Microsoft Releases Batch of Windows 8 Input Devices

jones_supa writes "To accompany Windows 8, Microsoft has released some interesting keyboard and mouse devices, all of which are wireless and use Bluetooth. The Wedge Touch Mouse is an artful product shaped as an angular wedge, being compact enough for travel too. Wedge Mobile Keyboard follows the style of laptop keyboards and includes a snap-on cover. Sculpt Touch Mouse is more like a classic mouse, but features a four-way touch-scroll strip. Finally, we have Sculpt Mobile Keyboard, which is a lighter version of a classic curved keyboard. All four are on the expensive side, but at first blush seem high-quality."

Comments

Wedge (Puck) Mouse

[wazzzup]

It looks like Microsoft is taking a page from Apple and emphasizing design now - along with the warts that go with it. I've never used the wedge mouse but instinct tells me that using one will invoke carpal tunnel induced rage like Apple's Bondi iMac puck mouse and clit-scroll Mighty Mouse.

Re:Wedge (Puck) Mouse

[tlhIngan]

It looks like Microsoft is taking a page from Apple and emphasizing design now - along with the warts that go with it. I've never used the wedge mouse but instinct tells me that using one will invoke carpal tunnel induced rage like Apple's Bondi iMac puck mouse and clit-scroll Mighty Mouse.

Generally speaking, Apple mice are among the worst, and always have been since the original Mac. Mice, though. Their trackballs tended to be quite nice at least on the powerbooks way back when). Their touchpads have gotten way better in the last few years (acreage... I don't understand where PC manufacturers get their awful smaller-than-the-original-ipod-screen touchpads from that you can barely fit your finger on).

But Apple mice? Generally crap.

Re:why no wires?

[Kenja]

wireless needs batteries and can be issues in a big office full of them.

Not to worry, no one in a big office will be using Windows 8.

Re:First

[Tubal-Cain]

No, no, no. This was first.

Microsoft make good hardware

[Simon Brooke]

Microsoft should reinvent themselves as a hardware house. A lot of their hardware is very good; I've never regretted any of the Microsoft mice I've bought.

It's a shame their software is (generally) so rubbish.

Re:Microsoft make good hardware

[ArcherB]

I'll take Logitech over MS any day of the week, especially considering the differences in warranty policies. Heck, even Logitech pays both ways for shipping. That is if they even want the product back at all for warranty.

I can't speak for Logitech's warranty policies, but I've had to deal with MS once. I had one of the first laser mice (ball less?) that broke on me. I remember it came with a 5-year warranty. I called MS's support and the girl asked me when I purchased the mouse. I told her I wasn't sure, but it came with a 5 yr warranty and that type of mouse had not existed for 5 years. She laughed, took my address and sent me a brand new mouse. No questions asked. No sending my old mouse back. No receipt. No registration (who registers a mouse?). Nothing. Just here's your mouse. Thanks for playing... Love Microsoft.

Re:why no wires?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in bluetooth devices.

I've had and used a microsoft wireless mouse with bluetooth, I had to change the batteries every 3 weeks. After a few months, I got rid of it, because the upkeep was simply too high.

Release a version that runs on diesel, and then I might consider it.

Re:why no wires?

[somersault]

Logitech also do a nice solar powered keyboard. My desk doesn't get any direct sunlight, and often I leave the lights off, but it always has plenty of charge. The batteries will apparently last 3 months even in complete darkness.

Now somebody needs to make some decent solar powered trackballs or trackpads and I'll be cable and battery free :)

At the mercy of the designer and the consumer.

[pointyhat]

We appear to be entering the age where we are the mercy of the designer and the consumer.

Every "innovation" is now in the design space and is simply about establishing a brand and adding a layer of turd polish rather than solving problems or increasing efficiency.

Look at Metro, look at Windows Phone, look at these input devices, look at everything Apple has done for the last 10 years, look at everything.

It still takes us 3 months to knock out a simple bit of software, stuff still needs endless updates, problems haven't got any simpler to solve, nothing connects or works with other things properly without arguing with endless layers of configuration. Computing has become the activity, not the saviour of our time which is supposed to deliver us from mind numbing repetitiveness. We've gone nowhere.

Real technical innovation is dead. RIP.

Re:At the mercy of the designer and the consumer.

[JBMcB]

It still takes us 3 months to knock out a simple bit of software, stuff still needs endless updates, problems haven't got any simpler to solve, nothing connects or works with other things properly without arguing with endless layers of configuration. Computing has become the activity, not the saviour of our time which is supposed to deliver us from mind numbing repetitiveness.

You clearly weren't alive in the 70's or 80's, when nothing talked to anything else and nothing was easy. It would be an amazing feat to get a database to import data from a spreadsheet on the same machine. CSV was the best you could hope for, and you'd loose all your metadata. And networking two different machines together? Good luck with that. Maybe with a serial cable and some Kermit scripts, you *might* get text files to transfer if you were lucky. Unless you had a few thousand dollars for a nice DECNet or Banyan system, of course. Want wireless data access? RTTY baby! A few suitcases full of equipment and batteries and you could open a Mainframe session at 50 baud.

Now, two people can be nearly anywhere in the world and send any type of data they want to each other instantaneously using devices that fit in their shirt pocket, for the price of a few bucks a day.

As Louis CK once said, everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Re:At the mercy of the designer and the consumer.

[pointyhat]

The social and entertainment wankfest works, if it makes someone an advertising buck. The moment you're no longer earning for them, you're tossed on the street.

When it comes down to doing important things, it's a fucking disaster.

Config.sys? Yeah I remember that, setting IRQ7 and port 220h for my SoundBlaster AWE32. Hard times eh? Well compare that to trying to get VMWare ESX 4 talking to a SAN so I can persuade it that the LUN has more than 2Tb of capacity. Esp when your kit costs £0.5m a whack. Nope doesn't do it, so we have to fuck around and do volume spanning to get our desired 42Tb array (for storing real shit like financial documents and medical data, not pissy videos of your kids falling off shit and facebook wanking).

Autoexec.bat? Yeah I remember that, loading in my TSRs. Hard times eh? Well compare that to working out why the fuck an MS hotfix broke our entire .Net stack by setting cache expiry wrong, causing a problem with a certain version of IE8 which happened to be deployed to 20,000 of our client machines...

Haven't opened your PC since you bought it. We have 20x 48 Core Xeon boxes which needed assembly and arrive on pallets. That and 1540 workstations and laptops which need to be secured. We have 10-20 workstations cycled per week due to failures and users fucking them up.

I'm not doing it wrong - you're not doing enough to gain experience of how shitty it is. You are a consumer. You are the people who they bother to fix stuff for and the point of my email above. Unfortunately, what we do (the non consumerists), makes the world go round. Noone would blink an eye if half of the tech you mentioned above disappeared overnight.

Re:I don't get it.

[tsa]

So basically you need a laptop.