Apple Mighty Mouse review

Full Review

No we haven't taken to reviewing cartoon mice super heroes here at Pocket-lint, well not yet anyway. No, the Mighty Mouse is the new mouse from Apple that breaks from the norm by offering more than one button (though many Mac users may have just bought any competing make before now). But can the previous one-button king just change its spots just like that? We get clicking and find out.

On the surface you can't really tell what's changed. The pebble shaped mouse has all the clear lines you normally associate with Apple. Its shiny white shell offers two grey buttons at the side, a bobble on the top, and a faint logo that tries to help you justify the £35 outlay. Underneath is an optical laser and that's about it.

Left-handers will be pleased to hear this is as ambidextrous as they come and all the buttons are programmable to suit your needs.

In practice and the mouse is very easy to use. Installation to both a Mac and wait for it, PC, was easy and the configuration even easier. But what about those buttons? Hidden is the answer.

The first new button to confuse regular Apple Mac mouse users is that the single button has gone (well unless you want to program it back) click on the left side of the bobble and you get your primary response. Click on the right and you get your secondary (equivalent of pressing Ctrl) response.

Those two grey buttons are actually one, that when squeezed, action whatever command you've set to it. Apple suggests either Expose or Dashboard to begin with and we can certainly see the benefits. The squeezing action does take some time to get use to, but heavy mouse users should get used to it after a couple of hugs.

The final addition is the bobble, or as Apple like to call it, the scroll wheel. Here you can either press it to activate the fourth command or you can whizz it around in circles to achieve vertical and horizontal scrolling in your open windows. The scroll wheel is so simple that it's a wonder it hasn't been used before.

Verdict

At £35 this is an expensive mouse no matter whether it’s “mighty” or not. We found no difficult using the new buttons even though we’ve read a series of reports and reviews online to suggest otherwise, in fact we are left baffled by one we saw which suggested that Apple should release new guidelines on how to hold a mouse - poppycock is our (polite) response.

Nothing is ever perfect and for this money we would have expected it to be wireless. We can’t see any reason why it can’t be apart from Apple trying to keep the costs down.

Either way it will make your navigation around the screen a whole lot easier and if you’re a heavy mouse user who must have the Apple badge on everything you own, this is certainly one mouse to consider. At least Apple has moved on from the days when it was charging £60 for a single-button ball mouse.

• Comment on this story for your chance to win a TomTom XL Live IQ Routes Europe