The AU$200 keyboard-and-wireless-mouse combo is easy to set up and requires little or no thought to use -- provided your browser of choice is Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The software takes four scans of your finger (any one will do), after which you're ready to create fingerprint logins for your favourite sites. We visited Hotmail and Gmail; on both sites' login screens, we let the keyboard scan our fingerprint on file (left index). A small window popped up, asked for our username and password, and let us either choose Submit or enter options (for example, it recognised Gmail's Don't ask for my password for 2 weeks option).
Subsequent visits to the sites required only that we submit our fingerprint, which was quickly recognised in about one second, before IE granted access to our in-box. Unfortunately, we didn't have much luck with alternate browsers such as Netscape or Mozilla's Firefox. We were able to access one site with these browsers (fantasy-football site TheHuddle.com) because it used a Windows password pop-up window, but all other attempts at using the fingerprint scanner failed. Still, for IE users, the Optical Desktop with Fingerprint Reader is a great tool for leaving your password problems in the past.
The keyboard itself comes with the standard array of multimedia and shortcut keys in addition to the fingerprint scanner, which sits on the left edge. The included mouse, Microsoft's Optical Wireless 2.0, requires two AA batteries and will serve most users well, although you may wish it had thumb-side buttons for added functionality.
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30/08/2005, 04:24 AM
Excellent Keyboard & Mouse
When i had the keyboard and mouse i set it up within minutes. Very simple and easy to use. I love gadgets so this was way up my street. The only downfall is that it can only be used with IE, I blame microsoft and i think they are unfair and that they are only doing it so people can switch back to IE so IE can have a excellent popularity rating. I likes to use Mozilla but no longer can if i want to use the fingerprint reader. Apart from this i love it and recommend it to anyone. Also the other thing is that it says not recommended for storing bank p****words etc. scares me a little as i think how secure is it really.
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04/04/2005, 07:22 PM
Worlds best keyborad!
Its wicked and fun + easy to use
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