my main machine is an original apple powerbook G4 that unfortunately doesn't have built in bluetooth. i am an avid bluetooth user though, using a D-Link USB bluetooth dongle to do such things as use my phone as a GPRS modem, as well as transfer most of the pictures you find in this weblog between the phones and my machines. on the old powerbooks, you get two USB ports - the problem was i often need 3 or 4 for an external mouse, and the various USB chargers and sync cables i use with our arsenal of phones.
what was the solution to my problem? hmm, i could consolidate by getting a bluetooth mouse that used the bluetooth dongle, and get rid of one wire in the process. right? wrong.
i tried two different bluetooth mice, the apple bluetooth mouse, and the Logitech MX 900, and although they both do work adequately, they didn't solve my problem. here's why:
the apple bluetooth mouse is a sleek, beautiful piece of design, in line with most of apple's designs that feels great in your hand. setting up the bluetooth mouse with an apple is a snap as you might expect, and the OS gives you great feedback on screen when the mouse is connected or disconnected. the difference in tracking is imperceiveable from a wired mouse, which is great.
the apple bluetooth mouse runs on 2 AA batteries (non-rechargeable), which for me lasted about a month with heavy use. that's great. unfortunately, it makes the mouse a little heavy to travel with. so i ended up leaving this mouse at home, and day by day migrating to carrying a lightweight wired targus optical mouse in my bag every day. that was the first disappointment.
the second was that this was supposed to save me a USB port by sharing the bluetooth connection with my other devices, but in practice you cannot use more than one bluetooth device at a time, making this a giant pain in the you know what. transferring a 40K picture or java .jar file from my apple to would routinely get halfway there and then just fail. when i disconnected the mouse, and tried it again, everything worked fine. i tried this with 3 or 4 different phones, and always got the same result. big bummer.
now, if i can rant on one other thing. apple: come into the 90's. put 2 buttons on your mice. and maybe, just maybe, come up to the 00's and put a scroll wheel on it while you are at it. who in the hell thinks that a one button mouse is a good idea? especially when OS X works fine with every other mouse on the market, extra buttons, wheels and all!
to end on a good note, the smartest feature is that the mouse has an on and off switch so you can save the batteries. i think that every bluetooth device should have a one-button-bluetooth-on-and-off switch.
well, one way to solve the issue of not having a two button mouse is to buy a two button mouse. the MX900 is the bluetooth version of the popular MX700 "wireless" mouse sold by logitech. the MX900 not only has two buttons and a wheel, but it also has five other buttons, which when installed on the PC do things like scroll up and down, bring up a task menu and do forward and back in your browser. pretty cool once you get used to it.
the MX900 comes with rechargeable batteries, and a big-ass cradle that doubles as a USB bluetooth dongle/base station. this is nice, except that again for my purposes, which is to carry with my laptop, i have no interest of carrying around a cradle with any device. since it works with the apple/d-link dongle, it shouldn't matter because i shouldn't need to carry around the cradle, however the battery only lasts a day or so before needing to be recharged. hmm.
in addition, this mouse, however is even heavier than the apple mouse. so much, so, that my wrist started to hurt after a day of use. i also found the tracking was inadequate on the Mac, which to be fair is not supported by logitech.
i also had the same problems with file transfers while the mouse was connected as i did on the apple.
Posted by: hans at May 15, 2004 04:44 PM