Bluetooth Versus Wireless Mice 519
Meneguzzi writes "Having stuck with wired mice for years, I have recently been impressed by a couple of cordless mice I've used on other people's computers so much that I now want to buy one to use with my Mac Book Pro. However, while shopping around for the perfect cordless laptop mouse I was stuck with the question of whether to go for a bluetooth mouse or one of the many proprietary cordless mice with tiny USB receivers. To my surprise, there seems to be little literature systematically comparing these two options for attributes like precision, battery life (both for the mouse and the laptop), RF interference, and whatnot. As a Mac user, bluetooth has the advantage that it won't take up a USB port, and (in theory), would consume less battery than a USB port, but I wonder if this is actually true in practice. On top of that, I noticed that there are far fewer (and less fancy) options for Bluetooth mice than there are for proprietary cordless ones. Logitech, for instance, has a very basic Bluetooth Mouse, while its proprietary options are much fancier. So I was wondering what are the experiences from Slashdotters on this particular type of hardware, and any recommendations."
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can you get Bluetooth mice with only 1 button? (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS X long ago learned to cope with mice sporting more than one button. OS X even does The Right Thing (context menus) with the secondary mouse button by default.
And now, with the new touchpads in MacBooks (where the "button" area is also part of the touchpad), you can set it up to pretend it has one button, or two.
Here's another news flash: OS X can handle standard PC keyboards, too! If it generates a standard USB HID code, OS X can deal with it.
Schwab
Logitech fancy bluetooth mouses (Score:5, Informative)
I personnaly own a Logitech MX900 it does come with a usb pluggable pod/receiver but it is fully bluetooth compliant. I never pugged the pod's usb cable anywhere, just the power cord to recharge the mouse. And it has always worked flawlessly.
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-MX900-Bluetooth-Cordless-Optical/dp/B0000CEPDF [amazon.com]
RF vs Bluetooth Mice (Score:5, Informative)
I've used several bluetooth and RF wireless mice. One thing you should consider is that when the CPU is bogged down the bluetooth mouse will become jerky and unusuable.
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using one of those for six months now, and I have mixed feelings about it. Battery life is great, no dongles sticking out and taking up ports is nice too and it works, but it's not a very responsive mouse and I don't really like the feel of the no button design (you have to push fairly hard to click, sometimes it registers a right click as a left click and the scroll ball gets erratic two weeks before the batteries run out)
It's ok for a laptop I guess, but far from ZOMG BEST MOUZ EVER! I would never use one on a desktop.
Re:My experience... (Score:1, Informative)
You're not alone. Bluetooth is not good for this task. After the overhead, you end up with an unacceptable amount of lag and/or periodic hangs due to caching. It's just not meant for low latency streams.
The Logitech dedicated devices are far better.
Highly Uneven (Score:5, Informative)
Based on these findings, and my own experience in the embedded arena, I would hazard a guess that all these Bluetooth mouse vendors are using the same embedded microcontroller, probably with the same embedded firmware. Hence, they all suffer from similar problems.
The only mouse's reviews that didn't seem to mention these issues (at least, not as bad as the others) was Apple's wireless MightyMouse. Of course, the MightyMouse has its own set of issues, such as the pretend secondary button, but if you can work around it, it's kinda sorta not too bad.
Again, this was about a year ago. I don't know if things have improved since then.
Schwab
My main complaint with Bluetooth mice (Score:5, Informative)
I've used... 4? 5? different Bluetooth mice with my Powerbook and MacBook Pro over the past several years. The biggest issue I've had, with the lone exception of Apple's Wireless Mighty Mouse, is that Bluetooth mice take a significant amount of time (often a few seconds) to "wake up" once they've gone into power saving mode.
I've observed this same issue with Microsoft's Bluetooth Mouse (Intellimouse Explorer, IIRC), a Bluetake mouse, a Dell mouse (not sure who makes it for them), and another mouse whose lineage escapes me. If the mice haven't been moved for several minutes, you have to wave them back and forth like a madman for several seconds before they'll start to respond again.
It's certainly not an inescapable shortcoming of Bluetooth, because my Mighty Mouse doesn't have this issue - if you start to move the mouse, it responds immediately, even if it's been inactive for minutes or hours.
The Mighty Mouse has another shortcoming, unfortunately. The scrollball design is really cool and intuitive... until it gets gummed up and stops working in one direction. This WILL happen to you, repeatedly.
