CrunchGear‘s Devin Coleway reviewed the strange, sexy Arc mouse. He liked it.
I think this is a great little mouse. It has an eye-catching look that doubles as a practical design for travel, and it feels good to use. The only problem is that it costs about $50, a good deal more than what most mini mice run for.
It uses its own RF dongle, relies on Microsoft’s surprisingly unpleasant mouse manager software, and could be cross-promoted with a certain brand of unreliable German automobile. If nothing else, it’s more interesting than the $12 travel mice at Walgreens.
Review: Microsoft Arc Mouse [CrunchGear]
I’ve tried it out. Its a nice and well designed little product. The dongle isn’t bad either. Feels nice and solid, even how it folds up.
Why oh why isn’t it Bluetooth?
Seriously. Why is there such a dearth of usable Bluetooth mice?
Desp,
Companies use dedicated RF dongles because Bluetooth sucks.
Bluetooth goes to sleep after a few seconds and takes a non-trivial time (about 250ms) to wake up. This makes it plainly inappropriate for mousing.
Rob, as a programmer I can’t really fathom the notion that a protocol goes to sleep.
Rob, my Mighty Mouse doesn’t “go to sleep after a few seconds.” It never goes to sleep while I’m actually using my computer, only if I actually leave to buy a cake or something. Even if it was total misery, it would still be worth it to me to not have a freakin’ dongle to be swapping around…
As a programmer, Desp, you’ll have no trouble googling sniff and park, Bluetooth’s sleep modes.
My mighty mouse (and other BT models) all sleep after several seconds of not being moved, resulting in a small but annoying latency on next use. I replaced my MM with an proprietary RF mouse because of it. But if you don’t notice it, you don’t notice it!
A good experiment would be to try them one after the other to see the difference.
That is interesting… I really have not (and still, after experimenting) seen this sleep behavior on my MM… And I frequently switch between it and both the pen and mouse on my Wacom tablet (wired) which I would assume would have no reason to be falling asleep (I might be wrong here?)
My girlfriend’s Kensington (proprietary RF) on the other hand has an annoying tendency to sleep constantly, and movement won’t wake it, only clicking. Annoyingly enough, it even does this if you use the USB cable to power it.
Anyway, I’m not saying that I don’t believe you, just that I have not and still do not notice this behavior switching between my MM and my Wacom. I do notice my own problems with BT – if I have to reconnect my keyboard or if I connect my phone, my mouse becomes a laggy mess while it’s thinking all that over. The convenience factor overshadows these issues to me, and I do wish more BT mice would come out. Having to replace my MM every so often because of gunky balls isn’t so hot.
Seriously, the sleep modes arent specific to bluetooth. I got a rf mouse that sleeps after 20 minutes which isnt that bad. All wireless mice should have sleep modes simply to save power. If Bluetooth had crappy sleep modes, the ps3 controller would be useless as well because its bluetooth. If you experienced bad sleep modes, its because its most likely a crappy mouse,so for Microsoft to not use Bluetooth on the Arc is completely dumbfounded