What is a Mogo Mouse? I've extracted this reduced-hype description from a page on their website (partially) entitled Road Warriors, Take Heart:
MoGo Mouse is a business card sized, Bluetooth-enabled mouse that stores neatly inside a laptop computer's PCMCIA or "PC Card" slot when it's not being used. Newton Peripherals introduced this user-friendly solution to mobile computing challenges, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Jan 2, 2006, in Las Vegas. Early reports from the show described it as "what a mobile mouse is supposed to be... light enough that it moves easily, yet big enough that you don't feel you're trying to work with a mouse the size of a walnut. MoGo MouseBT redefines what road warriors and other laptop users should expect from a computer mouse.
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This is a shot of MoGo Mouse being inserted into my PowerBook G4, AKA "BigGuy."
Note from the LED's blue glow that is was connected to the PowerBook at the time. |
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Here is a shot of the "MoGo Mouse with its "kickstand" lowered, which switches it on. What I like is that the kickstand is "spring loaded" so that it "gives" if you press too hard with the palm of your hand. |
Foolishly, the first thing I did was Read The Fine Manual. Why not? It's only 8 pages, two of which are covers containing nothing but advertising hype. (Why put advertising on a manual hidden inside the box? SELLING this thing is no longer the goal for THAT reader, is it?) And it covers both the PC and the Mac, supposedly.
First thing it tells me to do is to charge its internal rechargeable battery, for at least an hour. The LED that peeks out of the PC card slot shows red when charging, and becomes green when fully charged. This light is truly amazing and almost worth the full price of admission all alone.
Next, the pamphlet ("manual" is too generous a term, here) has some noise about Windoze popping up a "hardware wizard" — safe to ignore, thought I. So I jumped on down to Using, after the WINNoise. Big mistake, because in so doing, I glossed right over the part about the necessity to PAIR the MoGo Mouse with your laptop. After 5 minutes of flailing I backed up to what I thought was the Wintel nonsense, and discovered this. One would think that the manual could easily have had separate sections for Macs and PCs and not confuse Mac users with all that Hardware Wizard nonsense.
Once I read the part about pairing, it was a simple matter of holding down the left button for a few seconds while the LED turned from solid red to blinking blue, a sign they were "paired." From then on they will stay paired until 10 minutes of disuse sends the mouse into sleep mode to save battery charge. When that happens, a transparent popup informs you the Mouse has "left the desktop." To re-establish linkage, you must go through the 10-second repatriation dance. This is actually no big thing; it sounds much more onerous than it really is.
Speaking of the desktop, there is also a menubar insert that appears when MoGo Mouse is in the PC Card slot. Its dropdown menu reads: -
MoGo Mouse (Grayed out)
- Unknown Card Type (Grayed out), and
- Power Off Card (Invokable)
What happens on a Mac Laptop that has no PC Card slot, as in an iBook or MacBook; or has the newer, incompatible ExpressCard, as in a MacBook Pro? If they have BlueTooth, will MoGo Mouse work with them? Yes it will work, but there will be no way to charge it, as both the physical size and electrical characteristics are vastly different.
Overall, I liked the MoGo Mouse. A lot. But what I missed dearly was a scroll wheel. It seems to me it wouldn't take much to just take some trackpad-type material and mount it on the 3/8 inch gap between the right and left buttons, so as to easily simulate a scroll wheel. Maybe this will be a "new, improved feature" of MoGo Mouse II?
Other than the two deficiencies mentioned (doesn't work on MacBook Pro, and no scroll wheel) there are so many positive qualities about this thing, I still rated it 4.5 out of 5; about as high a rating as I EVER give.
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