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Your Next Pointer Device?

Posted by Roblimo on from the sometimes-the-old-ways-are-best dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Replacements for the rodent on your desktop are regularly being introduced. Here's yet another pointing device for you. A pen connected via radio to your PC. Movement is tracked by measuring the rolling of a small ball at the tip of the pen. This means it works on any surface. Take a look here. No Linux drivers yet, and I'll wait for the USB version. But I like the idea of a pen."

2 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Not Really Practical by waldoj · · Score: 3

    I've used pen devices. Granted, they were tethered, but the same problem applies: It's a pain in the ass to keep putting down and picking up a pen. Impractical for those of us that switch back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse frequently.

  2. Trackpoint Keyboard by jetson123 · · Score: 3
    For nerds and touch typists, I don't know of any better input device than the IBM Trackpoint. That's the same input device IBM uses on their laptops. It lets you type and mouse around without reaching for any kind of input device.

    It takes a few days to get used to it, but once you are, it's a really efficient way to move the mouse pointer around.

    I think a lot of people don't like the Trackpoint because they tried the knockoffs by Toshiba and HP; their "eraserhead" pointing devices don't work anywhere near as well as the IBM one. The trick to making those kinds of pointing devices work comfortably is in getting the mapping from force to pointer movement just right, and IBM did many years of user research and performance testing to improve that (even between IBM's different trackpoint models, there are noticeable differences: Trackpoint 4 is quite a bit more efficient than the older models).

    You can get several desktop versions of the Trackpoint keyboard from IBM. I bought Trackpoint 4 keyboards in "Stealth Black" for all my machines.