Logitech Cordless Desktop MX5000 Laser Review

Other buttons continue the MX5000's multimedia theme. Three at top left, near the Sync button, open Windows' My Videos, My Music, and My Pictures folders (while others at top right launch your e-mail or instant messaging client).

Next to the LCD, the keyboard's most ballyhooed feature is a vertical touchpad at the left edge that lets you adjust audio volume or graphics-editing zoom up or down by sliding a finger. Touch-sensitive buttons -- or rather, small circular areas of the touchpad -- serve as a launch button and play/pause, stop, next, and previous buttons for your media player; another is an audio mute button.

Dragging zoom or volume up or down -- accompanied by a minimum/maximum indicator on the LCD -- is easy enough, although anything more than a small increment requires several swipes of the slider instead of just moving your finger between top and bottom.

With a flat, low-profile design like other Logitechs (what the company calls "zero-degree tilt"), the keyboard offers a good, medium-stiff instead of mushy typing feel. Its final bonus is a calculator key above the numeric keypad that transforms the latter and the LCD into a handy alternative to loading and clicking on Windows' calculator, with results sent to Windows' Clipboard for pasting into an application. Its final drawback is that you must press the calculator key again to return the LCD to normal duty, and the key is so close to the system suspend or sleep-mode key that we twice put our PC into hibernation without meaning to.

Park Your Mouse

The mouse half of the MX5000 bundle is the pioneering laser- instead of red-LED-light-source MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse, tested here at its debut in We September 2004, albeit in conventional 2.4GHz radio rather than Bluetooth wireless form. While the keyboard uses two AA batteries (the LCD warns you when they're low), the mouse must be recharged by returning it to its upright desk stand each night, or at least once or twice a week; this saves money on batteries but is easy to forget to do.

Laser-accurate and 800-dpi-precise on almost any surface (not just a mousepad), the MX1000 boasts Logitech's excellent, smooth-tilting as well as -turning wheel for horizontal as well as vertical scrolling mouse. The right-handed-only mouse also nudges right up against without crossing the too-many-buttons line that so tempts pointing-device designers.

Above the comfortable thumb scoop, you'll find the usual browser Forward and Back buttons. Between them, however, is a little program-menu button that's an alternative to Windows' Alt-Tab for switching among open applications. And just above and below the scroll wheel are what Logitech calls Cruise Control buttons for high-speed vertical scrolling.

All the buttons work well and are, like most of the special keys on the keyboard, programmable for other functions via Logitech's SetPoint driver software/control panel. One disappointment is that the driver's option for assigning the same button to different functions is more limited than with the MX610 mouse we praised in a review last October -- a matter of assigning the Forward and Back buttons to page up or down through Word documents or move through PowerPoint slides or Outlook messages. As with its other cordless products, Logitech also provides its MediaLife clone of Windows' Media Center Edition for from-the-couch launching of slide shows or videos.

Good Morning -- Now Wake Up

Overall, we'd give the Cordless Desktop MX5000 Laser a four- and maybe consider a five-star review ... if we didn't have to substract stars for the set's often sluggish performance.

The keyboard LCD told us "Please wait" five or six times a day while loading the driver or switching between functions, and the mouse -- completely unlike the non-Bluetooth MX1000 we tested earlier -- frequently took anywhere from one to five seconds to respond or move the pointer after we started moving it across our desk, and took more or less forever to wake up after the PC entered sleep or suspend mode.

Pushing the minute underside buttons to reconnect or sync the mouse and transceiver usually solved the problem, as did rebooting for more severe cases, but the mouse was the first in a long time -- at least the last three years of wireless-rodent testing -- we'd call unacceptably slow. A keyboard designed to reduce your use of the mouse has merit, but in this case reducing mouse usage is a priority.

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