Kensington STUDIOMOUSE OPTICAL MOUSE FOR MAC DESIGNED FOR ADOBE & GRAPHICS (Kensington-64322)

Reviewed by: sekhem13

Weaknesses: Useless for graphics work

Overall: I purchased the product because the company claims it's compatable with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. However, the touchpad that has been substituted for a scroll wheel makes the product useless. I have to pound on the touchpad and dig my finger into it with my body weight behind it just to get the mouse to scroll. I think Kensington had a gorilla in mind when the designed the product. Once it begins to scroll, there's no controled motion- the document just leaps up and down- never mind the fine line or pixel level movement that is needed for high resolution graphics work. I had to use the scroll bar in the document just to move where I wanted to go. Scrolling through a text document is no better. It will irratically leap to the top or bottom or somewhere else in the document when the intent is to simply scroll to the next paragraph. I frankly would have gotten more use from a $5 mouse. I returned the product to the store after one day (even with the 15% restocking fee). I re-purchased a MacAlly mouse -they don't work well with Illustrator and tend to need to be replaced frequently but I'm quite happy with it- and quite unhappy about loosing a day of productivity to a crapy overpriced product. If you're into programing buttons just because you like gadgets, I suppose you might have some fun with this mouse. You can access menus with a click and the like, but the documentation is so incomplete you will have to figure out how to do it by trial and error.

Reviewed by: cjimbach

Strengths: Great design, matches my Mac Ti-book. Perfect shape for lefties and the optical tracking is pretty good.

Weaknesses: Very expensive. The "scroll" pad often locks and continues scrolling. Side scrolling doesn't work under OS X (duh Kensington), optical tracking occasionally freaks out.

Overall: I got the very first one of these MacConnection had to sell. The colors are very close to those on my titanium powerbook. Since this is a new product, and is designed for the Ti-book (which runs OS X), I assumed that the software would support OS X. Nope. Only certain features work. This is a very silly move on Kensington's part. I have 5 other optical mice on my desk and this is the only one that freaks out about the matte marble finish - so it needs to use a mouse pad. The shape is really a perfect mouse shape for my hands - it is low and wide and well suited to my hands. Overall, I would buy it again, but it is really a $30 mouse.