I love my Mighty Mouse... except when I hate it. Right now my scrollball is gummed up again, so I'm in the "hate it" camp at the moment.
Bluetooth is the way to go (Score:5, Informative)
I have the Microsoft "Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000" and it is pretty good. It definitely looked like the best reasonably priced bluetooth mouse I could find - it really is surprising that the selection is so poor. I think they haven't pushed them into the market as much as they could have, especially now that everyone knows what bluetooth is because of cell phone headsets (even though those make you look stupid ;) ). I'm a linux user, but you have to give Microsoft credit where it is due - they may make a terrible OS, but their mouse division is excellent. I prefer their mice over all the other brands.
Anyway - it works great. In use it feels no different than the "Laser Mouse 6000" I use when at home (the bluetooth one also uses laser, which I've found is actually nicer to use than LED optical), other than being smaller, of course. So there is absolutely no loss of precision - I've used it to make minute photo edits without a problem. And I've never run into interference. I mean, you're probably going to use it right next to the computer, so you should have an excellent signal. I have, however, used it from 20-30 feet across the room with my laptop hooked up to a projector, and it still had the same precision and no interference.
As you may have figured out from above, I don't use the bluetooth mouse when I'm at home at my desk. I have a USB hub with a few things plugged into it, including the Laser Mouse 6000, so I just plug that in when I get home with my laptop. That's because a full-size mouse is easier to use, not because the performance is any different, and it's also to save batteries. However, the battery life is actually excellent - with normal usage, the two AAA batteries the mouse uses last several months or more for me.
Apparently some bluetooth mice go inactive after a while, and take a couple seconds to respond again. As you can imagine, this would be annoying. With this one, though, while it does go on standby after several minutes, it starts responding again in under a second. It's never annoyed me because of that.
Pairing it with the computer works flawlessly as well; after the initial pairing all I have to do is switch it on and it starts working after just a second or two, with no intervention required. Of course, bluetooth is partially broken in KDE 4.2 and it takes some fiddling, but that has nothing to do with the mouse and I assume with OSX it works.
Finally - I don't like the idea of having to plug in a little receiver. It wastes a USB port, which are often lacking on laptops, and it would surely be easy to lose. Besides those mice being cheaper, I simply don't understand why you'd want to add another thing when your computer already has bluetooth built in.
All Logitech Bluetooths have a common problem (Score:4, Informative)
I've used 3 mice in their range.
The problem is the mouse goes to sleep very quickly (only a few minutes) and then misses movements for quite a time (perhaps 1/4 second) when waking. It tries to compensate by getting the first movement it recognizes and multiplying it up, so your first movement when the mouse wakes is usually a huge jump in one direction.
Also, they don't seem to use terribly good optical sensors in their Bluetooth mice, they have more trouble with surfaces than any other logitech made in the last two years.
The only Bluetooth mice that don't have this problem are Apple's, but they don't have real buttons on them.
I still use a Logitech Bluetooth mouse on my Mac Mini, but I keep wishing for something better.
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:5, Informative)
What is wrong with wire? (Score:4, Informative)
Problems with both BT and IR:
IR mouse has further disadvantage that there must be visibility between the USB thingy and your mouse.
Therefore if you are organized (i.e. never forget to take spare batteries and never put anything between mouse and USB thingy) athlete (doing arm training) go for wireless.
If you are disorganized nerd like me, keep wired one.
What I know, I suffered to learn... (Score:2, Informative)
FYI, I now own nearly identical spec. Logitech mice. A bluetooth and another with a little USB thing to go with it.
As an Ubuntu user, I first found www.hidpoint.com that promised to provide drivers to get my proprietary mouse to function. To date, they've never delivered a driver I can use, say in 64bit.
However to my shock and amazement, sometime a few months ago, the proprietary unit Just Worked! Seemingly it was some Ubuntu patch. I had to try on several boxes and it worked consistently. I think those hidpoint folks might redirect support accordingly perhaps, just to save everyone's time?
BUT, before this happened, because I really needed a wireless mouse, I bought a bluetooth since I used Ubuntu which Logitech CLEARLY does NOT support. Battery life sucks thick canal water!!! Like daily recharge? WTF!?
meanwhile months after the fact, I am still using the free El Cheapo batteries that came with my proprietary Logitech USB mouse, while the bluetooth mouse that costs about 175% of the proprietary model sits idle for this reason.
Re:My main complaint with Bluetooth mice (Score:5, Informative)
"The scrollball design is really cool and intuitive... until it gets gummed up and stops working in one direction. This WILL happen to you, repeatedly."
Agreed. I have a client with this problem. What is your solution to unsticking it?
Put some alcohol on a lint-free cloth, lay it flat on a table, then roll the mouse around upside-down on it so that the scroll ball is being rolled around. The alcohol seems to free up a lot of the lint and dirt that gets in there.
For God's sake no! (Score:5, Informative)
I am Mac sysadmin. I admin about 50 Macs in a design agency. The Apple Mac Mighty Mouse is usually the first thing that the designers throw out (bad form factor, cramps in the hands, poor right click functionality, the scroll ball gums up far too often and is difficult to clean, the cord is far too short etc) and the wireless mouse compounds all of that with terribly poor battery life and bad response times. The only way it'll be useful is if you use rechargeable batteries.
Do yourself a favour: get a Logitech RF wireless, whichever one suites your tastes. They have fantastic battery life (8 months on my Logitech LX7 [logitech.com] ) and Logitech almost certainly has one that will fit in your hands. Personally, I love the hard rubber grip on the sides of their mice.
The downside is that you need a USB receiver for them.
Re:My experience... (Score:2, Informative)
Bluetooth in a crowded environment have a tendency to make the computer (windows xp only?) hang because everybody is running around with cell-phones with bluetooth on and it becomes a lot of negotiations and discoveries going. So I have disabled bluetooth at work.
But bluetooth has one advantage in less crowded situtations, two bluetooth mices does not disturb each other! At home we had a problem that the wireless mouse and keyboards where disturning each other, when my wife was moving the mouse (trackball actually) then I could not use mine. It did not matter that it was different manufacturers and I tried several different combinations. Finally I changed into using bluetooth mouse and wired keyboard.
My bluetooth mouse is a logitech V470 and it works flawlessly. I have not not noticed the lockups I had at work even when sitting in crowded places but it might be that I am using Linux in my laptop and that the problem is a Windows only problem.
At work I am now using a Logitech V220 cordless. It also works perfekt and there is no disturbance from collegues. In a tight cubicle landscape it might be a problem like I have at home but we have our own offices.
If you do not sit cramped together with others using wireless mice/keyboard then I recomend standard rf-wireless. If you get problems then switch to bluetooth.
Re:Related Question: Interference in a Lab? (Score:2, Informative)
I set up a training workshop with a number of cheap Microsoft mice, and yes, they did interfere with each other. These were standard RF, not Bluetooth. I would venture to say Bluetooth mice uniquely pair with your PC and would not have the same problem, though someone else may correct me.
The upside however was that the range was fairly small so I was able to separate them enough to minimise interference. I would still probably recommend wired mice if you're going to have a lot of them, though.
Re:My experience... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. The dongle will be in HID mode, so simply presents as a basic keyboard/mouse. Otherwise users of bluetooth keyboards would be up the creek with using the BIOS, or anything else that doesn't have a bluetooth stack.
Re:RF vs Bluetooth Mice (Score:3, Informative)
That would make bluetooth mice impossible to use with games. This isn't true. They're still not as good as wired mice, but they're not bad. The refresh rate is noticeable lower, which can be an issue, but only for the hardcore.
Re:Bluetooth (Score:3, Informative)
everything has bluetooth inbuilt now
When buying my new laptop (~1 month ago), one of the things I wanted was bluetooth. It turns out that most people didn't use the bluetooth in their laptops, so manufacturers started pulling it from just about every model you can find. Going to the local shops, only about 10% of the laptops had it. For god's sake, there were almost as many with blueray drives as bluetooth!
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:2, Informative)
That aside, the device is a rugged thing. I've had mine for several years, and it shows absolutely no indication of wear. Since you don't need to pick the thing up and move it around, it needs very little desk space. It works perfectly on Linux with the standard USB interface or with a PS/2 adapter if you prefer. I used to get some pain in my wrist and arm after long sessions at the computer with ordinary mice, but that is a thing of the past now.
Since the OP referred specifically to power usage, I have to say I don't know how much power the USB transmitter drains (since I use mine with a desktop machine it's a non-issue) but I think I have replaced the battery in the actual mouse only once or twice at most.
Re:My experience... (Score:5, Informative)
What you are experiencing is a feature of some bluetooth chips (notably those manufactured by CSR, which includes Dell's chips) which is designed to support using a bluetooth keyboard in a bios. Bluetooth keyboards and mice use the Bluetooth HID profile, which is the USB HID protocol wrapped in a thin bluetooth layer. These chips support an HID proxy mode, where the chip identifies as a USB HID device, and then simply removes the wrapping from incoming HID commands and dumps them on the USB Bus (yuck, PIN Number syndrome, but the redundancy was necessary for clear expression here :( ), and does the reverse too, which is a bit trickier.
The net result is that usb keyboards and mice probably automagically work with your computer. I've no real understanding of how this interacts with bluetooth device pairing, as I've never gotten this to work for me, but hopefully it requires you to first pair the keyboard or mouse in question with the bluetooth chip while running an OS with bluetooth enabled.
Re:VX Nano (Score:5, Informative)
I was a little dissapointed that it was RF, but the dongle it uses is TINY and can be just left in the laptop (even when in a bag).
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:3, Informative)
Admittedly, the right-click takes some getting used to, and I still don't get it right once in a while, but the buttons are there.
Re:Can you get Bluetooth mice with only 1 button? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You ask us a question... (Score:5, Informative)
Typically, it's because it's not used properly. The protocol itself has plenty of features for reducing power draw, and has been getting better, but a surprising number of products use the manufacturer default settings for their Bluetooth chip.
For example, the clocks at the two ends need to stay synchronized to despread the signal. The more closely synchronized they are, the smaller your listening window needs to be to catch the beginning of a frame, but the more frequently you need to synchronize (depending on the accuracy of the clock you use, which also has an effect on power consumption). There are a lot of parameters that could be adjusted, and several performance measurements that you need to balance; the manufacturer defaults work well enough, so many product teams just use them.
Those that take the time to do it right get better performance, but it's not usually noticed, as people assume that all Bluetooth devices will perform similarly (which closes the cycle of not being able to justify the effort to optimize your settings).
Re:I would like to reinforce (Score:3, Informative)
You could fix the ring thing by sticking 3 or 4 pieces of teflon tape under the mouse. It's sold for exactly that purpose. I still won't get a mouse where the right-click functionality could "use some improvement", but then again I'm not using OS X.
Re:My experience... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bluetooth (Score:3, Informative)
There are tiny USB BT dongles that aren't much bigger than the USB port itself. Check dealextreme.
Re:For God's sake no! (Score:4, Informative)
One more caveat on Apple mice worth mentioning explicitly; they only have one clicker for the multiple mouse buttons (as others have mentioned) which means it's impossible to a L+R simultaneous click. Since some apps do use this combination explicitly (i.e., Blender), this can be very frustrating.
(Blender does have offer an alternative way to trigger/emulate this mouse combo, but that requires holding down a key on the keyboard, and thus is considerably less elegant/easy to trigger.)
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:2, Informative)
Read the instruction manual: you'll find that you just have to hold the mouse by those two lateral buttons (not squeezing them, just holding) and you'll be fine!
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:2, Informative)
Having worked at Logitech... (Score:4, Informative)
...I had tons of Mice to play with (though I wasn't in their mouce/keyboard) department.
Anyhow, Here is what I can tell based on experience and currently owning and using both Bluetooth and Wireless mouse from Logitech. On Mac and PC.
- Logitech Wireless technology is very mature, almost flawless, offers more bandwidth to mouse than Bluetooth, helps in gaming.
- Bluetooth mice have a very slight lag at start of mouse movement, u become accustomed to it in a day or so. Almost as if they were in sleep mode and had to wakeup.
- If you game, stick with wireless, lag will drive you in sane.
- Battery life is effected more by Laser or Optical vs Bluetooth or Wireless. I can't notice much of a difference.
- I don't charge either of the mouse for weeks (they are both laser). Use them for few hours every day. they charge in under an house when the battery is down.
- I repeat, if gaming, stay away from Bluetooth
- On my PC (though never on Mac), the damn Bluetooth mouse sometimes hangs. Possible Bluetooth drivers, but I can't say.
- Oh Pairing, thats a bitch. Consider a keyboard and a bluetooth mouse, its not paired to your mac, so you either use shortcuts to get it to pair with your mac, or use another temporary mouse. Problem is compounded if keyboard is also bluetooth. You basically have no way to tell your MAc what to do, unless you hook up another keyboard/mouse.
- On Linux, stick with wireless, it is detected as any good old USB mouse.
If you can spare a USB, go with Wireless.
