It is a calculator. It is a wireless mouse. It is a Bluetooth numeric keypad. It’s… really bizarre. Canon’s X Mark I Mouse Lite takes everyone’s favorite desktop rodent and tries to make all of it fancy like, filling that wasted space below the mouse buttons with a calculator — monochrome LCD and all. Except that the unused space below the mouse buttons isn’t wasted in any respect — it was designed for resting palms, not poking fingertips. The result’s a mediocre mouse paired with a mediocre calculator, for $60. Sadly, it isn’t nearly as elegant of an answer because it might seem to be, and after a pair days of use, we were able to switch back to our boring old single-function mouse. So what exactly left us so unimpressed? Jump past the break to determine.
Hardware
Ignoring the rather large full-function calculator taking over two-thirds of the X Mark I’s front face, the mouse itself is very boxy and oddly flat, lacking the curved top that makes other mice a lot more comfortable to apply. The mouse pairs along with your Mac or Windows machine using Bluetooth, that’s also how your computer will recognize entries from the numeric keypad, located just under the left and right mouse buttons. There’s also a scroll wheel with click functionality at the front, and a recessed Bluetooth pairing button at the back. Below the pairing button, you’ll notice a dual-mode power button, with positions for “PC” and “Mac.” Both positions worked just fine when pairing with our MacBook. The mouse is supplied in black or white, and is powered by a couple of AAA batteries — there is a compartment simply to the left of the pairing button.
In case you have average-size hands, half your palm will float freely over the numeric keypad. Not ‘hey look, we’re on top of the world’ freely, but rather ‘it’s really about time I had somewhere to rest’ freely. We didn’t get tired using the mouse, necessarily, but we definitely longed for a smooth, curved face on which to rest our sweaty palms. As a mouse, it felt accurate and reasonably responsive, though not as smooth because the standard mice we’ve become aware of.
Calculator
Like most desk jockeys, we spend an excellent period of time doing random calculations. A $12 receipt plus a $17 receipt equals a slightly unpleasant $29 roundtrip in a taxi for a gathering across town — that sort of thing. We usually use a software calculator for this brain-busting simple arithmetic, however, and located it simpler to continue doing so despite a glittery new 10-digit calc sitting right there in the midst of our mouse. Once we did use the combination cruncher, we found it more well-off to boost up the mouse and place it directly in front folks, in place of repositioning over the mousepad. Since we frequently do calculations and move the cursor simultaneously, we found it awkward and counterproductive to exploit the device as both a calculator and mouse.
Given that you should purchase a calculator for a dollar in some parts of the sector, a $60 calc better get the job done no less than besides. Fortunately, it does, but that does not exactly leave us impressed. The Mark I (a completely, very distant cousin to the Mark II ) does pull off a fine looking neat trick: tapping the “KP” button (for KeyPad) forces the mouse out of calculator mode and into numeric input device mode, letting you type numbers at the mouse just as you could on an ordinary numeric keyboard. This can be an appropriate option in case you wouldn’t have a dedicated number pad nearby, but with small, crowded keys, you are not going to enjoy using it for long.
Wrap-up
As you’ve got ascertained, we are not really sold in this hybrid mouse / calculator concept. Half-baked or not, we just don’t see the purpose. We imagine that this was a fun little project for Canon’s design team, but we’ll be sticking to our separate mouse (and virtual calculator) for now, and forever.
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