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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."
Honestly, I have recommended it to everyone I know. It's quite honestly the best mouse I've ever used.
It's only flaw is that it doesn't have Bluetooth, but at the same time its battery life is about 4 times as long as my desktop's (also a Logitech) Bluetooth mouse.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Having been a rabid Mac user and advocate since 1992, I have to say: Apple *sucks* at mice. My roommate has a wireless Mighty Mouse, and it never right-clicks properly for me.
However, you may love it; my roommate swears by the thing, and never has any problems.
So basically, my post is useless, except to say that whenever you can, try before you buy.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
...And we'll fight about every little detail, go off-topic, crack jokes about welcoming you to the year 2000, debate form over function, laser over inferred, brand versus brand versus model, and in the end you'll still have to decide for yourself.
Have you at least read the reviews on Amazon? Are we only deciding blue-tooth versus wireless, or do we have to pick the exact model for you? Is your 'perfect mouse' going to be someone elses 'perfect mouse' and vice-verse?
Not actively trying to troll here, but wanting to bring your attention to the fact that it ends up being a very heavy personal decision based on your preferences, hand-size, availability, etc...
...is that a dedicated wireless tech like Logitech's is better than Bluetooth.
My Bluetooth mouse at work occasionally lags behind, or sometimes stops moving for short whiles (even when it's not fallen asleep). Generally it seems the Bluetooth layer adds the occasional issues encountered with wireless networking in general.
I haven't ever seen this with Logitech's dedicated wireless devices.
Then again, I could just be a victim of bad drivers. :)
.: Max Romantschuk
Unfortunately, I've found the Mighty Mouse completely unusable. They continued using a single button, and instead it senses where your finder is to determine if you are left or right clicking. If you rest your fingers on the mouse, it can't detect this properly and instead always registers a left click. I wasn't able to get used to this and instead just went back to using the trackpad.
It takes some time getting used to the right click mechanism. I know I didn't become comfortable with it for a few weeks, but now I find myself slightly lifting my index finger off of standard two button mouses as if it were my mighty mouse.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
I personnaly own a Logitech MX900 it does come with a usb pluggable pod/receiver but it is fully bluetooth compliant. I never pugged the pod's usb cable anywhere, just the power cord to recharge the mouse. And it has always worked flawlessly.
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-MX900-Bluetooth-Cordless-Optical/dp/B0000CEPDF
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.
Your decision to move to a system that requires an independent power supply (batteries) is an invitation to Murphy to send his law to your house / place of work at the most inopportune moment.
Oh, and radiation. I'm sure it'll kill you too. Bluetooth will force you to visit your dentist too.
Plus what are you going to fight off the ninjas with if you don't have a mouse cord?
Holy surrealism, bantha!
I've been using one of those for six months now, and I have mixed feelings about it. Battery life is great, no dongles sticking out and taking up ports is nice too and it works, but it's not a very responsive mouse and I don't really like the feel of the no button design (you have to push fairly hard to click, sometimes it registers a right click as a left click and the scroll ball gets erratic two weeks before the batteries run out)
It's ok for a laptop I guess, but far from ZOMG BEST MOUZ EVER! I would never use one on a desktop.
Based on these findings, and my own experience in the embedded arena, I would hazard a guess that all these Bluetooth mouse vendors are using the same embedded microcontroller, probably with the same embedded firmware. Hence, they all suffer from similar problems.
The only mouse's reviews that didn't seem to mention these issues (at least, not as bad as the others) was Apple's wireless MightyMouse. Of course, the MightyMouse has its own set of issues, such as the pretend secondary button, but if you can work around it, it's kinda sorta not too bad.
Again, this was about a year ago. I don't know if things have improved since then.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I've used... 4? 5? different Bluetooth mice with my Powerbook and MacBook Pro over the past several years. The biggest issue I've had, with the lone exception of Apple's Wireless Mighty Mouse, is that Bluetooth mice take a significant amount of time (often a few seconds) to "wake up" once they've gone into power saving mode.
I've observed this same issue with Microsoft's Bluetooth Mouse (Intellimouse Explorer, IIRC), a Bluetake mouse, a Dell mouse (not sure who makes it for them), and another mouse whose lineage escapes me. If the mice haven't been moved for several minutes, you have to wave them back and forth like a madman for several seconds before they'll start to respond again.
It's certainly not an inescapable shortcoming of Bluetooth, because my Mighty Mouse doesn't have this issue - if you start to move the mouse, it responds immediately, even if it's been inactive for minutes or hours.
The Mighty Mouse has another shortcoming, unfortunately. The scrollball design is really cool and intuitive... until it gets gummed up and stops working in one direction. This WILL happen to you, repeatedly.
I love my Mighty Mouse... except when I hate it. Right now my scrollball is gummed up again, so I'm in the "hate it" camp at the moment.
#DeleteChrome
I have the Microsoft "Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000" and it is pretty good. It definitely looked like the best reasonably priced bluetooth mouse I could find - it really is surprising that the selection is so poor. I think they haven't pushed them into the market as much as they could have, especially now that everyone knows what bluetooth is because of cell phone headsets (even though those make you look stupid ;) ). I'm a linux user, but you have to give Microsoft credit where it is due - they may make a terrible OS, but their mouse division is excellent. I prefer their mice over all the other brands.
Anyway - it works great. In use it feels no different than the "Laser Mouse 6000" I use when at home (the bluetooth one also uses laser, which I've found is actually nicer to use than LED optical), other than being smaller, of course. So there is absolutely no loss of precision - I've used it to make minute photo edits without a problem. And I've never run into interference. I mean, you're probably going to use it right next to the computer, so you should have an excellent signal. I have, however, used it from 20-30 feet across the room with my laptop hooked up to a projector, and it still had the same precision and no interference.
As you may have figured out from above, I don't use the bluetooth mouse when I'm at home at my desk. I have a USB hub with a few things plugged into it, including the Laser Mouse 6000, so I just plug that in when I get home with my laptop. That's because a full-size mouse is easier to use, not because the performance is any different, and it's also to save batteries. However, the battery life is actually excellent - with normal usage, the two AAA batteries the mouse uses last several months or more for me.
Apparently some bluetooth mice go inactive after a while, and take a couple seconds to respond again. As you can imagine, this would be annoying. With this one, though, while it does go on standby after several minutes, it starts responding again in under a second. It's never annoyed me because of that.
Pairing it with the computer works flawlessly as well; after the initial pairing all I have to do is switch it on and it starts working after just a second or two, with no intervention required. Of course, bluetooth is partially broken in KDE 4.2 and it takes some fiddling, but that has nothing to do with the mouse and I assume with OSX it works.
Finally - I don't like the idea of having to plug in a little receiver. It wastes a USB port, which are often lacking on laptops, and it would surely be easy to lose. Besides those mice being cheaper, I simply don't understand why you'd want to add another thing when your computer already has bluetooth built in.
I've used 3 mice in their range.
The problem is the mouse goes to sleep very quickly (only a few minutes) and then misses movements for quite a time (perhaps 1/4 second) when waking. It tries to compensate by getting the first movement it recognizes and multiplying it up, so your first movement when the mouse wakes is usually a huge jump in one direction.
Also, they don't seem to use terribly good optical sensors in their Bluetooth mice, they have more trouble with surfaces than any other logitech made in the last two years.
The only Bluetooth mice that don't have this problem are Apple's, but they don't have real buttons on them.
I still use a Logitech Bluetooth mouse on my Mac Mini, but I keep wishing for something better.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Meh, tell your friend to try out one of logitech's revolution mice. Those things are so damn nice to use: ergonomic, laser, wireless, with a scroll wheel that can continue spinning. Seriously, apple's (old) insistence on a one-button mouse and introduction of the 'puck', I just haven't bothered to look to apple for a mouse device.
Problems with both BT and IR:
IR mouse has further disadvantage that there must be visibility between the USB thingy and your mouse.
Therefore if you are organized (i.e. never forget to take spare batteries and never put anything between mouse and USB thingy) athlete (doing arm training) go for wireless.
If you are disorganized nerd like me, keep wired one.
:: There is no light at the end of a tunnel. There is a tunnel after a tunnel : Thom Y.
I have a wireless keyboard and mouse bundle, and I have never have any problems with batte
Get Bluetooth if you have it built in. Even if you don't have it built in (which having a Mac you do) get Bluetooth. It beats having a dongle for every damned device you want to plug in (keyboard, game control, mouse, headset) the Bluetooth one can do all of it.
