my new mouse

logitech v500

posted: Dec 28 2004

In my search for both a more and more wireless life and the perfect human input device, I found this mouse today.

Remember when the scroll wheel was the “new!” feature that bumped a mouse into the $50+ range? And soon after, the scroll wheel was surrounded by about 50 buttons and that was the big deal: overkill… a mouse with more buttons than you can remember what to do with.

I dig this thing. It’s sleek, and feels nice; it’s weighted just right, it’s compact, it works great and it matches my computer.

The bummer: compared to my old mouse, I lost the wheel-click function (which I really only used on the tabs in “firefox(Get a good browser):http://www.getfirefox.com/. It seems like logitech could have made the whole scroll panel into the third button…hmm…and scrolling without moving a real wheel is a bit odd at first, but after one sitting I’m almost used to it. It even makes a muted, muffled ticking sound gliding over the touchpad scroller.

Oh, and since I’m a first-time wireless mouser, I’m not sure if the seeming pointer-paralysis I’m experiencing is a normal wireless thing or not. It’s not latency, the response gap is zero to virtually un-noticeable. the issue is the pointer seems to randomly get stuck when I’m trying to do pixel-sized movements, like position the cursor “just to the left (or right)”. Using a pad of paper for a mouse pad might be goobing it out, or maybe I’m just used to my old mouse… ha! Like old shoes seem to always feel better at first when you’re trying on new shoes, then you buy the new ones and a week later you have to do something that might get the new ones dirty so you put the old ones back on for the task and think: “How the heck did I wear these for so long?”

This falls a bit short of the perfect device, but it was better than anything else I found so far. I think I’m keeping it anyway. Sometimes the cool factor carries a few extra points. I’m going to name it slicker.

-- jase