For the past year, I have been working with Windows 8 and Office 2013 and have been able to install it on several old laptops, including an old Windows XP tablet (yes, there were tablets BEFORE the iPad). Windows 8 is a new paradigm, but it worked well on these old machines. The only big difference was the lack of a touch interface. The closest was the XP tablet, but the touch driver was only a single point of touch. So I started looking for a Microsoft device to fill the experience gap between Windows 8 on old hardware and a true Windows 8 machine.
The first thing that caught my eye was Microsoft’s Wedge Touch mouse. The phrase “Optimized for Windows 8 navigation” was tempting, along with “Touch”, though the phrase “4-way touch scrolling” was a bit confusing. One store clerk mis read that as four finger touch. The images on the Microsoft website did not have any points of reference for size, so it was hard to guage the size of the device. Rather than a bubble pack, the device comes in a box the size of a paper back, so my expectations was that it was something larger than the touchpad on a laptop. Which would make sense if the device supported multi finger touch.
On opening, it turns out the device is actually the size of a book of matches. Since I was not going directly home, I was expecting to have something to read while I waited, but it only contained a booklet with one page of instructions and a product guide of legal-sleaze. So I had to wait until I got home to get more information. When I did get home I found that the instructions could have used some proof reading before publishing. I have a couple of mice that have a pretty red or blue light, but they only require the dongles to be in a USB slot, but the wedge did not mention that Blue Tooth should be turned on. (I worked that out by trying the mouse on several machines, including one that hada mouse with a pretty blue light, but blue tooth was off )
So with that, I decided to download the software. When downloaded, the software thought the mouse was an Arc mouse. I also downloaded the 97 page product guide, it had to contain more than the 12 page product guide that came with the device. Nope, this time it was 97 pages of mult-lingual legal-sleaze with no useful information. In reality, there was no documentation on the device.
So, this is not the standard, I have come to expect from Microsoft, it is more the hype style of that fruit company that sells things by just sticking an i on the name. iCloud? I wonder if they ever considered releasing their own version of Data Input/Output Transfers?
I would have expected that for a premium price that the device would have been a premium product rather than another mouse. It is cute, but it is just a mouse. If it is promoted as a Windows 8 device, it should support multi-finger touch actions
As I said, I got a wedgie from Microsoft.
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 