You just bought yourself a brand new laptop, but you don't get along that well with the touch-pad right? It happens to a lot of us, what you need is a mouse, if your laptop has Bluetooth you can go for the Bluetooth version of the mouse and still keep all your usb slots (no usb dongle needle, that is just for the regular wireless mice).To keep things as simple as possible I'll just talk about the different features that you need to take into consideration while choosing your Bluetooth mouse.
Mouse Sensor
We can have three types of sensor, mechanical, optical and laser. The first one is pretty much outdated nowadays, and it is only used on trackballs, still you might remember back in the day where your mouse had a plastic ball underneath, that ball would then move two or three rollers inside the mouse, and that would trigger the movement. This old technology had problems, would only function correctly in a very smooth surface (mouse pad) and collected grime and dirt from the surface, eventually you would have to clean the ball and the rollers, and you would notice an immediate improvement on precision.
What you can see in stores as far as mice go are the optical and laser sensors. The optical uses light the detect movement, so it is more precise than the mechanical, also since the sensor never touches the surface you get no dirt on it, so you really don't have to deal with maintenance. This light is not harmful to the eye, usually it is red in color because that is the colour with less wavelength (less power needed), so far so good, but this sensor will have trouble moving in textured and uneven surfaces, you can use this on your desk directly, but not on your leg, or in glass.
Bluetooth scroll wheel optical mouse review
As far as DPI go, optical can reach a rough max of 1000DPI, more then enough for the regular computer usage (document processing, browsing, general applications).Now the laser is a different story, same principle as the optical, but it uses a laser to do so, it is a lot more precise, as it can now reach up to 4000DPI, uses even less power as the optical and has no trouble with rough or uneven surfaces (some can even work in glass desks), the only downside is that you shouldn't point the sensor to your eye, since it works with radiation that could pose a problem.
A few years ago i would say you should only go for a laser if you work in Design/3D or a first person shooter gamer, since all these applications need a lot of precision, but nowadays the price between optical and laser is roughly the same, so I would advice you to shell out a bit more and get the best possible, specially if you are using this in a laptop, because often we like to use the computer in bed or in other less standard places, and a mouse that can deal with rough surfaces is a must.
The Birth of the Bluetooth Mouse
Battery Life Indicator
Since we are talking about a cordless solution mouse, we will use some sort of batteries, despite some models claim they can last half a year, eventually you will run out of battery life, and will need to recharge or get a new set; that can happen while you are just browsing at home in your relax time, or during a very important work related presentation when you are already a bit stressed out. This situation can be avoided if your Bluetooth mouse has a battery life indicator, that is nothing more than one or more lights that let you know how much battery juice there is left, you might find this irrelevant, but when the time comes you will wish you had one of these.
Scroll Wheel Design
I'm not even going to cover the mouse without a scroll wheel, because those just don't make in sense nowadays, still has far as scroll wheels go, we also have some different designs that will or will not fit your need. First off we have the classic wheel, just moves back and forth so you can do the vertical scroll at any given time. We also have the more advanced wheel that also acts as a button, so you can scroll again vertically and still click it as you would in a button, this usually triggers a special mode where you can scroll vertically (or horizontally in some cases) with the mouse movement, as opposed to the wheel.
Finally we have a relative newcomer, that is the trackball in place of the wheel, this way you can scroll in any direction you like with no need to press in any button or drag any bar, some models even have a mode that uses this small trackball as the mouse itself. It is just a matter of choice really, most models have the wheel with the button function, and i think that this is the standard that you should base upon.
IOGEAR Bluetooth Optical Mini Mouse
Size
This is really key when you want to use the mouse with a laptop, I'd say that we can have two categories of small mice, the standard laptop mouse, that is a smaller version of the desktop, and still retains all of it's functions (apart from the cord and battery that is), and we have the micro-mice. This second really really small mice, are good when you really don't care about features and just want the smallest mouse possible, because in regards to quality they do break a lot more often than the laptop ones.
Usually don't have Bluetooth, just regular wireless that takes up one usb slot, or cordless (most cases really), also they lack precision (small dpi) since all is really shrinked up; personally i would not go for these as you will eventually drop them or the buttons will start to stick, until a really decent one comes along, don't even bother with these, because the big companies that develop mice don't even have these models in their range (guess why).
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