Apple’s Magic Mouse – reviewed

This is a guest post by Andrew Mason. Andrew is a technologist and productivity blogger who can be found at http://www.didigetthingsdone.com and twitter.com/masontech.

I placed an order for the new Magic Mouse the moment they were released. The mouse looked good and I had a use for my old Mighty Mouse so decided the Magic Mouse would be a great addition to my Apple collection.

Well, it arrived this morning delivered by DHL in a plain cardboard box. The new Mighty Mouse is no longer packaged in a box but now comes in a hard case similar to the iPod range and as always, the packaging is top quality.

Upon opening the hard case, you are presented with the mouse and a brief manual. You no longer get the driver CD as you did with the old Bluetooth Mighty Mouse.

I got the mouse out, turned it on and then went straight to setting it up, obviously tossing the manual in the bin without even reading it (ahh, a man after my own heart – Oli).

The mouse is identified as an Apple Mouse at this stage. It successfully paired with no issue. I then ran the software update to get the software for the Magic Mouse that was released last night.

67MB download for the software update, and a reboot was required to get the mouse up and running. You get a new Mouse icon in System Preferences along with a nice animated Mouse preference pane in System Preferences.

So, how is the mouse to use?

At first the mouse feels slightly awkward as it is a lot lower and sleeker than its older sibling. The feel is very similar to the iPhone and the metal sides on the Magic Mouse feel really good!

The mouse is extremely responsive, pretty much the same as the Mighty Mouse, but it is the new multi touch interface the really makes the mouse excel. The ability to use virtually the whole surface of the mouse as a trackpad is just awesome. Like having your iPhone working as a mouse!

Scrolling based on speed and also dragging your finger all the way down rather than spinning the little ball is great. Feels a lot more responsive and I am sure this is something which I will pretty soon take for granted.

The styling is awesome and turned some heads in the office and the touch interface made a couple of guys in the office seriously consider making the purchase, now that they have seen and played with one.

Sure, it is not a cheap mouse, but the mouse and keyboard is how you interact with your computer so I place a hight value on this. I have now been using the mouse for 3 hours and I can see already that it is going to be my friend for a long time to come. I may even buy another for my second Mac!

Fore more photos check out Andrew’s Flickr set here.