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Three Funky Mice Made for Laptops

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:23:19 +0000

It isn’t easy being a computer mouse these days. While laptop sales grow and desktop sales decline, more people rely solely on laptop touchpads, many of which offer more functionality than mice. And tablets like Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab shun the mouse altogether.

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But before you toss your tethered friend, it’s worth paying homage to the many things this gadget can do. From precisely cropping one of cousin Fred’s fleeting girlfriends out of a family photo to selecting just the right number in a spreadsheet filled with thousands of digits, the mouse is just the right tool for such precision jobs. And sometimes it’s just a lot more comfortable to use for long stretches of work on a laptop.

This week, I tested three computer mice that laptop users will actually want to bring along with them. Their designs make them simple to pack in a bag, use while sitting on the couch or recharge directly from the laptop. I tried Microsoft’s $70 Arc Touch Mouse, Logitech’s $50 Couch Mouse M515 and the $70 Swiftpoint Mouse.

At first glance, Microsoft’s Arc Touch Mouse looks like nothing more than a flattened mouse. But it’s cleverly designed to bend into an arc that serves as a comfortable rest for the hand. As soon as the Arc Touch Mouse is bent into this shape, its battery turns on. It holds this shape until you flatten it with your hand. When it’s flattened, the mouse turns off to conserve battery. Microsoft claims this battery will last up to six months. The flattened Arc Touch is much easier to pack in a carry-on or to slip into a side pocket than its rotund relatives.

On a Mac, the Arc Touch is limited to basic functions, including use of its touch-sensitive scroll strip that scrolls super quickly when a finger flicks up or down on it. This strip makes a subtle sound like that of a roulette wheel as it scrolls, and a tap on the strip stops the scrolling at a specific location on the screen. I caught myself looking down at this mouse a few times to make sure I wasn’t using a real scroll wheel because the sound effects and feel of the scroll strip are so wheel-like.

On a Windows PC, installing software will give the Arc Touch extra functions. Double tapping the middle of the scroll strip gives it the same function as a regular mouse’s middle click. Or this button can be programmed to open a link in a new tab within Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. This mouse’s tiny USB receiver can be plugged into a laptop almost unnoticed or it will magnetically stick to the base when not in use.

Logitech’s Couch Mouse M515 seems like it was made with me in mind. I often sit on my bed or couch using my laptop, and this mouse has a sealed underside so its sensor doesn’t collect fuzz from fabrics after passing over them several times. I used it on carpets and on a blanket and liked its base, which is designed to glide easily over all types of surfaces. This mouse felt fast and responsive.

To conserve battery, the Couch Mouse is only on when a hand grips it. So if someone stops to watch TV for a while, then accidentally sits on the mouse or the mouse slips between couch cushions, its buttons won’t continue clicking away. An underside switch turns it entirely on or off. The Couch Mouse also uses a USB receiver, and it can be stored inside the mouse for travel.

Like the Couch Mouse, the Swiftpoint Mouse from Swiftpoint Ltd. of New Zealand, is designed for use with laptops in less than ideal working environments. This tiny mouse was designed to operate directly on the laptop wrist rest area or on the laptop touchpad, itself. In fact, the mouse comes with a large, clear sticker labeled “Swiftpoint Parking Accessory” that goes on the laptop so the mouse doesn’t slip off when the laptop’s tilted.

The simple sticker worked well, creating a magnetic square in the center of the wrist rest area that kept the mouse from slipping off when I was leaning back and typing at an angle.

The Swiftpoint Mouse is made for maneuvering directly on a laptop.

A scroll wheel on the right of the Swiftpoint Mouse works by rolling it with one finger or by turning the mouse on its side and moving it up or down, which made for faster scrolling. I found this feature awkward and unnatural at first, but after a lot of use, I grew accustomed to it. Touching the left click button while scrolling up or down zooms in or out, respectively, on any screen.

This mouse is so small that rather than its USB receiver fitting inside or on it for storage, the mouse magnetically attaches onto its USB receiver, resting on it while the receiver is plugged into the laptop. This allows for the Swiftpoint Mouse to recharge its battery; Swiftpoint says 30 seconds of charging will give the mouse an hour’s worth of juice and a 90-minute charge will last two to four weeks, depending on how much you use it. The former proved to be true for me, but I didn’t have enough time to test the latter claim.

When I set this mouse onto the USB receiver for charging, it flashed a rapid green charging indicator light, which slowed after about a minute. Using a rechargeable mobile mouse means not worrying about getting stuck somewhere with dead batteries.

For those looking to have more control in the Windows 7 environment, Microsoft is bringing out in May an $80 model called the Touch Mouse. It will work specifically with Windows 7, using a touch surface that responds to gestures so as to perform tasks like docking, minimizing or maximizing and displaying the desktop.

It’s an awful lot like Apple’s $69 Magic Trackpad, a square surface that came out last summer and enables gestures within the Mac operating system for desktops.

Though these three mice are easy to port around and work well in a variety of work environments, they can’t replace many of the clever gestures built into so many laptops nowadays, especially Macs. But if you’re looking for comfort and function on the go, they do the trick.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

A New Picasa Puts a Name To All Those Faces

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:00:02 +0000

Posting digital photos online to share with friends and family is supposed to be fun. You finally get to show your shots off to the people who waited weeks or even months to see them, and glancing through the images can conjure up memorable anecdotes. But wouldn’t it be even more enjoyable to look at pictures with the people in them identified so you can quickly find those shots with certain people you want to see?

