Product Review: Targus Bluetooth Laser Mouse w/ Touch Scrool (Mac)

I am a huge fan of anything that comes out of Cupertino, usually, but there are a few things that Apple just does not get right. The “Mighty Mouse” has a major flaw with it’s scroll ball. Other Mac owners will know what I’m talking about, but the way the Might Mouse is built is, it has a tiny scroll ball on top, rather then a scroll wheel, like a traditional mouse. This scroll ball is enclosed in the mouse, with no way of opening it up to clean the ball and the contacts, therefore allowing dirt to build up, and affectively, rendering that little scroll ball useless.

I have seen a few methods for cleaning the Mighty Mouse scroll ball, but I found a product from Targus that eliminates this problem, all together. The Targus Touch Scroll Mouse. This mouse is for Mac only. It is a wireless Blutooth mouse, and has all the features of Mac’s wireless Mighty Mouse, but the bid difference here is, rather than a scroll ball, it has a touch pad that acts the same as the scrool ball, but without the moving parts to get gummed up.

All the familiar Mac controls are here. Left and right click. 4 way scroll. Click scroll, to enter Dashboard. There are 2 side buttons, on the left: one activates Spaces, and the other is a regular left click. You can than download software from Targus to program the buttons to do what ever you want.

The mouse was very easy to set up and connect to my iMac, via Bluetooth. Just turn on the mouse, and start the Bluetooth Setup Assistant on your Mac. That’s it. One thing I found a little hard to get used to was, the controls are very sensative., compared to the Mighty Mouse. I had to go into System Preferences and turn down the  tracking speed and scrolling speed to very slow.

So how does the “Touch Scroll” work? It is a 4 way touch sensor on the top, and for the most part, works really well. If you have your scroll speed set too high, it goes really fast, and can be quite annoying, when you’re trying to read a small article, and just need to get to that last paragraph. Like I mentioned above, just adjust your scroll speed in System Preferences, and you’ll be fine.

I recommend this product for anyone looking for a better alternative to Apple’s Mighty Mouse. In Canada, it retails for $69.99. I am giving it 4 green candies out of 5.

Here’s a few more screen shots for you: