Shortly after we covered the Logitech VX Nano Notebook Mouse, the guys from Gyration got in touch to tell us about their Air Mouse, a mini travel mouse with a twist: it works without a table. Yesterday FedEx dropped one off and we have been playing around with it.
The Air Mouse looks just like a regular mouse but it has a couple of additions. Inside there is a gyroscope, which detects motion in three dimensions. And outside, on the bottom, there is a big switch, which triggers the in-air mode. It's a little smaller than the Logitech, as you can see in the picture. It's also slightly lighter, and feels less solid in the hand.
Although it is aimed at travel use, I put it to test in the living room. I have just set up an old G5 PowerMac for use as a media center, so it seemed the perfect place to try it out. A cordless mouse is obviously better than a tethered one when you are kicking back on the couch, so a mouse that doesn't even need a surface would seem to be even better.
First, in went the dongle. The Air uses the 2.4GHz wavelength instead of Bluetooth, just like the Logitech, which means faster response and less RF interference. The dongle is big, though. On a desktop computer, size doesn't matter, but for traveling, it certainly sticks out from the side of your laptop. The tiny Logitech plug'n'forget nubbin in much better. Fortunately, there is space inside the mouse to hold the dongle.
When I plugged the USB stick in, the Mac immediately recognised it as a keyboard, and opened up this screen:
I closed the window and tried moving the mouse around. Nothing. I checked that the batteries (supplied) were in the right way, and hit the "connect" switch on the bottom of the mouse. Still nothing. There was nothing for it but to look at the instructions, where I found that you have to hit the "connect" switch on the USB receiver. After that, everything worked fine. A clear case of pebkac.
Gyration says that the mouse has limited use on the Mac -- it just shows up as a regular USB mouse. The site also tells us that the right button won't work. This may be some inside jibe at Apple's frankly ridiculous penchant for single-button mice (thankfully now cured) but the right button actually works fine, along with the scroll wheel and the scroll wheel button.
The other three buttons on the mouse's back were not recognized, though. This is odd, as OS X has support for multi-button mice built in. If you are using Windows, the supplied driver software should take care of everything, as well as offering some gesture based controls for more complex interaction (zoom, text highlighting).
Lifting it off the desk, things continued to work. You need to press and hold the trigger on the bottom to engage the drive, as it were. A double click will keep it switched on. This helps, as those with big hands may have trouble keeping the bottom button pressed while manipulating the regular mouse buttons up top. The trouble here is that once you get to the edge of the screen, you can keep on moving the mouse and -- of course -- the pointer remains where it is. Moving back again starts the pointer moving, but now you are slightly skewed, as the mouse uses relative and not absolute positioning.
The tracking, though, is accurate and smooth. It takes a little getting used to -- moving the mouse left and right does nothing. You need to treat it like a conductor's baton and point at the part of the screen you want. Ironically, the mouse tracks better in the air than it does on the table, probably because it uses a blue light instead of a laser. One nice touch: If you are in "air" mode and put the mouse down, it switches back to normal mode. Neat.
The Air Mouse is great as a remote for a media center, and would also work for presentations. As a normal, deskbound mouse it fares less well, giving a slightly jerky response to normal movements. The price is $100.
Product page [Gyration]
