Microsoft's New Touch Mouse And

If Microsoft users were looking for an equal match to the Macs lovely multi touch mouse, then the Microsoft touch mouse is exactly that. This mouse looks very sexy and modern, its beautiful black top and sides and white bottom give it an amazing luxury look. Using the latest in multi-touch technology, the touch mouse has a series of embedded touch sensitive sensors that recognize a multitude of hand gestures such as pinches, taps, flicks, pans, expanding, zooming, scrolling and some others that we’ve all become used to from Apples products.

Microsoft is also introducing what it calls ‘Blue Track’ which finally allows the mouse to be used on surfaces your normal mouse wouldn’t function on such as cloth, wood, carpet, wool, and other soft or coarse materials. This mouse will be available in summer of 2011 for $74.95, and we will definitely grab one for our PCs.

Touch Mouse

Features:

• BlueTrack sensor
• Touch capabilities… obviously
• Works exclusively with Windows 7
• Nano-tranceiver slot on the mouse itself

Pros:

• Works really well on just about every surface
• Super comfortable in the hand
• Sleek, attractive design

Cons:

• Has a tough time distinguishing left-clicks from right-clicks
• No XP, Vista, or OS X support
• Sloppy scrolling

Long Version:

As I said earlier, Microsoft’s Touch Mouse is a wonderful idea. I happen to favor a touchpad over a mouse on whatever machine I’m using — most regularly my MacBook Pro — and the notion that those same gestures could be found on a much more comfortable mouse got me excited. Unfortunately, things weren’t as seamless as I’d expected.

The Touch Mouse offers a number of different touch-based gestures: a single finger scrolls, pans, and tilts, while a thumb swipe will send you backwards or forwards. Obviously, backwards or forwards can mean different things during different activities, but it’s basically the ability to push the back button or the forward button in your browser, or quickly scroll through PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft also added a flick to its single-finger gestures to allow for super speedy scrolling.

This is where the Touch Mouse lost me. It really doesn’t perceive the difference between a slow, smooth scroll and a flick. I got sent to the bottom of the page too many times to count, and even the slow scroll (when recognized) wasn’t all that smooth. Plus, the mouse is actually just one large button, with sensors to detect whether you’re inputting a right or left click. When I hold a mouse, my middle finger (right clicker) nudges right up against that line, but since the Touch Mouse’s line doesn’t actually separate different buttons, it’s easy to miss.

But the Touch Mouse has its great moments, too. The thumb gesture especially wowed me. Even though it made me feel awful for being too lazy to mouse over to the back button, I still used that gesture as much as possible. Whoever said laziness was a sin? Not Microsoft, that’s for sure.

When I met with Microsoft to talk about the Touch Mouse, they used the word “delight” like a zillion times, most often connecting it with the word “control.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what they were talking about. But after getting hands-on with the Touch Mouse, it really is an entirely new sense of control over your machine that is, in short, delightful. Again, the idea is fantastic. But until they can make those controls more reliable, it’s hard to recommend it.