December 9th, 2004
Yahoo's Zawodny seeks Bluetooth mouse
Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny is seeking a Bluetooth-based mouse and I’ve been meaning to talk about my experience for a long time. Such a device, by the way, would make an excellent Christmas gift for your favorite techie. Jeremy uses an Apple PowerBook. As it turns out, I’m running Microsoft’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (Microsoft calls it the Wireless Optical Desktop [WOD]) with my PowerBook G4. When setting WOD up, the PowerBook not only automatically detected the mouse and keyboard, it also knows to use the Windows button on the keyboard as the "command" button for Mac OS X. Even though I haven’t figured out how to program the keyboard’s other special buttons (eg: the Media Player controls), I love it. But I also have two small complaints and I’m not sure that either of them are unique to the Microsoft gear. *
First, the mouse pointer is sometimes slow to respond when the mouse is coming out of its hibernation mode (when you haven’t moved it for a while) and I don’t believe you can configure the mouse to not hibernate (or the AA batteries would drain in a day). Admittedly, I can live with this. You’re never going to get the performance of a wired mouse out of a wireless one.
Second, I’ve noticed a significant difference in processor utilization when using the wireless keyboard and mouse. The downside of this is the noisy fan in the PowerBook to cool down the stressed out processor. Jeremy has a more powerful processor than I do (I’m running the 12-inch 867 Mhz G4 and maxing out the memory at 640MB didn’t help), so he might not have this problem.
One thing that is really cool is how the Bluetooth connection stays active, even when the PowerBook goes into standby mode. In other words, if the PowerBook is on standby, and the mouse is hibernating, a jiggle of the mouse still wakes the PowerBook up. (I just didn’t expect this, given what I’ve seen over the years. Then again, it is Apple.) I also concur with one of Zawodny’s readers who observed that the Microsoft Mouse is not for left handers. It is very much a righty mouse. What would really be cool is if the new Bluetooth-enabled BlackBerries had support for Bluetooth-based keyboards.
