Microsoft's Touchstrip Arc Touch Mouse Feels Like the Future
9/02/2010 02:43:00 AM
kenmouse
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Arc Touch Mouse
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Microsoft
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Technology
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Touchstrip Arc Touch Mouse
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After the overt teasing, leaking, and then more leaking, Microsoft's finally ready to spit out the details on its Arc Touch Mouse, which at the end of the day is really just... a mouse. As we've seen, the peripheral has an incredibly unique design -- the flat device arches its back to click into a mountain shape, which actually ends up powering the little rodent up. So, where does the whole "touch" factor come into play? Well, very similarly to the Mad Catz Eclipse mouse, the Arc Touch has a capacitive touch strip with sensor pads between the mouse buttons that can be used for scrolling and customizable shortcuts. We've got you covered with some hands-on impressions and video after the break, but that's about all you'll be getting for a while since the press release below says the $69.95 mouse won't hit the market until December. Yep, December! That's a bit odd to us, but they'll be taking pre-orders today so hit the break to finally see this thing push the cursor around.
On the box Microsoft only states Windows compatibility, but when we plugged the magnetic-nano USB dongle into our MacBook Pro we were up and running within seconds -- the scroll strip even worked quite well in Firefox and Chrome. Obviously, the mouse is much more customizable on a Windows PC, and we downloaded the new drivers to the Inspiron M101z to configure some shortcuts for the touchpad. The software allows for configuring different tap tricks -- for instance, we configured a double-tap on the strip to launch Windows Flip. While the shortcut is helpful, we mistakenly ended up tapping on the pad a few times when attempting to just scroll through the page. Speaking of scrolling, it's all rather fluid and when you drag a finger over the strip there's haptic feedback, which is supposedly intended to simulate the feeling of using a scroll wheel. It's a rather odd, yet cool feeling and we've just about gotten the hang of what short and longer finger strokes will do in terms of overall control. In terms of comfort, the soft rubber grip arc is mighty comfortable, though we've only been playing around with it for a few hours so we haven't really been able to give the ergonomics of it all a fair shake. On that note, enjoy the video below and stay tuned for our full review sometime soon.
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