With the focus on operating systems, desktop software and games consoles, it’s often easy to forget that Microsoft have always have a presence in the peripheral market. The original InteliMouse series pretty much paved the way for the optical mouse, being among the first to feature a middle-button / scroll-wheel and built-in forward/back buttons. Well, Microsoft have done it again. The Microsoft Touch Mouse is going to completely alter the way you interact with your PC.
The Touch Mouse truly is a thing of beauty. It’s curvaceous, yet comfortable. Everything about the design is very sleek, down to the smallest detail. Being a wireless mouse, a USB wireless adapter is required. With the Touch Mouse, the tiny USB adapter slots directly into the back of the mouse when not in use, making it ideal for portable use.
The touch capacity functionality itself though is what’s most innovative about this device. There’s a whole host of customisable gestures, including one, two, and three finger multi-touch and thumb swiping. By default, swiping your thumb back and forth will navigate you through web pages, flicking a single finger up or down will scroll pages, and swiping multiple fingers left, right, up or down controls the placement and size of windows.
The only slight design fault that we noticed was that the right-button isn’t as sensitive as the left-button. Meaning that if you casually right-click, quite often you’ll end up accidentaly left-clicking. You have to quite consciously move your finger to the far right for right-clicking, which is a bit of a shame.
The Microsoft Touch Mouse will only work with Windows 7 (and later versions, of course), and this is because it takes advantage of all the touch features that are built directly into the operating system.
Having launched in the US earlier this month, the Microsoft Touch Mouse will be available in the UK from November 15th.
Prices are around £69 in the UK and $79.95 in the US.
This really is an innovative piece of tech. Once you’ve used one, it’ll be extremely hard to go back an ‘old-fashioned’ click-mouse. The Microsoft Touch Mouse really does change the way you use Windows, for the better.
