Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
TrackBall Comes Of Age, April 5, 2004
The Turbo Mouse Pro Wireless is similar to the older Turbo Mouse, but has some new features to bring it up-to-date.
The wireless version works, for me, as well as a wired version, but with more flexibility. You need to keep the main trackball unit within a reasonable distance of the wireless receiver (within six feet, according to the manufacturer.) If you merely want to eliminate the wire, this is great. If you want to sit across the room, the Turbo Mouse Pro Wireless may not be the answer.
Setup is fairly straight-forward. Connect the wireless receiver to a free USB port on your Mac. Make sure the channel-select switch is set to the same position on both the receiver and the Turbo Mouse. (There is a two-position channel selector, in case of radio interference.)
The trackball uses AA batteries. If you are going to leave your Turbo Mouse unused for more than a few days, you should probably remove the batteries. Also, check periodically to see the batteries are sufficiently charged.
Kensington has also been working on the MouseWorks software. You will probably need to download an update from the Kensington web site. The version I received with mine was still beta. I have since downloaded a few different updates and it works fine with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther).
There are a total of ten buttons and a scroll-wheel. The four buttons surrounding the ball itself are for mouse click and dragging options and can be customized to suit your needs.
There are also six programmable buttons lining the top portion of the Turbo Mouse Pro. These buttons can be programmed to launch any application or jump to a favorite web page.
If you have never used a track ball before, this can take some getting used to. However, once you become accustomed to the feel and operation, you won't want to go back to a traditional mouse.
Pros: Flexible, easy to use, programmable. Scroll wheel is a nice bonus. Wireless. Smooth and precise tracking.
Cons: Large and awkward at first. OS X version of MouseWorks software still lacks some of the features of the original Mac OS 8 & 9 versions. No low-battery indicator. UPDATE: The latest versions of MouseWorks software have the ability to check the battery level in the Turbo Mouse Pro. If the battery is low, an alert box will pop up. Still, an LED or some other form of harware low-battery indicator would be useful.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Worst of the lot., May 19, 2005
I bought this because of all the rave reviews of the original Kensington Trackball (Metal housing/ADB). I had been using a Kensington 2 button trackball before this & after OSX came out, Kensington finally got their software working well & I was pretty satisfied with it. Well the upgrade to this one was a big disappointment. The software works ok, the problem is in the wireless reception. For the trackball to work properly, you have to put it on about the same level as the USB wireless radio transmitter & no more than about 1 1/2 ft. away, making getting the wireless version rather pointless. A wired version might be a little better, however the button placement makes it difficult to use, particularly the scroll wheel, which doesn't roll but jerks around & makes trying to scroll with it annoying. The large ball which sits in the center is heavy & because the little rubber feet on the bottom of the unit come off very easily the base slides around on a flat smooth surface, which if you try to put it on a keyboard tray in an ergonomic position (tilted), means the unit will slide off & onto the floor, the battery lid will pop off & batteries spill out, and, worst of all, the ball will go rolling off somewhere under a file cabinet & you have to go looking for it. I've gone back to using my Kensington 2 button, but that is coming apart & the springs are shot after cleaning it so many times (the only saving grace of this model is that it is easy to clean off the dirt). Next time I'm going to try the Contour trackball.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unstable, May 12, 2004
When I first got my Wireless Turbo mouse, I found the transparent blue ball to be a little sticky, so I dropped the putty-colored ball from my old ADB turbomouse into this new one and found it to be smoother . OK. But then my first Wireless Turbo Mouse sucked batteries; I had to change them about once a week. Kensington replaced it, and now I've been using the replacement for about a year and I'm finding that the cursor jumps randomly all over the screen. New batteries helped a little but I can be working and suddenly the cursor will jump to the other side of the screen-or if I'm word-processing, the cursor will just start drifting uncontrollably down the line. It's disastrous in Photoshop. I'm going back to usb. And I'll probably buy a Kensington Turbo Mouse.
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