It Doesn’t Jut
August 21, 2007
By Eric Grevstad
Logitech’s newest product is hardly bigger than your thumbnail. It’s smaller than most postage stamps (0.5 by 0.7 inches). You can place it on a quarter with no overhang at any corner.
Oh, yeah, it comes with a mouse, too.
The tiny trinket is what Logitech calls the world’s smallest USB receiver, tuned to the same interference-resistant 2.4GHz radio signal as most of the company’s other wireless mice. There’s a storage slot for it inside the VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks, next to the two AAA batteries, but Logitech prefers that you leave it plugged into one of your laptop’s USB 2.0 ports.
There, as a “plug-and-forget nano-receiver” (Logitech’s phrase), the gadget protrudes just 0.3 inch from the side or rear of the computer, so you can stuff the notebook into or yank it out of your briefcase with no risk of snagging or snapping the flash-drive-size adapter you get with other cordless rodents.
We used the VX Nano with two different notebooks and it was a breeze, except once when we needed to use its USB port for another peripheral. With our largish fingers, it was actually a bit difficult to grasp and pull out the nearly flush-fitting adapter.
On the Move
At $70, the Nano is priced $10 below the VX Revolution that tops Logitech’s mobile mouse lineup. Like that mouse and the desktop MX Revolution, it features what the vendor calls the MicroGear Precision Scroll Wheel — the main attraction of which is not scrolling precisely at all.
Click the wheel, and the mouse switches between conventional, one-click-at-a-time vertical scrolling and a free-spinning mode that blurs north or south through lengthy documents and spreadsheets at warp speed.
If you frequently find yourself nudging your mouse’s scroll wheel five or ten or twenty times to refer to something in another part of a file, you’ll soon get the hang of flicking the Logitech’s wheel, whether to scroll just a few screens’ distance or fly through dozens of pages or hundreds of spreadsheet rows. The feature also works more smoothly in the Nano, without the clunky shift between modes that we felt with the MX Revolution.
Another Logitech family feature is the button centered on the top of the mouse behind the scroll wheel. Use the mouse to highlight a word or phrase on screen, push the button, and you’re taken to an online search page (your pick of Google, Yahoo, Live, or AOL) to learn more about the topic. It’s another addictive feature, though we wish there was a way to flip back, Alt-Tab style, from the search window to your previous screen.