People rarely tag photos because identifying and labeling the people in them is an arduous, manual procedure. This week, I tested the new version of Google’s free photo organizing and editing software, Picasa 3 ( picasa.com) and an updated version of its free online-sharing component, Picasa Web Albums. The Web component tries to take some of the work out of identifying people in your shared photos using facial recognition. It automatically isolates faces in your pictures, invites you to identify them by name, and then recognizes these faces every time they pop up in future pictures so they can be tagged with one click and no typing.

New and Improved

Picasa 3, the Windows desktop application, includes a handful of new or improved features, including smarter editing tools, like cropping suggestions, and a one-step process to share photos from desktop albums. It also has the ability to create movies from still photos; to edit video clips and to upload those movies to YouTube. Personalized photo collages are a snap to make, and pictures can be labeled with text right on the image.

But my favorite feature, the ability to name-tag faces in photos, is found in Picasa Web Albums.

When photos are uploaded from a personal computer to Picasa Web Albums and a user enables Name Tags, facial recognition finds all of the photos containing faces and then groups together the photos it thinks are of the same person. The user must create name labels to go with each face. Once a face is labeled, the program does a pretty good job of recognizing that face in subsequent photos and suggesting a name to go with it. These labels can be seen by you or others, if you enable visible name tags when sharing.

In Sync

Another plus in Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums is that both now clearly label all albums to show which are public or private, and which are set to automatically synchronize with the Web-based versions of these albums. And these two programs are smart enough to synchronize with one another using a single mouse-click. Picasa Web Albums worked so smoothly that I often forgot it was Web-based and not a desktop application. But all photo editing and retouching must be done on Picasa 3, the desktop program. This led to many moments when I became absorbed in Picasa Web Albums and looked there for editing tools before remembering I needed to return to Picasa 3 to touch up photos.

Likewise, name tagging can only be done on Picasa Web Albums because photos must be uploaded and scanned for facial recognition to work. I found myself offline in the Picasa software, noticing a photo with a face that wasn’t name tagged and wanting to label it, but not being able to do so without using Picasa Web Albums.

Some Back and Forth

I eventually got used to this back and forth between Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, but it could be a deterrent for some users. Google (GOOG) says it is looking into how to integrate name tags with its Picasa 3 desktop software. As for making a Mac-compatible version of Picasa 3, the company says it doesn’t have any plans to report. However, the Web component, including face recognition, works fine on a Mac, and Picasa offers a free uploading utility for Macs that allows pictures to be sent to Picasa Web Albums directly from Apple’s (AAPL) iPhoto software.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the process of labeling photos with name tags. This provided a new way to sort images according to who was in each shot, and Picasa even found some hidden faces of friends I hadn’t seen in photos, giving me a new perspective on an old picture. Of course, the system isn’t perfect. A few things — including a lamppost — were falsely identified as faces in my photo albums, and it even requested name labels for the faces in photos I took of Renoir paintings.

There’s no way to completely turn name-tagging over to Picasa; you must manually assign a name to each face. But this discovery process grows smarter the more it is used, returning accurate, selectable name-tag suggestions below each photograph. A People page lists all the people whose faces appeared in uploaded photos, and I started relying on this as a quick reference tool. A photo name tag can include a nickname, full name and email. If someone is already listed in your Gmail contacts, these data are automatically retrieved and entered as you begin typing a name.

A Sync button at the top of each album in the Picasa desktop software assures users that any changes or edits made to photos in albums on the desktop will automatically be reflected in the Picasa Web Albums. I tested this many times, and uploaded photos changed quickly to match the desktop copy.

Picasa 3 offers customizable photo collages and Picasa Web Albums uses name tags to label faces in photos.

Instead of uploading photos from Picasa 3 to Picasa Web Albums and then sharing them from there, users can now hit a Share button in Picasa 3 that uploads images and emails them in one neat step. Privacy status on all albums is clearly marked, both in the desktop software and online in Picasa Web Albums, so you know if your album is private or public. These options can be adjusted in Settings, where the language used to describe sharing conditions is very clear. I liked the useful editing tools in Picasa 3, including an automatic crop tool that generated three cropping suggestion previews per photo.

Getting the Red Eye Out

A new automatic red-eye removal tool returned accurate results; it was easier to use than most because it identified red eye for me so I could fix it with one click. “Fill light,” a standby in Picasa, is a movable scale that adjusted and brightened dark, shadowy photos that were originally hard to distinguish. I even found photos that I had not previously seen in their entirety — including shots of the inside of Notre Dame Cathedral and a favorite photo of me with friends in front of a sunset.

Along with these other features, Picasa 3 has a shortcut button for easy uploading to Google’s Blogger service and one-step Geotagging, which adds location tags to photos. This software also includes a nice-looking built-in photo viewer for looking at all images on your PC. Picasa Web Albums has a mobile component and a new way of finding public photos from around the world, called Explore, which reminded me of searching on Flickr.

If you’re looking for a richer photo-sharing service that doesn’t confuse users when it comes to privacy, Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums are well worth your time. And name-tagging will change the way you sort through photos, though it would be more useful if it was available in the Picasa desktop software, as well as on Picasa Web Albums.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com