Apple releases a wireless Mighty Mouse

Saturday, July 29, 2006

This week Apple released the new version of their Mighty Mouse and the Bluetooth support is one of its main new features. The mouse is compatible with the 2.0 specification of Bluetooth and it needs one AA battery to work.

If you don’t notice the difference in weight terms you can also insert in the Mighty Mouse two batteries and it will automatically switch to the second when the first is flat. Apple has also implemented a power management system that reduces the power consumption when the mouse is not used and added an on/off switch to turn the Mighty Mouse off.

Another big improvement is the introduction of a laser tracking system to control the mouse movement. This translates in a better tracking (Apple says it is 20 times more accurate) and better functioning even on surfaces where usually these types of mouse devices have problems.

The Apple wireless Mighty Mouse is equipped with touch sensitive technology to provide the left and right click functionality and it can also be configured for left-handed or right-handed users. Apple also thought to old school users that want a single button mouse. A simple change in the OS X system preference pane lets the user combine the classic approach with the advantages of Bluetooth and laser tracking.

The wireless Mighty Mouse like its predecessor has a 360 degrees scroll ball that in recent versions of the Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.6 or later) can be customized to launch an application when clicked. Lastly the final customizable button is activated by squeezing its sides (even in this case you have to use a recent version of the OS).

Speaking of operating system while the previous wired version can be used with Windows XP (obviously on the new Intel powered Macs) the wireless Mighty Mouse does not work with the Microsoft OS.

The price is set to 69 dollars with free shipping (that’s 20 dollars more expensive than the wired version).