Cool Yule rating: 3.5 stars $59.99
Price:
Description: The Kensington SlimBlade is designed as a fully functional “Media Mouse”. At first glance, the SlimBlade looks like an everyday wireless laser mouse. However, it offers additional functionality over an everyday mouse, with features such as volume control, and the ability to pause/play feedback on your computer. Instead of a scroll wheel, the mouse also includes a trackball for scrolling.
The pad found on the back/bottom of the mouse allows for volume control, and the option to rewind, skip ahead, pause and play media on your computer. While the volume control always worked, in my tests I found that in order to take advantage of pause/play, skip and rewind, you had to have the appropriate application open and in focus. For example, when trying to pause a song in iTunes, the application had to be the active application (tested on a Windows XP machine), it couldn’t be minimized. This is a somewhat serious drawback, and one which I hope Kensington patches soon. Fortunately, volume control worked regardless of what was active on the computer. The trackball took some getting used to. While I was initially frustrated using it, after about a day of use it became in some respects preferable to a scroll-wheel.
Overall, if you use your computer speakers as your primary music player, the SlimBlade is a good investment for its volume control and wireless features alone. If you tend to watch lots of videos in iTunes or Windows Media Player, the additional functions such as pause/play become more useful.
