Apple Magic Mouse review

Still with us? Good, now those PC owners have gone, we can have a real discussion about what this mice means to Mac owners.

First of all, it's Bluetooth-only, and there's no wired option. Its body is a graceful convex curve. In your hand it feels a lot weightier than the Mighty Mouse, and in pristine Apple white it certainly looks the part.

The big news, of course, is mult-touch technology. The whole top surface of the Magic Mouse is touch-sensitive, so you can perform gestures on it, like you can with Apple's iPhone or MacBook trackpads.

Simply drag your finger up and down the mouse to scroll up and down inside any open windows. This also works with a left and right action to scroll sideways, and you can move your finger around in a circle to scroll 360 degrees in graphic apps, like Photoshop, Preview and iPhoto, when you're zoomed into a document.

This works much better than the old trackball, since obviously there are no moving parts to get clogged up.

By default you scroll "with momentum", which is similar to the way lists on the iPhone continue to move a bit after you flick your finger, then slow down to a stop, however you can turn this off in the preferences if you don't like it.

According to Apple you're only supposed to use one finger for scrolling about, but if you've used a MacBook trackpad before you'll be used to using two finger tips for scrolling, and the mouse still seems to handle two finger scrolling perfectly well, it's just not officially recommended, because you might get the occasional stutter.

When you click the whole surface depresses with a satisfying sound. Clicking anywhere can register as a left-click, but the top right area is reserved for right-clicking. If you're one of the 0.002% of people in the world who don't want a right-click area you can assign this back to a left-click in the preference settings.

Now we've covered the basics we can get into the features that will make Windows users jealous.