I have a bit of a fetish for the ARC series of mouse and was pretty excited when the ARC-Touch was released after having used the ARC for about a year or so. However, the ARC-Touch is nothing when compared to the MS Touch Mouse – it does everything that I wanted from a touch HID, especially when compared to the very capable Apple Magic Mouse.
The ARC Touch was missing a couple of things, list the ability to swipe to go forward and back on webpages as well as support for 2 or 3 finger swiping – the Touch Mouse does all of those and does them very well.
Setup was an absolute breeze as MS now put all the software and drivers on the nano-receiver and the install instantly (there is a possibility that all that happened was the features were ‘unlocked’ from a previous install of the ARC Touch drivers).
The packaging was very nice, very apple-like. Built quality if great and compared to the ARCs the Touch Mouse has a certain heft to it that makes it feel more like a desktop mouse than a portable. The texture on the top feels nice and allows your fingers to glide smoothly – it may wear quickly as it's simply screen-printed on, we'll see I suppose.
My main gripe as with the ARC series is the need to have the nano-receiver at all. I would much rather BT, but I am sure there are pros and cons either way. At least the receiver is low profile enough to not jut out so far that it gets demolished if I forget to remove it before putting my laptop into its bag. At least it fits snugly inside the bottom of the mouse with a firm yet soft ‘click-click’ action (I have no idea what this is actually called) – something that wasn't quite right on the ARC series with the magnetic stowage for the receiver.
Over all, I am super-stoked with this new mouse. My only main issue is that in a week I start a job where XP is still the preferred SOE and all of the advanced touch features are Windows 7 only!