High Style on a Medium Budget
What's up with the blue products, anyway? Lately we've seen Blue from American Express, Pepsi Blue, and now Microsoft has introduced a new line of desktop fall fashions anchored by an Optical Mouse Blue and keyboards with what it calls "astral blue" accents. There's also a wireless version of the mouse, although it uses older models' radio technology instead of Bluetooth.
Actually, the new blue hue is a nice change from the usual off-white, or the black and silver that seems to have replaced beige as desktop PC makers' favorite. Besides highlighting the conventionally corded Optical Mouse Blue ($35) and Wireless Optical Mouse Blue ($45), it festoons the MultiMedia Keyboard ($35) and Natural MultiMedia Keyboard ($55), which share a new top-row layout of multimedia controls and shortcut keys with, respectively, a traditional layout and Microsoft's split ergonomic setup. We tested the corded mouse and split keyboard for this article.
If you do prefer black and silver, Microsoft has chosen it instead of blue for two bundles of cordless keyboards (with the new top-row controls) and cordless mice, the Wireless Optical Desktop ($85) and split-keyboard Wireless Optical Desktop Pro ($105). All of the abovementioned mice use smooth-gliding, zero-maintenance optical instead of old-fashioned, crud-collecting rolling-ball technology, which fixes the obvious fault of Microsoft's first cable-free mouse-and-keyboard combo (see our January 2002 review).
As Good As a Three-Button Mouse Gets
The Optical Mouse Blue squeezes into Microsoft's overstuffed rodent roster just above the generic white Wheel Mouse Optical ($30) and below the IntelliMouse Optical ($45) and voluptuously ergonomic IntelliMouse Explorer ($55).
Unlike the latter two, it has no side buttons to mimic a Web browser's Back and Forward toolbar icons -- just the usual left and right mouse buttons with a scroll wheel between them, the wheel also clickable as a button (triggering an auto-scroll function by default).
The new model's scroll wheel is a bit wider than those of other mice, which makes for slightly more convenient vertical navigation, and translucent, which adds panache (as does the company's trademark red taillight). Otherwise, the mouse offers an ordinary oval shape, comfortable for either right or left hands but not as cozy a hand rest as the Explorer, along with the familiar PC- and Mac-compatible USB cable with detachable PS/2 port adapter.
Like other optical mice, the Blue's smooth motion (even on a desk with no mouse pad, as long as you avoid mirrored or glass desktops) will spoil you for a scratchy mechanical rolling ball.
The biggest negative is that we've been spoiled by four- and five-button mice to the point where we missed having a customizable side-mounted or thumb button, but consoled ourselves with the Optical Mouse Blue's relatively low price -- and Microsoft's first-class IntelliPoint 4.1 driver software, which makes it easy to reprogram the wheel or other buttons for anything from launching a favorite program to a shortcut function such as copy, paste, or undo. It also supports different button assignments in different applications (say, auto-scroll for a click of the wheel in Word but Back for the same action in Internet Explorer).
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