Tailless Mice on Glass
I needed a new travel mouse a couple weeks back, to fill in for those times when my favorite TrackPoint isn’t quite the right tool, and to save a bit of wear-and-tear on my right index finger.
Now, I’m picky when it comes to input peripherals (on the desktop, only the Microsoft Natural 4000 will do; on the road, only a good ThinkPad keyboard gets me to even consider a laptop, etc.), so it was not an easy choice.
I’ve normally gone with Microsoft mice in the past, but this time, I went back to Logitech. Partly because they had one that felt like the best compromise between size and ergonomics. But more than a little bit because of a feature Logitech calls Darkfield, which allows these optical mice to work without a mousepad on darn near any surface, even including glass.
The only caveat is that the glass must be at least 4 mm thick—I’m not sure that’s a real limitation because I wouldn’t want to put any computer on glass any thinner. 😉
This little rodent lives up to the Darkfield claims perfectly. I haven’t yet tried a surface it didn’t work on, and when I pulled it out in a meeting last week and set it down on the glass table, being able to amaze another geek when he said, “Uh, you’re going to need a mousepad for that.” was priceless.
I haven’t dived into its features enough for a proper review yet, but this Anywhere Mouse MXÂ works so flawlessly and is such a joy to use, that I feel obligated to give kudos to Logitech.
