If you want a wire-free mouse to use with your laptop, but don't reckon you can spare a USB port for a wireless dongle, the HP Wi-Fi Mobile Mouse may be right up your street.
Unlike your average wireless peripheral, the HP is designed to latch directly on to your laptop's Wi-Fi - in theory, you can just hit the Connect button, leaving that precious USB port free.
It's a nice idea, and worked fine - once we'd got our heads around the idea that for once, the software drivers really were necessary (we've become so blase about peripheral drivers that we tried absolutely every other solution first). It's presumably in order to make the dongle-free wireless work that HP has been so prescriptive about your PC setup: as well as being a stickler for drivers, the HP Wi-Fi Mobile Mouse works only with Windows 7 machines. XP fans and Mac lads are left in the cold.
That small caveat aside, though, we were much impressed by the HP. It's symmetrical (slight dislike) and the battery panel comes off a bit too easily (likewise) but it's attractive, robust, comfortable to use and accurate.
The HP fits nicely under the palm, although as a 'mobile' product it's smaller than most desktop mice - roughly the size of the Logitech Anywhere. We liked the weight and feeling of solidity, but again, 107g shouldn't be too much of a burden for laptop-toting road warriors.
Apologies for the blurry photos, but these should give an idea of the HP's size (my hand is neither unusually large or small)
The top surface is done in a sort of black brushed-metal effect, and feels good under the fingers. The side buttons, scrollwheel and detailing are pale silver, and the side buttons protrude slightly; this makes them easier to hit. (It would be nice if the rightmost button was further forward, but that's a side effect of going for a symmetrical design.) These are pre-programmed as forward and back in web browsers.
The scrollwheel itself can be pressed downwards, as the usual 'fifth button' arrangement. This is preset to switch the mouse into a convenient fast-scroll action, whereby mousing up or down powers up or down through an iTunes library, long web page or whatever.
All of the mouse buttons can be re-programmed to other functions.
Comments
A2819274 said: My HP WiFi Mobile Mouse arrived off back-order yesterday I ordered it to compliment my HP Elitebook 8460p After nearly 2 hours of attempting to get this to work I finally gave up The mouse was detected but would not pair despite my countless attempts driver installations etc As my company just purchased 20 of these for all of our IT engineers it was time to cut my loss and start from scratch I fully formatted and reinstalled my Elitebook with Windows 7 Pro x64 Downloaded all of the latest Intel drivers direct from Intel and the latest HP drivers direct from HP matched to asset tag of laptop Finally after more than 24 hours of working I attempted one final installation of the mouse using the latest software from HP To my surprise it finally workedTo my grave disappointment the mouse is very poorly made and makes an extremely annoying squeaking sound when either left or right mouse button is pushed We will be returning all 20 units to HP as this is unacceptable Look for another mouse this one is a dud