DO NOT get a fucking Apple Mighty Mouse. I've had a couple, great idea in theory, but not a good mouse in practice. Right click sucks. It works at first and stops working over time. If you completely remove your index finger from the mouse and click with your middle finger you can usually get a right click, or if you take out the batteries and put them back it works again. It's not worth it. The ball always gets fucked up over time, you can fix it and it will work again for a while, then fix it again, and again, and eventually, not anymore.
Get this Logitech, reviewed it, you can find my review in that link, and I did chastise Logitech a bit, but when compared the other Bluetooth mice I've used that's the best.
The USB wireless mice do have one advantage. They work immediately on boot up no problem on every OS. With Bluetooth I've found that to be the case with Linux. On Mac I have to either hit the connect button while booting with the Logitech (the Mighty Mouse actually did better at this - go figure) or fidget with the buttons and hope the Mac pics up on it after a while. With Windows, well, very mixed experience there, especially when it forgets the mouse should exist.
On my Macbook Pro I always carried a mini bluetooth keyboard and a mouse in my bag, and I left a bluetooth keyboard and mouse on my work desk, used Synergy at home. I had at least 3 each keyboards and mice paired with it, they all worked great every time. I even paired a bluetooth headset with it, but that seemed to be problematic. Audio quality would degrade with time, and the applications were stupid, if the headset wasn't present it wouldn't automatically switch back to the built in or external mic/speakers. Not to mention I paired a Motorola Q, a Blackberry and an iPhone. The Q was awesome with it, surprising since it sucked all around otherwise. The Blackberry was functional, but not that great. There was no point with the iPhone. I don't even see why it's pairable.
Linux on the other hand, I've paired everything above and a PS3 Sixaxxis, the Mac I could only get that to work via USB.
I like Bluetooth, I'm pushing Logitech to support it a bit better, and I can't wait for the day the dongle dies. The electronic dongle, not my dongle.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I am Mac sysadmin. I admin about 50 Macs in a design agency. The Apple Mac Mighty Mouse is usually the first thing that the designers throw out (bad form factor, cramps in the hands, poor right click functionality, the scroll ball gums up far too often and is difficult to clean, the cord is far too short etc) and the wireless mouse compounds all of that with terribly poor battery life and bad response times. The only way it'll be useful is if you use rechargeable batteries.
Do yourself a favour: get a Logitech RF wireless, whichever one suites your tastes. They have fantastic battery life (8 months on my Logitech LX7 ) and Logitech almost certainly has one that will fit in your hands. Personally, I love the hard rubber grip on the sides of their mice.
The downside is that you need a USB receiver for them.
Mice is the one thing where Microsoft is better than Apple.
Yeah, I've stuck with corded mice too. Every time I've used someone else's wireless I hear the stories. From the WoW tank who's mouse battery died while the guild had the last boss to 1% hp for the first time, to the intermittent rolling and clicking. It just all sucks. Plus, I don't want to be buying batteries all the time, or plugging my mouse in like its a Norelco razor. I am damn happy with my corded mouse. 100% reliability. Doesn't get much better.
My dad has a cheap USB cordless laptop mouse, one of those super tiny ones with a single AAA battery. It works like a charm. But I would never use one for my desktop.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Same here. On a laptop a thingy in a USB port is very unhandy because if you use the computer on the couch or in bed there is a chance that it will be forced to bend due to folds in the upholstery or the sheets. This can cost you your motherboard. I don't want to risk that.
-- Cheers!
what so many others have said:
The Apple "Mighty Mouse" is the best mouse to use with the Macbook Pro. There are several reasons for this. Let me take care of the negatives first:
(1) Right-clicking can be a pain. You have to move your finger way over to the right-hand edge of the mouse, and maybe even lift your other finger. This is the one thing I can say that they really screwed up. On the other hand, considering that their original mouse had only one button, it's still an improvement.
(2) The bearing surface is a smooth (teflon?) ring, all the way around the mouse. As a result, there is a bit more drag than there is on other mice, and the ring tends to pick up a bit more dirt than other mice do.
Now for the positives:
(A) At least there is a right-click. And in fact there are actually 3 buttons: press the ball on the top for the 3rd button, much like you press the wheel on other mice.
(B)I got that wrong. I forgot about the side-buttons, which work as a pair. Squeeze them together, and they behave as a 4th button.
