I was always taught to "not look a gift horse in the mouth," but...
That's just what I am doing.
For those of you not familiar with the phrase, it means, when you receive a gift, be grateful for it as-is.
I believe the expression comes from the age old practice of evaluating the age and health of a horse by checking its teeth.
The theory being, if someone gives you a gift horse, don't go checking to see how old/healthy it is - but be grateful for the gift.
Anyway, not too long ago, Logitech had a web contest in which up to 20,000 lucky winners would receive a Logitech Cordless Navigator Duo™.
In a highly uncharacteristic happenstance, I found myself among that group of lucky winners.
Well, I got around to unboxing my new keyboard and mouse today.
I had a little trouble getting the mouse to behave, but that was because of my KVM switch, not the product. I ended up having to turn off all three systems attached to the KVM switch before the mouse would behave on any of them.
Now to the teeth...
Overall, the keyboard is nice. If the spirit moves me, I can now easily move the keyboard to my lap without hassling with a cord. The keyboard has a bunch of built-in quick action buttons, including buttons to launch e-mail, start up a web cam, open a browser directly into one of three different sites, and a suite of "media control" buttons. The play/pause/back/forward buttons are tied to a fairly large selection of players including MediaMatch and WinAmp. Unfortunately, my current player of choice, Media Jukebox, is not one of the supported players. Fortunately, the volume up/down and mute buttons are tied to the master sound controls, not to the media player, so those keys work even with Media Jukebox.
Unfortunately, some of the other keys, including the "F-Lock" keys don't work. These keys are supposed to provide automatic shortcuts for various applications like e-mail. I updated the drivers, rebooted, etc., but still no luck.
The overall feel of the keys is okay, and the keyboard has a nice palm rest. Of course, being cordless, I will have to change batteries every so often. It will be interesting to see how long a set of batteries lasts.
The included mouse is a nicely styled optical model. It is the first optical mouse I have ever used. I have read all sorts of reviews that say that once you've gone ball-less, you'll never go back. To be honest, I just didn't see any difference between the performance of the optical mouse, and that of the mechanical one. Maybe if I were doing highly detailed CAD or drawing it would matter... but, since I don't...
Among my host of peculiarities, is an acute sensitivity of the pad of my right index finger. I have tossed a pile of mice because the mouse button required too much pressure, causing my poor finger to throb in protest. Unfortunately, the left button on the new mouse is such a button.
The good news is that my former Logitech cordless mouse, which has a set of pillow soft buttons, works with the new receiver for the Duo.
The bad news, is that the mouse wheel no longer works. It doesn't work on the new mouse either, so I figure there is a flaw in the receiver or in the driver.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize how much I was using the scroll wheel until it was gone. The "third button" functionality of the wheel still does work, so I can use the auto-scroll feature of the Logitech mouse driver, but I don't like the functionality as much as the scroll wheel.
Before it is all said and done, I might just go back to the old wired keyboard and old wireless mouse - having looked the horse in the mouth and deciding to throw it in the barn with all the other almost rans.
But, for the time being, I guess I'll stick with this mixed-breed setup and be grateful that I got anything at all.
Digg It!
Bookmark it!
Posted by David at February 07, 2003 05:57 AM