Info Atek Super Mini Optical Mouse, Iogear offers Bluetooth Mini Mouse, Mini-Mouse Is a Bad Mom......

Atek Super Mini Optical Mouse

5/6/2001

Introduction

Has anyone ever honestly found a suitable replacement for the mouse? Be honest! Sure those trackballs and trackpads and little nubby things that stick out of laptop keyboards are good -- (in fact, I love my trackpad) -- but those can’t beat a mouse. Try a fragfest or pixel work on a Photoshop document with one of those pads, balls, or nubs and you’ll see what I mean. So, we need a mouse for some things, but carrying them around with your laptop is a little clumsy and subjects them to possible damage.

What is it?

Enter Atek’s new “Super Mini Optical Mouse,” a mouse that fulfills a simple purpose: a small, very light-weight, precise, real mouse for folks on the go.

How does it work?

How does it work? Very simply. Indeed, you can’t say anything new about this mouse that hasn’t already been said about every other mouse. You plug it in; it works.

Installation

Installation is nearly painless. There is no software included with the mouse, you simply plug it in an available USB slot. On a 2000/XP system (yes, the mouse will work with the new Windows XP), Windows recognizes it as a “USB Human Interface Device” and installs the driver. Windows 98SE is a little more tricky. It doesn’t see the mouse as the human-interface device. Rather, it asks what driver you want to install. I indicated that I’d pick my own driver, then Windows recommended the USB Human Interface Device driver. I chose that driver and installed it.*

Macintosh installation is barely noticeable. Plug it in. That’s it. The left-mouse button is your single-click. If you want to add function to the right-mouse button, you can download the USBOverdrive driver. Atek will have a full Macintosh driver extension shortly.

What can you do with it?

Well, you can simply -- mouse! Plug it in and you have a full, working mouse just like you have on your desktop. The benefits over the standard laptop offerings are many: precision, easier to use, comfortable. The benefits over a standard mouse are just as many: optical is more precise than ball-mice, no need for a mouse pad, small enough to use on the airplane trays and even your laptop’s palm-rest area. It’s very sturdy and solidly constructed.

Issues

If you’ve never used any sort of mouse besides the standard PS/2 Microsoft mice, you’re into for a small shock when you pick up this one. Unlike a standard mouse, the entire mouse can fit neatly inside a closed hand. I found the buttons a little to find a first what with the place you hold and the place you press buttons so close to one another. Indeed, you could almost call this a finger-tip mouse. Still, this issue was hardly a barrier and I became used to its size in minutes.

Mini-Mouse Is a Bad Mom

October 15, 2004

Female mice that are abnormally small due to gene “knockout” technology are also bad mothers whose poor parenting skills cause their young to die within a day or two of birth, scientists report this week in the on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since Chawnshang Chang, Ph.D., cloned the gene for testicular orphan receptor 4 (TR4) 10 years ago, he and other scientists have tried to learn its function – scientists call it an “orphan” receptor because they don’t know what protein links up with it. So a team led by Chang, director of George Whipple Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Rochester Medical Center, knocked out the gene in mice, then watched what happened.

They found that many of the mice died before birth. Those that lived are markedly smaller than their normal counterparts: They’re born far smaller and then make up some of the difference as they grow, but generally they are about 20 to 30 percent smaller by the time they reach adulthood. The miniature mice are not as fertile as normal mini mouse, having only about half the offspring as other mice.

Most visibly, the females have very bad parenting skills: They don’t build nests, nurse their young, or tend to their offspring, which die within a day or two as a result.

“Basically, we observed mothers that don’t care for their pups,” says post-doctoral associate Loretta Collins, Ph.D., who did much of the work along with Yi-Fen Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of urology. “A normal mouse will gather its offspring and crouch over them and take care of them, but these “knockout” mice just left their pups scattered about the cage.

“Our plans to further characterize behavior and gene expression in these animals will help us identify the target genes that are normally controlled by TR4 and contribute to regulation of specific behaviors,” she adds.

Scientists have known that the receptor is present throughout tissues such as muscle, spleen, thyroid gland, the testes, and the cerebellum, but they didn’t expect that knocking out the receptor would have such broad effects.

