New Targus Bluetooth Laser Mouse for Mac: Good!
I’m testing one of the new Targus Bluetooth Laser Mouse for Mac. They’ve designed a whole series of accessories for Mac users, all are streamlined, using the same design styling.
My previous mouse was the Kensington Slimblade Presenter Mouse. It’s a small, compact bluetooth mouse that looks good and works fine. However, it seems to eat through batteries like there’s no tomorrow. 
The Targus mouse feels more like a bar of soap in your hand — longer and taller than the Kensington. Getting it paired up with my Macbook Pro was effortless. However, the disc that came with it — to make use of the extra two side buttons — was unreadable. I had to use a Windows machine to grab the .dmg installation file.
Extra options
After installation into the System Preferences, you have to reboot. Then you can set those buttons to a variety of options; the default being forward and back in Safari, but you could set up AppleScripts to be triggered, or launch a specific application.
One of the biggest pluses for me was the “quick scroll” that is available in the four-way “touch scroll” button. It makes scrolling through long web pages a breeze! That “touch scroll” works well if you can get over the fact it’s more like a touch-pad than the standard scroll wheel on most mice.
Overall this seems like a good mouse for someone wanting to make use of bluetooth on their Mac, while getting extra functionality from the additional buttons and touch scroll. And, it has something the Kensington needed, an OFF switch!
Update 10/25/08: The scrolling on this mouse is sometimes a bit too much; it scrolls too fast, too far at times. Perhaps there’s a setting or button to help this. Also, the mouse is very particular as to WHERE you click on it. So, for me, when I type, then go to click with the mouse, I don’t always reposition myself in the correct position, ending up with some unexpected results, such as ending up with a right-click when I tried a standard left-click, or a side button when I was just trying to move it. I’m not sure if it’s a design problem or a (new) user problem yet.
As someone who builds sites for a living and tests out new online applications all the time, I find that I have hundreds of passwords. Some are very valuable and some are annoyances (why did I have to create a login to get a software update from APS?!), and most are somewhere in between. Being familiar with security on websites, my logins are aways different and difficult to remember. After a while you quickly learn that postit-notes don’t cut it for keeping track of your online life.
