It’s got frikkin’ laser beams!

We’re big fans of wireless. Any time we can have one less cord snaking across our desk, we’re very happy. So when Targus sent over their new Bluetooth Laser Mouse For Mac, we were excited to give it a spin. And thanks to the Bluetooth built-in to every late-model Mac, the mouse was easy to set up and simple to use between several machines—no Bluetooth dongle required.

A quick trip to the Bluetooth Setup Assistant (System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Bluetooth > Setup New Device) got us up and running. Once the mouse was recognized, adjusting Tracking and Scrolling speeds in the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences allowed us to set the mouse’s responsiveness to levels we were comfortable with. As we usually keep our mouse tracking speeds cranked all the way up on our old USB mouse, we were surprised to find that the Laser Mouse had us turning the tracking speed all the way down before we could control the mouse with the precision we are used to—and even then, controlling the pointer never felt as sharp as our old mouse. Keep that in mind if you are someone who prefers a slower mouse—as in more movement required to traverse screen. The 1200-dpi Targus Laser Mouse is a speedy little bugger, and may not work well for people who aren’t power-mousers.

The mouse also features two programmable buttons on its left side. The Targus mouse driver installs as a System Preference, giving you the ability to launch apps, control your Mac’s volume, perform key commands, or trigger an AppleScript to do practically anything your Mac can do. In practice though, the two side buttons don’t feel like they are in the right spots for our thumb, and consequently we never got into the habit of using them. The Laser Mouse also features a cool, touch-sensitive scroll button. It came in handy for everything from Web surfing to editing large text documents. You can scroll vertically and horizontally. Unfortunately, even after several weeks of use, we were still inadvertently scrolling sideways a bit as we swiped the sensor, frequently causing content we were reading on our screen to scroll off the left side of the page. We wish Targus would offer an option to lock the Laser Mouse’s scrolling into vertical-only. And strangely, the scroll sensor also clicks like a third mouse button, although Targus’s driver doesn’t allow any configuration to make that click actually do anything.