“TR4 is a master regulator that binds to other genes and turns on or blocks other genes,” Chang says. “Now we know that it plays an important role in growth, development, and reproduction as well.”

In addition to Chang, Collins, and Lee, other authors from Rochester include Cynthia A. Heinlein, Ning-Chun Liu, Yei-Tsung Chen, and Chih-Rong Shyr. The team also included Charles K. Meshul of the Oregon Health and Science University, Hideo Uno of the University of Wisconsin, and Kenneth A. Platt from Lexicon Genetics Inc. of Texas.

Creative Free Point Travel Mini mouse

May 24, 2005

REVIEW:

Well, not always - especially if you're a notebook user who has to lug a bag full of gear hither and yon. For those who travel light, Creative has made an improvement to its mobile mouse line.

The company first released a miniaturized mobile mouse with a self-retracting cable, then a wireless version that uses a thumb-sized USB transmitter that looks like a Flash memory drive. It's latest FreePoint Travel Mini mouse ($59.99 Cdn. suggested retail) is even more compact and convenient than those first two models.

First, the "more compact" bit. The original wireless mouse's receiver was a completely separate unit that sat alongside the mouse in a carrying bag, adding slightly to the bulk of the package. The newly designed FreePoint Travel Mini's receiver is much smaller and fits into a spring-loaded slot in the bottom of the mouse for transport (the new mouse comes with a fancy little carrying case, too). Besides saving a bit of space, this means you won't be digging around the bottom of your notebook bag for the transmitter - just grab the mouse, pop the receiver out and plug it into the laptop's USB port, and you're up and running. All the necessary drivers are built into modern operating systems.

As I said, the new mouse is also more convenient - in some ways - since the FreePoint is not just cordless, it's rechargeable. It has a built-in battery that fills up on juice via a USB cable while it's in use, so no more batteries to change. An auto-off feature extends the life of the batteries, and an average mobile user should get a couple of weeks of use from a single charge.

But I'm in two minds about this feature, because it means you have to carry around the cable and plug the mouse into your laptop or PC from time to time to top up the batteries (there's no way to just plug the mouse into a wall socket). The strangest part of the design is that the USB cable is only for charging - it simply provides current from the USB port to feed the batteries. So if you need to charge the mouse while you work or play, you'll have to plug the cable into one USB port and the mouse's USB radio receiver into another, taking up two ports - not very slick, and potentially a problem if your notebook only has two USB ports and you want to use a printer or scanner.

Thankfully, you shouldn't have to recharge all that often. The mini mouse is rated for around two weeks of general use on a single charge. Plus, you can forgo the AAA nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeables altogether and just use a pair of standard AAA alkalines that will provide up to three months of use per set (or just carry a spare set of alkalines around on a trip instead of packing the charging cable).

Arguments over the practicality of the charging system aside, the mouse is well designed. The two-button device has a clickable scroll wheel, and is designed for either the right or left hand. It has slightly indented sides that fit nicely into the hand, and each side of the mouse has a slightly velvety black no-slip coating, too.

The FreePoint Travel Mini is much smaller than a standard mini mouse to make it portable, but not so small that it feels like a toy in an average-sized hand (although it was also the perfect size for my five-year-old to handle easily).

The only thing I can really pick on is the fact that since it's designed for either hand, the mouse isn't overly ergonomic. It's fine for short bursts of (adult) use on the road, but for heavy-duty desktop mousing I'd still want to have a full-sized peripheral designed specifically for the right or left hand.

The wireless system performed well, too. The 2.4 GHz wireless connection sent out a strong signal within several feet of the notebook in my tests. This is more than enough for mobile users who pair the mouse up with a notebook, and I had no problems with interference during my testing. The mouse was working within seconds after plugging it in each time, and kept going smoothly and without any signal problems after that.

Like the wireless system, the optical sensor the FreePoint uses is also very stable. It has an 800 dot-per-inch (dpi) optical system that will work on pretty much any surface that's not highly polished, from a desk to a book to an airline tray.

Whether you need the rechargeable option is up to you. But either way, the Creative FreePoint Travel Mini mouse is just the thing for notebook computer users who want to travel light - and keep things compact.