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Bluetooth Versus Wireless Mice
Meneguzzi writes "Having stuck with wired mice for years, I have recently been impressed by a couple of cordless mice I've used on other people's computers so much that I now want to buy one to use with my Mac Book Pro. However, while shopping around for the perfect cordless laptop mouse I was stuck with the question of whether to go for a bluetooth mouse or one of the many proprietary cordless mice with tiny USB receivers. To my surprise, there seems to be little literature systematically comparing these two options for attributes like precision, battery life (both for the mouse and the laptop), RF interference, and whatnot. As a Mac user, bluetooth has the advantage that it won't take up a USB port, and (in theory), would consume less battery than a USB port, but I wonder if this is actually true in practice. On top of that, I noticed that there are far fewer (and less fancy) options for Bluetooth mice than there are for proprietary cordless ones. Logitech, for instance, has a very basic Bluetooth Mouse, while its proprietary options are much fancier. So I was wondering what are the experiences from Slashdotters on this particular type of hardware, and any recommendations."
I've used several bluetooth and RF wireless mice. One thing you should consider is that when the CPU is bogged down the bluetooth mouse will become jerky and unusuable.
Typically, it's because it's not used properly. The protocol itself has plenty of features for reducing power draw, and has been getting better, but a surprising number of products use the manufacturer default settings for their Bluetooth chip.
For example, the clocks at the two ends need to stay synchronized to despread the signal. The more closely synchronized they are, the smaller your listening window needs to be to catch the beginning of a frame, but the more frequently you need to synchronize (depending on the accuracy of the clock you use, which also has an effect on power consumption). There are a lot of parameters that could be adjusted, and several performance measurements that you need to balance; the manufacturer defaults work well enough, so many product teams just use them.
Those that take the time to do it right get better performance, but it's not usually noticed, as people assume that all Bluetooth devices will perform similarly (which closes the cycle of not being able to justify the effort to optimize your settings).