When Apple announced the latest updates to its MacBook laptop, it also unveiled this new Magic Mouse.  It's the successor to the Mighty Mouse, which came in for a a lot of criticism when it was first released.

Today, a lot of people have products that use multi-touch technology, but now the American manufacturer has used it to replace the scroll wheel: you use the whole thing with your fingertips, whether you're scrolling down a page or making a left or right click.



According to Apple, its new mouse is ''so sleek and dramatically different, it brings a whole new feel to the way you get around on your Mac. You can’t help but marvel at its smooth, buttonless appearance.''  It's true that it certainly commands a lot of attention on the desktop, and certainly looks like no other mouse we've ever tested.  But does that make it easy to use?

Handling: too low, too heavy


We took the Magic Mouse around our lab to see what everybody thought, and despite its name, it certainly wasn't met with universal acclaim.  The two main complaints were that it sits too low and is too heavy, making it hard to move accurately.  The position of your hand isn't very relaxed either.  You push the mouse around with your fingertips while your palm sits on the desktop, unlike other 'ergonomic' mice where you hold the mouse in your hand, helping to avoid tiring your wrist out.  That's why, even though Apple enjoys a very strong following with graphic designers, we strongly recommend they don't adopt this mouse.

As usual, Apple hasn't provided any technical information about the sensor, so we got out our ruler and opened up Photoshop and worked out that it has a resolution of 800 dpi.  This means the cursor will move pretty slowly if you have a large 24'' screen.  However, the Magic Mouse would be perfectly suitable for a home user.  For doing detailed graphics work on a large screen (bigger than 24''), though, we think there are better mice out there.


Finally, sliding it across the desktop is just about acceptable but really nothing to write home about.  The Nova Slider X 600, for instance, which rests on ceramic feet, slides much more fluidly, even after a year of use.

Multi-touch, but not too much


For a lot of people, multi-touch means being able to zoom into a photo using two fingers to pinch in and out, like we've got used to on the iPod Touch and the iPhone.  You can't do that with the Magic Mouse though.  There are only three gestures available: scrolling; zooming in on the whole screen by pushing your finger up while holding the Ctrl key down and, most importantly in our eyes, moving backwards and forwards through web pages by brushing two fingers left and right across the surface of the mouse.

Settings: the bare minimum


In its search for the perfect mouse, Apple has stripped down the Magic Mouse's exterior so much that it only has two physically clickable buttons, one on each side.  That means you can't program extra features to secondary buttons, like using the Expose system for giving a preview of currently open windows or the desktop that's popular with Mac users.  As a result, the configuration options are basic and allow you to control the cursor, scrolling and double-click speed.  This is a long way from the advanced customisability of programming your own macros or adjusting the sensitivity on the fly like you can on some Logitech and Razer mice, to name but two.  For such an advanced mouse, we were frankly expecting more.