I know I’ve been very lax about science or tech posts of late, but as I’ve picked up a wireless mouse for my work laptop recently for use at home, I thought I would share some impressions of it. This is the Logitech VX Nano mouse. When it comes to mice, I tend to like them fairly simple – not the “buttons all over the place” types (i.e. like gaming mice).
What I like about this mouse is that while it is marketed as a notebook mouse, it is not too small. It is only slightly smaller than a standard mouse. Its shape and size still make for a comfortable mouse for me at least. The shape should also allow for left handed users to be comfortable with it as well I think. Larger hands may find it a tad small – my hands are more medium sized with longer fingers. The USB transceiver is really nice in that it is small enough to plug into the laptop USB port and can leave in there without much worry of breaking it. The portion that sticks out is just a hair under 1/4″, and the mouse itself fits into an included pouch which helps protect in in a bag. It also has an on/off switch underneath to help save battery life when not in use. Again while I don’t do much with the extra buttons, this mouse includes web browsing “forward” and “back” buttons next to the left mouse button. There is also a button behind the scroll wheel that sort of acts as a replacement for Alt-Tab in Windows, giving a menu to select any open window. Of course, these button functions are customizable through the Logitech software. The scroll wheel has both horizontal and standard vertical scrolls. One of the nicest features, for my use at least, is the that the scroll wheel has two vertical scroll modes. One is the standard scroll of 3 or so lines at a time with some tactile feedback. If you click the wheel as a button though, it goes into what I call “free wheelin’ ” mode. This mode freely scrolls many lines. It’s very useful in a long web page, large spreadsheet, or in what I find really handy, while at work I have the ability to scroll through about 20,000-30,000 lines of text in large log files. I find the section I am concentrating on, for instance an error dump section, then one flick brings me to the most recent events at the bottom of the section.
So, if you’re in the market for a nice cordless mouse for your system, check out the VX Nano from Logitech. I like it enough that I now keep it in my bag and use it at work as well as when working from home.
The Science Attic 