The look reminds us of Motorola's PEBL mobile phone.

Remember how your mouse used to use a ball underneath itself to guide your cursor around the screen? Nowadays, optical technology is the preferred mousing method, but Kensington figured out a way to make the trackball useful again: adding it to an optically driven mouse.

You end up with the SlimBlade Trackball Mouse, with its trackball atop the mouse, where you usually find a scrollwheel. The trackball can be used like a scrollwheel in webpages, word processing docs, and so on. But Kensington went in another direction, too, letting you use it to control your cursor - in other words, the trackball itself becomes the mouse. Just press the button that surrounds the trackball, and you switch from the mouse-controlled cursor to a trackball-controlled cursor. It’s an ingenious feature that comes in handy during those times you’re using your Mac on a desk designed for a preschooler, or when you’re giving a presentation and you want to stand and roam the room.

Don’t roam too far, though. The mouse uses Bluetooth, which has a 30-foot range. It needs pair of AA batteries, and a power gauge light tells you when to slap in some fresh AAs. You don’t need any additional software to use the two-button mouse, and you configure tracking speed, click speed, and the left and right buttons in the Keyboard and Mouse pane of the System Preferences.

The bottom line. The SlimBlade Trackball Mouse is not only a nice travel mouse for your Mac notebook, but a terrific everyday mouse for your desktop Mac too.

COMPANY: Kensington

CONTACT: www.kensington.com

PRICE: $99.99

REQUIREMENTS: Bluetooth, 2 AA batteries (included)

Trackball can be used to control your cursor. Looks nice.

Limited to Bluetooth’s 30-foot range.