Kurt Shintaku's Blog

• Several mice have been adjusted to all be 1000 dpi standard. This means that your mouse will be a lot more responsive and probably a lot of people (me included) will want to go into the control panel and slow it down a bit.
• Several of the mice now have an IR laser as an illumination source. Look at all the marketing links for details.

• It’s even more ergo than before, tilts both ways, has only a few hotkeys (the useful ones IMO), it still has the F-lock, but it’s persistent across reboots, it’s USB, it has the Insert block keys back to the 3×2 arrangement, print screen is no longer F-lock dependent, there are a few extra keys above the numpad which should be useful for Excel users ( =,(,),<backspace>), it has the Led indicators on the palm rest, it looks awesome, it feels awesome.
• It has a zoom slider right there in the middle… well… I guess that had to be there… my preference would be for that to scroll instead of zoom…but I’m sure zoom works for some.
• My impression: I love it! The one thing I realized that I wish hadn’t changed was the big delete key on the insert block. I find myself hitting ‘insert’ and ‘end’ way too often. I guess I got used to the new layout…
• Some of my personal thoughts: For years we have read/heard feedback (mostly from superusers, a lot of them internal to MS) about wanting a super high end ergonomic keyboard.  I have read several times of people letting us know that they think that a keyboard like this would be a wild success because they and 50 people they know on each of the 50 biggest companies in the world would definitely buy one… time to deliver!
• The range of the new wireless products is same as before (6 feet) since they use the same wireless technology (27 Mhz)

• Remember when I mentioned the Zoom function in the Software? Well several of the mice have a special button assigned to it. IT IS SWEET!. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written something for a meeting that looks great in my monitor and what when I put it up on the TVs on the conference rooms is unreadable (gotta drop down to 800×600). This features saves all the headaches every time.

The notebook products:

• Cool new notebook products, both wired and wireless.
• The new wireless mouse has a tiny receiver (smaller than before, no hinge anymore) and it still acts as an off switch when it docks in the mouse