-Hi I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for cnet.com and despite this desktop here in front of me.
Today, were gonna talk about Microsoft's new Touch Mouse.
So, what's kind of cool about this product is that it works just like a regular mouse.
It's wireless.
It has an optical sensor here at the bottom, but this whole front surface is actually one bit touch sensor, and this is designed to be a Windows 7 mouse that's because the sensor area here works with Windows 7 touch software.
So, in addition to using like standard
right and left clicks to this mouse, you can also use gesture based input in order to give you sort of a more natural feel and control on the screen.
The mouse comes with a small micro USB input pop side of the bottom like that.
So, that works pretty much as expected.
You can click to select items or double click to launch applications as normal, but the mouse really starts to shine when you start using applications.
One of the first features of the mouse is forward and back sensing.
So, if you're running your thumb along the side here,
you can navigate back and forth between web pages.
Now, with 2 finger input, you can actually control the application position on the screen.
So, I drag 2 fingers down on the mouse, the screen will minimize, drag it up, it expands.
If you use 2 fingers going to the left, it aligns the application window according Window 7 snap assignment, of course same works when you go to the right.
So, 3 finger inputs gives a macro view of the apps you have opened.
You can see if you drag up, get all 3 browsers and you can navigate the ones you want
or if you go back to that view, you can drag down to make them all disappear, same thing again if you're in an application all 3 fingers drags back down.
That's really the basic functionality, the Microsoft touch mouse.
That's actually an expensive little device too, goes for about 70 or 80 bucks at pre order from various sites online.
It should hit the market in the beginning of September.
None of those features we showed are completely revolutionary.
They do feel natural for the most part.
The most accurate is thumb motion because you have to sort of tuck your thumb in to go up and down and it's a little bit weird.
We'd probably prefer a hard forward and back buttons like you get on most mice these days, but minimizing and maximizing windows and moving from left to right on the screen really does feel pretty intuitive.
We can see using that feature right early if we had a windows 7 system and this mouse.
We also add that Microsoft has windows 8 coming out next year, previous to that operating system have shown a higher land on touch input.
We expect that it's gonna mostly focus on tablets and portable devices, but that said, we can see a touch mouse like this actually having a pretty benefit there.
You probably wouldn't wanna spend 80 buck
unless must though if [unk] wasn't gonna work with Windows 8. When asked Microsoft about, it wouldn't really commit anything regarding Windows 8 support only that you can probably expect that there will be some extendibility.
So, overall, well, this is an expensive little device.
It is pretty intuitive.
You don't have to learn a whole new touch based gesture language in order to take advance of it.
So, that's what we can recommend this thing particular for people who are actually experimenting with touch input on the desktop.
So, I'm Rich Brown.
This is Microsoft Touch Mouse.
