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The last couple of laptops I have tried to find the perfect tool setup with–if required–the right accessories to make it even better. There are a couple of sleek notebooks out there than come with a power plant rather than a power supply, if you know what I mean. These are not for me. We spend too many hours per day on the job and we charge our clients too many bucks to spend time, money or even our backs’ future to carry around stuff that does not work or not do it’s job in just the perfect way.

My problem was always with the mouse. On my desk I have a proper mouse that I take the time to connect whenever I’m at the office. But for on the road it is useless, because it is huge, has a long cable and therefore never makes it in my bag. I did not manage to find the perfect on-the-road mouse till now, so I’d use my touch pad most of the time and for the occasional presentation my little HP laptop mouse that is ok, but not more. And when it comes to Human Interface Devices, good is definitely not good enough. It has to be very closed to perfect.

I also like to use Bruno’s Kensington Wireless Presenter for pretty obvious reasons.

Now, what I do no like are dongles or how ever you call those little things that you plug into your USB port to connect through proprietary means to some external device via a technology that is already inside the laptop (Bluetooth in this case).

So I was looking for a combination of the Apple remote and the Apple Bluetooth Mightymouse for a Windows PC in a mobile form factor that does not come with a dongle or in other words supports the Bluetooth standard.

Well, here it is: The Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000

It’s a small form factor wireless multi button laser wheel mouse and a wireless presenter (Powerpoint remote control) including laser pointer as well as a general remote to operate media players and any other application that can be operated by keystrokes. It did come with a dongle, but in fact it supports Bluetooth and does work w/o the dongle when connected to any other internal Bluetooth adapter.

It really does what it is supposed to do. No cable, no dongle and connects well also after standby etc. The only little flaw is with the driver included which relies on the proprietary dongle that can not be redirected to my internal dongle. So the additional nice features and driver support for magnifier and instant viewer etc do not work when not using the dongle.

So my impression with this product is in line with my general opinion on Microsoft: they will never really and fully support an (open) standard. They will always take the time and effort to extend it to their own interpretation to force you to use one or more of their products. In this case the limited functionality is still unique and very valuable for me. If they’d come up with a driver package that will not rely on the proprietary dongle, I would actually recommend the product to others. :)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 8:54 am and is filed under Life, the Universe and Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.