Apple Magic Mouse

Full Review

Based on pure aesthetics, Apple's Magic Mouse is a crowning achievement for the company's design team. Sophisticated, alluring, and downright stunning, the Magic Mouse epitomizes Apple style. Getting down to actually using the mouse to get stuff done, we found the Magic Mouse and its Multi-Touch features work well. But it may not be incentive enough to abandon your current mouse.

The top surface of the Magic Mouse has a nice, smooth feel, while the aluminum along the sides has enough texture for gripping. Like the Apple Mouse (the new name for the Mighty Mouse) the Magic Mouse has no visible buttons. It also does not have a scroll ball. The Magic Mouse has a very low profile, the lowest of any mouse we've seen at our Test Center. It measures 11.43 cm long, 5.41 cm wide, rising 2.36 cm off the table. If you like having the lower part of a mouse resting against your palm, the Magic Mouse may be too low. But generally, you won’t need to have the mouse against the palm of your hand. Turn the Magic Mouse over, and you'll find the battery compartment, which houses two AA batteries. The laser optics are located near the top of the mouse. The power switch is next to the optics. The bottom of the mouse also has two plastic rails upon which the Magic Mouse moves.

Apple’s Multi-Touch technology is already in use, in the iPhone and on MacBook track-pads. In the Magic Mouse, Multi-Touch acts in place of a scroll-ball. You can use the whole surface above the Apple logo for finger swipes. You can swipe up, down, left, right, diagonally, or even in a circle, and your on-screen window will move in the respective direction. Scrolling with Multi-Touch is easy and feels natural. The other helpful Multi-Touch functions are two-finger swiping left or right for going forward or back in iPhoto or Safari, and holding down the Control key on your keyboard and swipe up and down to zoom. Multi-Touch works smoothly on the Magic Mouse, but it doesn't feel more advantageous or worse than a scroll-ball. Hopefully, driver updates or third-party applications will include more functions that demonstrate the input advantages of Multi-Touch on a mouse. There is an advantage in terms of maintenance – the lack of moving parts means you don't have to worry about a clogged or broken scroll-ball.

There are only two buttons on the Magic Mouse, a severe limitation – especially for anyone who's already using a mouse with more than two buttons, like the Apple Mouse. We mention the Apple Mouse specifically because it features a pair of side buttons that launch Exposé by default, and its scroll-ball button launches Dashboard. Atleast with the current revision of OS and drivers, the Magic Mouse doesn't offer direct access to these facilities, and Apple recommends using a corresponding F-key to activate the Dashboard and Exposé. Upon right- or left-clicking the Magic Mouse, the whole top of the mouse presses down and there's an audible click sound. Despite the lack of de-lineation between the two buttons, it is hard to accidentally click the wrong button.

We did not have any transmission problems with the Magic Mouse's Bluetooth, which claims a range of 10 metres. After sitting idle long enough to trigger the mouse's sleep mode, the mouse reconnects with the Mac virtually instantaneously. This was a pleasant surprise since Bluetooth mice and keyboards usually take a few seconds to re-connect. The on-screen tracking is excellent, the cursor always kept up with both long and precise movements. The biggest disappointment with the Magic Mouse is the way the mouse feels as it moves on a table, mouse pad, or desktop. As described earlier, the Magic Mouse rests on two plastic rails, and the rails need to have enough grip on the surface so the Magic Mouse stays still while you perform Multi-Touch gestures. The result is a grinding, rough feel as opposed to normal mice that offer a “smooth ride”.

We tested the Magic Mouse on three environments, first on a Mac with OSX 10.6.1, secondly on a Mac with Windows 7 installed via the recently released Boot Camp v3.1, and thirdly on a non-Apple PC running Windows 7. It worked just fine on the Mac OS, but you can't use Multi-Touch if you run a non-Mac operating system on a Mac. So in the other two environments, the Magic Mouse worked as a basic wireless two-button mouse.

Bottom Line

Although it's not perfect, the Magic Mouse successfully combines design and usability. It's great as a two-button wireless mouse, but if you need more than two buttons, the Magic Mouse is not for you. As mentioned earlier, there's no scroll-ball button.