Photo gallery: Microsoft Explorer Mini MouseDesign
While Microsoft has plodded along with the same essential shape for its basic mice — a kind of feminine curve in the middle of the fat mouse body (for more than a decade now) it's also branched out into some more interesting ergonomic shapes, and it's in this interesting shape category that the Explorer Mini Mouse fits. It's a nicely curved mouse with four primary buttons — two regular sized buttons for left/right-clicking, as well as two thin assignable buttons that run down the left-hand side, and a clickable and sideways scrollable wheel embedded as well. The shape is attractive, but does make it impractical for left-handed users.
The Explorer Mini Mouse is wireless, utilising the 2.4GHz frequency for an up to nine metres claimed range. The USB transmitter is around 3.5cm long — not as short as some wireless mouse transmitters, but still small enough to snap underneath the mouse for storage in the supplied bag.
It's also very clear that while the mouse itself has probably been assembled in a darkened Chinese factory somewhere, the design is all American. Why can we say this with such confidence? Because for a mouse that wears the appellation "Mini", the Explorer mouse is a pretty chunky beast, in deference to American tastes. It's only once you put it next to the behemoth standard Explorer Mouse (which is largely similar but boasts a rechargeable battery stand as well) that the Mini mouse looks anything like "Mini".
Features
Microsoft describes the Bluetrack technology that runs the Mini Mouse as "the four-wheel drive of mice". Thankfully this doesn't mean that they feature bull bars designed for killing pedestrians or run for approximately three seconds before requiring a fresh tank of petrol — it's got more to do with the surfaces that Microsoft claims the mice are capable of handling.
Up until the world switched to optical mice, this wasn't a problem. You could run a mechanical ball mouse over anything you liked, and it would certainly run — at least until the rollers got jammed up with crud, hairs and unmentionable sticky bits. Optical mice, have, however, been a little fussier, especially when it came to tricky surfaces like glass, carpet or granite. The larger blue beam of the Bluetrack, so Microsoft claims, is up to four times more accurate than a standard thin red laser beam, and so can manage on these tougher surfaces with more accuracy.
Speaking of the blue beam, Microsoft claims (and we're quoting here) that the "Glowing blue light effects are part of Explorer Mini's noticeable, sophisticated design". All we'll say is that when you snap in the battery for the first time, be sure to glance away — the blue light is extremely bright, and all the mousing accuracy in the world won't do you any good if you're permanently blinded by your mouse.
Performance
For a notebook mouse, the Explorer Mini is surprisingly comfortable. We often find that smaller notebook mice are in fact too small (or the wrong shape, or both) and the Explorer Mini skips these problems nicely. Even after extended use we found no hand cramping to speak of.
We were somewhat concerned with the use of a 2.4GHz bandwidth for transmission. While the signal needs of a mouse probably aren't all that high, anything that works in that crowded space only adds to the overall signal degradation of everything else, including wireless networks. We didn't specifically test how it affected our wireless network, but found no problems with the mouse itself in terms of signal strength even from some distance away, which was pleasing.
What then, of Microsoft's claims of Bluetrack's tracking superiority? Well, aside from our earlier warning about not staring into the beams (we suspect getting two of them and crossing the beams might be bad too), we couldn't find anything that the mouse wouldn't track on. A wooden desk was fine, the carpet underneath was fine, and a truly ancient glass mousepad — that dated back to the non-optical mouse days but had baffled every optical mouse we'd ever thrown at it — didn't defeat the Explorer Mini. We even experimentally ran it over the base of a custard tart, and while that was physically tricky to do, the Explorer Mini kept up admirably.
New technologies often attract a price premium, and it's hard not to notice the Explorer Mini's rather high asking price for what is, after all, a mouse. Hopefully the high fidelity of the Bluetrack system will become standard in some of Microsoft's cheaper lines soon.
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