(C) The Mighty Mouse works seamlessly with the Macbook over bluetooth. In fact, my regular work setup is a Macbook Pro with a Mighty Mouse and their bluetooth keyboard. There is NO noticeable lag, glitching, or delay like there are with some wireless mice. It is rock-solid.
(D) The battery life is great even if you just walk away at the end of the day, and if you want even more life, there is an off-switch on the bottom. I have had this mouse for over a year, I am a professional developer, and I often do not bother to turn it off at the end of the day. I think it was just last week I inserted my 4th pair of AA batteries.
(E) The ball on the top is a full trackball, far superior to wheels, even the wheels that tilt for side-to-side. You get full 360-degree control, and very smooth. Nothing else on the market has a full 360-degree secondary control like this. Scrolling horizontally is as easy and instinctive as scrolling vertically.
(F) This is the only control device (mouse or trackball) I have EVER owned for more than a year without having to at least partially disassemble it for cleaning.
I am not sure what else I can say. The right-click could use some improvement. Big deal. And the ring on the bottom should probably be 3 or 4 teflon pads instead; also "big deal".
And you are getting this from a long-time Windows person. There are some Apple practices or design decisions that I am still not convinced about. But as for the Mighty Mouse: the pluses so far outweigh the minuses that this is a no-brainer.
Cordd kyboards ar the most rliabl kind and thr's vry littl than can go wrong with thm. I'v bn using this old Chrry modl for yars and it's still as good as nw.
No, it is well documented that the Mighty Mouse is poorly engineered for the right mouse function (and this coming from a rabid mac user since 1988). Just because some people "don't have problems" with it doesn't mean it isn't poorly engineered. They do have problems--they choose to ignore them, or think they are insignificant (which is fine), but in the spirit of helping others on a discussion forum, it's best to be honest of real shortcomings.
...I had tons of Mice to play with (though I wasn't in their mouce/keyboard) department.
Anyhow, Here is what I can tell based on experience and currently owning and using both Bluetooth and Wireless mouse from Logitech. On Mac and PC.
- Logitech Wireless technology is very mature, almost flawless, offers more bandwidth to mouse than Bluetooth, helps in gaming.
- Bluetooth mice have a very slight lag at start of mouse movement, u become accustomed to it in a day or so. Almost as if they were in sleep mode and had to wakeup.
- If you game, stick with wireless, lag will drive you in sane.
- Battery life is effected more by Laser or Optical vs Bluetooth or Wireless. I can't notice much of a difference.
- I don't charge either of the mouse for weeks (they are both laser). Use them for few hours every day. they charge in under an house when the battery is down.
- I repeat, if gaming, stay away from Bluetooth
- On my PC (though never on Mac), the damn Bluetooth mouse sometimes hangs. Possible Bluetooth drivers, but I can't say.
- Oh Pairing, thats a bitch. Consider a keyboard and a bluetooth mouse, its not paired to your mac, so you either use shortcuts to get it to pair with your mac, or use another temporary mouse. Problem is compounded if keyboard is also bluetooth. You basically have no way to tell your MAc what to do, unless you hook up another keyboard/mouse.
- On Linux, stick with wireless, it is detected as any good old USB mouse.
If you can spare a USB, go with Wireless.
If that slight lag at start is a non-issue, once paired to a Mac, the BT mouse works great, without issues.
Actually, no, iMacs come with optical mice. Apple doesn't sell any other type and hasn't for a few years.
I had a boss who insisted on outfitting me with an all (clear) glass desk and a wireless mouse and keyboard. The glass desk made the optical mouse about worthless -- I had to get a mouse pad. But even worse was that I was working sometimes 18 hours a day, and the wireless mouse and keyboard were constantly running out of power. I had to get a bunch of rechargeable batteries and a station, but eventually I just replaced them with a wired set because it was just a pain in the ass and I didn't care about how it looked. It took my boss eight months to use up the batteries in his wireless mouse, though. That probably says something ...
I still use a mouse pad no matter what the surface is, though, because I find that any uneven or slightly reflective surface makes the pointer jump. The semi-gloss desk at my new job is just terrible for the optical mouse -- and my wife gave me this neat-looking mouse pad that is glossy and has the same problem.
I had three of those from dealextreme. None of them worked.