If that slight lag at start is a non-issue, once paired to a Mac, the BT mouse works great, without issues.
My $0.02 (CDN) (Score:3, Informative)
I've used a LOT of mice over the years, and I went wireless way back. Currently I use a Logitech MX Revolution on my main home machine and another on my work notebook when it's docked. For travel, I use a Logitech V470. I'm no hardcore gamer, but the Revolution has always performed very well in every application up to and including casual gaming. The V470 is my second Bluetooth mouse (on my second Bluetooth notebook) and also performs very well.
I use my notebook all day every day at work, so I only get about a week of battery life out of the office Revolution, but it charges fairly quickly and I always have the Bluetooth mouse for backup if the Revolution runs low while I'm working. No manual switching necessary, it just works. The V470 runs on AAs, and I have yet to need a battery change, but I've only had it for a few months.
The one thing that will drive you crazy with some Logitech wireless mice, the MX Revolution among them, is their crappy charger design. I love the mouse, but you have to keep the charging contacts very clean (especially on the mouse, where a small pencil eraser helps) and fiddle with placement in the charging cradle waaaaay more than you should, especially with an older one. It's enough of a problem that I've seriously considered "acquiring" some electrolytic paste (like they use on ECG contacts) to make charging easier. That being said, it's still worth it.
To zero in on your original question - I would avoid USB dongles unless they are tiny enough that you can leave them plugged in all the time. I killed my first notebook (the one before the one before this one) by plugging a USB dongle into it one or more times a day - eventually the USB port separated from the motherboard, and everything went to hell after that. This, incidentally, is why I use a dock at work... and why both of my subsequent notebooks have had Bluetooth and a Bluetooth mouse.
So... I'd say go Bluetooth, and the V470 is a good choice if you're after a compact ambidextrous mouse with good battery life and a power switch (you want a power switch). Good luck!
Re:You ask us a question... (Score:3, Informative)
I've tried bluetooth mice, and there's a bit too much lag on it for me. Also, bluetooth drains batteries a hell of a lot more than RF wireless.
I assume you mean "more than [other] RF wireless". I've got the Dell-badged Logitech mouse/keyboard combo (from a wootoff). Both the keyboard and mouse are powered by 2 AAs, and I get about 2 months battery life from both. If I use rechargeable batteries, I only get a few weeks, since they self-discharge faster than the hardware drains them . . . I've never found mouse lag to be a problem, except when the mouse is sleeping and has to wake up again -- if I'm using it constantly I don't notice a problem. I don't play games, though, so I can't address lag in that context.
It comes pre-paired with its own dongle, you'd have to do some research to use it with another adapter. The upside to that is that it looks just like a USB keyboard/mouse to your OS in stock configuration.
Re:Why on Earth a Mouse Pad? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd say your assertion depends on the surface and mouse - my LED optical mouse fails to read either on my glass covered kitchen table or my black computer desk. My newer laser optical mouse fails to read on the glass table but handles the black desk just fine.
From my experience, Bluetooth tends to eat more power than proprietary standards, but proprietary is less compatible than other standards. Bluetooth did come up with a low power spec [wikipedia.org] recently, but I doubt there are any devices out that use it. I get about a week of use on my proprietary Bluetooth Logitech mouse (but incidentally, I have the same non-bluetooth mouse on another computer and it gets about the same). My proprietary and newer Logitech laser mouse [logitech.com] gets about 5-6 months on two AAA batteries (the package said it could last a year).
Re:Bluetooth (Score:3, Informative)
I had three of those from dealextreme. None of them worked.
Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse (Score:2, Informative)
Exactly, and that is one of my biggest complaints about Apple. On one hand you have people claiming how simple and intuitive they are.
On the other hand how are the following the least bit intuitive?
-Right click on older Mac Book Pros requires you to place to fingers on the track pad and then click the giant mouse button that easily could have been split in half.
-Scroll wheel on iPods, who knows what you're doing half the time.
-Pressing "Enter" in Finder on OS X does a "rename". Huh? What's the single press button to open the damn file?
-"Home" and "End" in Mac OS X. I may as well rip these keys off the keyboard because by default they're useless compared to there behavior on a PC.
-iPhoto: Try to delete something, I dare you. Hint: don't try the obvious stuff like the "delete" key or pressing "right click" (I'm assuming you already know you're Mac hardware's obscure Konami code-esque right click combination)
For all Apple's UI preachy-ness you'd think they'd have figured out the value of a right click context menu by now.