Review: Microsoft Touch Mouse

Microsoft’s Touch Mouse, aimed at Windows 7 users, is a direct challenge to Apple’s multi-touch Magic Mouse. Apple’s Magic Mouse is an uncomfortable, gimmicky device.

Did Microsoft Hardware, with its history of high-quality peripherals, do better? No, not really.

The Touch Mouse is beautiful, from hardware to packaging. But lets not be shallow. The Touch Mouse is just as low-profiled and uncomfortable to hold as the Magic Mouse. The small collection of gestures could be genuinely useful – application switching, scrolling and zooming, forward and back – but you know what’s more useful to most Windows users?

A right click.

Whether you’re ‘right’ or ‘left’ clicking on the Touch Mouse’s single physical button is decided by your finger position. This makes right clicking more difficult than it should be. It also makes it completely impossible to left-click while holding the right mouse button.

Why does that matter? It means you can’t play most first or third-person shooters. Other games in totally different genres – The Sims, for example – use similar multi-button controls. So if you’re a gamer, even for an hour every odd weekend, the Touch Mouse is useless to you.

Even if you’re not a gamer, the click-difficulty will annoy you. If you’re into mouse shortcuts enough that you’ll use gestures to navigate Windows, you probably right-drag things all over the place to copy, move and create shortcuts. Have fun with that.

Maybe, just maybe, this is one for Windows 8. We’ll have to wait and see. For Windows 7 users, this is one to avoid unless you’re in the market for novel but impractical bling.