Review - The Logitech Cordless Trackman Optical Mouse
Whilst working in bed recently, enjoying the benefits of wi-fi and early morning productivity, i discovered a nasty downside to my overzealous work attitude.
Given the way I sit in bed and work, my wrist would frequently start hurting when I used the laptop trackpad. This pain would then, rather annoyingly, follow on throughout the day when using the USB attached standard optical mouse on my Intel Mac mini at the office. And so, having decided that I wanted to avoid causing a repetitive stress injury as a result of too much computing fun, I went and purchased a Logitech Cordless Trackman Optical Mouse.
The mouse itself was easy enough to unpack and hook up with the Mac mini and in fact worked straight out of the box. This means that, even without drivers, the cordless optical mouse is OSX compatible; that being said, to enjoy the full benefits of all eight buttons on the device you do need to install drivers for it.
The cordless mouse comes in 2 parts. The first is the USB based antenna that allows the optical device to communicate with the OSX based Mac, and of course the second part is the pointing device itself. Getting started was simple and the Logitech web site itself is pretty easy to navigate, allowing me to find the most up-to-date software drivers pretty quickly even though the drivers did come on CD included with the product. Once downloaded getting thedrivers installed was also painless and with not much ado - and a restart - the mouse was almost ready to be used to its fullest ability.
A 7 Button Optical Cordless Mouse!
The trackman actually benefits from eight, YES 8, buttons. Each of these, having installed the software drivers, are available for configuration via Mac OSX "System Preferences". Without any drivers of pre-configuration the mouse works straight off the bat, and the 2 buttons work as perscribed. Via the admin interface it is possible to turn any of the buttons into one of 16 possible actions:
- Click
- Nothing
- Advanced Click
- Cruise
- Open Application
- Open Document
- Open Folder
- Open Web Page
- Dashboard & Exposé
- Display Control
- Eject CD
- One-Touch Search
- Shut Down
- Sound Control
- Switch Application
- Zoom
Point It In Any Direction
Another great thing about the Logitech Trackman is that it doesn't matter at what angle you position the mouse, whenever you move the trackball in an upward direction the cursor will move accordingly up the screen.
Conclusion: Ergonomic, Anti-RSI contraption
The Logitech Trackman Cordless Optical mouse is avery ergonomic and a great tool to avoid the hazards of repetitive stress injury (RSI). The added benefit of the cordless trackman optical mouse is that because you are not dragging the mouse across your desk you do not necessarily end up getting a callous on the bottom of your hand/wrist. Your hand stays stationary at all times and your fingers do all the walking. I have been using the trackman for more than a week now and on the whole i find it a definite plus, and improvement to my general mouse using experience. The installation of drivers seems to have caused no problems and on the whole using the Logitech Trackman Cordless Optical mouse is a generally agreeable experience. Out of 10 I would give the Trackman an eight (8/10).