not in use, though its battery can maintain a charge for five days.

Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 7000

The Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 is little more than a Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 with a new coat of paint and different power system. The 6000 is a flat silver with glossy black accents and is powered by a pair of AA batteries, which should last about 10 months. The 7000’s rechargeable battery lasts for around five days of use. Whenever not in use, the 7000 has a flat cradle that serves as its home and fully charges the mouse in under three hours; a 30-minute charge will provide a few hours of use. Both use a 1.5-inch dongle that give the mice a range of about 18 feet.

The 7000’s scroll wheel rolled completely smoothly, without ratcheting or almost any friction, and tilted sideways for horizontal scrolling. Two thumb buttons run along the left side, but they were easy to miss and tricky to click without also clicking the left mouse button without practice. However, its curvy, molded shape made the 7000 the most comfortable of the “conventional” mice over extended periods.

Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000

Microsoft’s alternative pointing device, having exited the trackball business about three years ago, is also a mouse. The Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 is shaped . . . oddly. Imagine taking a gray baseball, shaving the bottom to make it flat, carving a groove at 10 o’clock for your thumb, and adding four mouse buttons and a rocking scroll wheel to arrive at this unusual shape. The unique form tilts your wrist clockwise compared to other mice, helping relieve carpal tunnel pain and stress by forcing you to use other arm and wrist muscles. It took us three comfortable but annoying days before moving the cursor came naturally.

The scroll wheel has more friction than the Laser Mouse 6000/7000, and the larger thumb buttons are too awkwardly positioned for convenient use. Its large, wired receiver looks rather like a conventional mouse, but it gives the Natural mouse a range of close to 40 feet.

Clickable Conclusions

Kensington's hardware is generally well-built and pleasant to use, but small details seemed a little rougher with Kensington products than with its competition. Buttons seemed to need slightly more force to click, and the scrolling hardware feels a little coarse and notchy at first.

Logitech has more mice and trackballs than all of its competitors put together, so there’s a good chance you can find the right combination of size, style, features, and price in a Logitech mouse. The VX Nano and MX Air were exceedingly well put together, with extremely slick antifriction pads, effortless mouse buttons, and even packaging that looks like it came right out of Apple HQ.

It's sometimes easy to forget that Microsoft is in the hardware business, but its mice reflect more than a decade of improvement on the traditional “two-button soap bar.” Its trio of mice all came with a slick software package that has a few neat tricks. And well-sculpted shapes of the mice fit the hand well.

by Warren Ernst

Trackballs Kensington Expert Mouse Now in its seventh generation, the Expert Mouse offers the largest trackball (it’s nearly billiard ball-sized) with the most surface exposure, four large buttons, a scroll “ring” that surrounds the ball, and the excellent MouseWorks software, making it the best overall trackball. Its large size makes it easy both to make large sweeping movements as well as finely detailed ones, and it works for both righties and lefties. The relatively heavy ball keeps some inertia when it moves fast, making it feel natural, while the built-in wrist rest makes it feel especially comfortable. Oversized buttons encourage different hand positions to distribute muscle wear. Because it’s corded, regularly moving it to different sides of the keyboard (to switch hands) is troublesome. Expert Mouse $99.99 Kensington us.kensington.com CPU Rating: 4.5 Logitech Cordless Trackman Optical The Cordless Trackman Optical is built at an angle, making it extremely comfortable, yet also slightly difficult to get used to. Its buttons are oddly placed, and moving the cursor up takes some practice. (It seems like you actually roll it diagonally.) The ball is less exposed than the Expert Mouse, so large movements require more finger movement, and the ball carries less inertia when “thrown” quickly. Odd button placement requires patience to learn before it becomes intuitive (especially the left mouse button), but a large number of programmable buttons can make tasks simpler. Cordless Trackman Optical $59.95 Logitech www.logitech.com CPU Reating: 4 Logitech Cordless Trackman Wheel Looking like a large mouse, the Cordless Trackman Wheel uses your thumb to move the trackball instead of your fingers. Due to how the thumb is built and connected to your hand, this makes horizontal movements easier and faster than vertical movements, which takes getting used to. Like its brother, it is cordless, which could encourage swapping hands once in a while, but it's clearly intended for righties only. It's also a little light in the buttons department, with only two mouse buttons and a scroll wheel. Cordless Trackman Wheel $49.95 Logitech CPU Reating: 3

Software Makes The Mouse Much of the functionality of these mice was tied to their software, and, for the most part, manufacturers use the same software with all of their mice. As such, we also pitted our manufacturers’ mouse software against one another. Kensington MouseWorks MouseWorks, the combination driver and configuration software for Kensington’s hardware, allows for configuration options most others don’t. It doesn’t work with Vista, however. You can enable horizontal scrolling; adjust overall cursor speed, scrolling speed (basically, the number of lines of text per “notch” of the scrolling wheel), and two types of cursor acceleration; and program each of the mouse buttons. Buttons can reproduce keystrokes, perform mouse actions such as double-click or click-and-hold, or open a small program launcher filled with the icons you designate. MouseWorks supports “chording,” whereby pressing two buttons together generates a unique mouse-click, and MouseWorks supports the programming of CTRL-Click, ALT-Click, SHIFT-Click, or any combination of keyboard modifiers and mouse buttons. You can even make the same button perform different tasks when running different programs. CPU Rating: 4 Logitech SetPoint SetPoint comes with nearly all Logitech’s pointing devices. It allows for the typical reprogramming of a mouse’s buttons and pointer speed, as well as checks the battery life. A feature unique to SetPoint—and a real benefit to gamers—is its ability to automatically sense when a game loads into memory and then disable its mouse speed and acceleration settings, letting you use the mouse sensitivity settings directly built into most FPS games. This generally allows for more accurate movement and shooting. Judging from Logitech’s support forums, this is a longstanding problem. All the Logitech wireless mice seem to need a millisecond to “wake up” after more than a minute of disuse, which is an annoyance not seen in competitive mice. CPU Rating: 3.5 Microsoft IntelliPoint Microsoft IntelliPoint software is slick and well-integrated into the standard mouse driver control panel, instead of a separate window like SetPoint. All buttons are programmable, either on a per-program or global basis, while the Windows XP versions map the clickable mouse wheel as the “Instant Viewer,” which is best described as a 2D version of Vista’s Flip 3D task switcher. You can set the scroll to varying levels of acceleration: Slow scrolling advances one line at a time, while fast scrolling advances 10, 20, or more lines at a time. It’s very useful, yet maintains high precision. CPU Rating: 3

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