Microsoft Touch Mouse

Still looking for a good mouse!
I prefer the funtions of the MAC Mouse touch on the MAC but the feel of the Microsoft on the PC is better
although it is too sensitive sometimes. Maybe they should combine forces. Not sure if I would buy again.

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!