Rudolph the red-nosed mouse - let your thumb do the walking
Written: Oct 31 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Neat, comfortable, powerful, cool-looking, versatile, accurate, it glows
Cons: complicated for someone used to a one-button mouse, slightly less facile than a plain trackball.
The Bottom Line: This is the most useful, sensible, well-designed, durable and comfortable pointing device I've ever used. It has all of the functions a mouse should have.
ajwall's Full Review: Microsoft Explorer (D68-00002) Trackball
Amazing... this USB cable transmits enough electricity to light up this little round mousey-ball thingy...
That was my first thought when I plugged in my mouse explorer trackball for the first time. Well, I finally got tired of periodically cleaning the fuzzy gunk out of the inside of my Intellipoint Smartmouse. So, for the past week I had been experimenting a with an alternative a simpler trackball - you know, the kind with a prominent central ball and buttons to either side. Then an ad for this thing caught my attention. I was intrigued by the thumb-ball because it seemed like a smart idea.
Let me tell you, I am an experienced user of pointing devices and it was a long painstaking process that brought me to my current contentment with this trackball. I like to place those shooter games which demand rapid and extremely precise pointing UNDER PRESSURE - and Counterstrike(tm) commandos will not settle for anything less. After some getting-used-to I am now a happier and far more deadly gamer with this thing.
I started out last month with a regular Intellipoint mouse equipped with one of those nifty scrolling wheels (which also allows you to either zoom your sniper rifle or switch weapons rapidly in an emergency with most shooter games.) Sometime mid-year I noticed that other people were pegging me impossibly rapidly over long distances in the game and I realized that they must have discovered a better pointing device than my mere mouse.
The typical trackball allows you to roll around with two or three of your fingertips which allows you to have quite a bit of control, but the clicking part tends to be annoying. You find yourself reaching with your pinky for the right-click, the poor little guy isn't made for that kind of strain! Not only is your clicking slightly hampered, but you have no hope of doing any of that cool scrolling with an intellipoint wheel. When I played my homicidal games with a trackball like this I was much faster than with a mouse, but I couldn't do that weapon switching and zooming that I was babbling about earlier.
The Trackball Explorer gives you all of the speed and tidiness of a trackball, with the power of an intellipoint mouse. You let your thumb do the walking, so to speak.
Thumbing it, as I mentioned, takes some practice but it doesn't take long. Additionally, the mouse comes with driver software that allows you to customize your pointing to the geometry of your particular thumb. This means that if you find yourself moving the mouse diagonally instead of straight up and down because of the way you hold the Trackball Explorer, you can fix it to work with your hand.
The icing on the cake, of course, is that this device is OPTICAL. There are no moving parts to clean, a light sensor takes the place of little internal mouse wheels.
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