TotalApps

November 2, 2009 in Hardware by David John

Well I finally managed to get my hands on Apple’s new Magic Mouse. Despite the mouse being no longer ‘mighty’ the new device certainly surpasses my expectations. Looking back it appears I am particularly hard on Apple mice having managed to go through quite a number of Mighty Mice in my time.

Within two months the scroll ball on the top would be permanently stuck and a few months after that I would have to turn off the expose option as the mouse would frantically spasm into expose mode on and off. I even attempted to take the mouse apart to give it a clean which resulted in a trip to the Apple Store for a replacement.

The new device will hopefully last me a bit longer and although I don’t really like mice where you have to replace batteries periodically the benefits certainly outweigh the negatives.

I have posted a few unboxing photos to my Flickr account and to be honest there isn’t that much to photography. The Magic Mouse is design simplicity, a tiny on/off button resides on the base  and a little green LED lets you know it is working, other than that the mouse is simple, sleek white and amazingly functional.

The mouse glides over the desk with great easy and the multi-touch options are fantastic. Much like the previous Mighty Mouse you have to manually activate the right click option which I personally think should be on by default given the hassle of holding down CTRL each time you want to use a context menu although that could be just my left handedness kicking in.

Multitouch Options

There are three main multitouch options.

• The obvious scroll option replaces the mini ball on the top of the mouse.
• The scroll works on any section of the top surface Screen Zoom that allows your zoom into an area of the screen my using the scroll while holding down CTRL.
• finally the Swipe option that allows you to use two finger swiping to move quickly through the Coverflow interfaces.

Like previous mice you can adjust and fine tune the sensitivity of the various scroll options in the system settings.

It is far too early to conclude just how successful the Magic Mouse will be but even after a few hours I really don’t think I can live with just Mighty when there is the opportunity for Magic!!