Marginalia

Mice fascinate me. I don’t mean the little furry mammals, though actually they do fascinate me. In this context I mean computer mice. I’ve a bit of a thing about trying different types of mouse, and the latest to hit the desk is Gyration’s Air Mouse.





This is an ordinary looking cordless mouse and it works in an ordinary looking cordless mouse way. Plug the provided dongle into a USB port, hit its Connect button, hit the Connect button on the mouse, and you are in business.

But there’s more. This is one of those mice that you can wave about in the air. There’s a trigger button on its underside and if you hold this down while waving the mouse around you can move the cursor and left and right click.

In addition to the main large mouse buttons there are three programmable buttons sitting just beneath the scroll wheel. Two are simple tap buttons, the third you hold down to swipe the mouse in eight directions. To programme these and two shake control functions you need to install some software, and here I hit a snag. I was installing the mouse on a netbook without an optical drive. Copying the installation file to a USB stick was no bother, though.

The range of activities you can attach to the button presses, swipes and shakes is vast. They include launching software or issuing commands within applications, actions like image capture, zooming and opening the display configuration, and functions like closing windows, cut, copy and paste.





If the variety here is not enough you can set up screen hotspots to trigger actions. There are eight in all – the four screen edges and the four screen corners. And you can even invoke an Alt, Shift, Ctrl or Windows based keystroke combination.

And yes, all those options work both when the mouse is on the table and when it is wielded in mid air.

The Gyration Air Mouse is designed for both left and right handed users. On the desk I had no trouble at all with it. However in the air I found holding down the ‘trigger’ button on the underside was fine for cursor movement and using the two large mouse buttons, and for the shake controls. The smaller three programmable buttons were a bit tricky to reach though.

Gyration has second guessed this potential problem, and you can double click the trigger button to force the mouse into ‘motion mode’ so you don’t have to hold it down. This makes things a whole lot easier.

I am ready to pack the Gyration Air Mouse in its little travelling pouch and take it with me next time I work away from the office. I want to see the look of amazement on the faces of those on the train when I start waving my mouse in the air.

The Air Mouse costs £85 if you buy it online from Gyration.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon with Vodafone taking a look at its 360 service. Due to go live tomorrow, this service puts people at the heart of your mobile phone.

It is hardly a new idea, but Vodafone obviously thinks it needs to push itself forward in this area, believing that connected services based on aggregating social networking tools are the way forward.

The launch handset is Samsung’s full screened, touch enabled H1. Exclusive to Vodafone it is a well specified phone. It has a 3.5-inch touch enabled OLED screen, 16GB memory, WiFi, GPS, a maximum talk time of over 400 minutes on 3G, and a 5 megapixel camera. The H1 is one of two exclusive Samsung handsets to offer Vodafone 360, with the second handset to follow shortly. The service will also be offered on other more widely available handsets going forward.





The H1 runs the Lunix based LiMo operating system, and the user interface is designed primarily to appeal to a consumer market at the outset. It takes a slightly tangential approach to things, with the home screen offering views of your contacts around with you can pan with a finger. Those you contact most often are shown first, you need to pan through the list to get to those you contact least. Choosing a contact lets you see their current level of connectedness across a range of social media and initiate a contact using the method that suits you best.

Another screen, easily accessed via a hard button on the handset, offers a mix of application shortcuts and live data. A shortcut to the music player can sit right next to a display of live weather data, for example, and you can enlarge the size of the data carrying applications so that they stand out.

It is an unusual approach to user interface design, which tends to rely on a home screen offering time, date, maybe live weather, and some user identified application links. Unusual but actually, for those who see their handset as a link to their friends, very sensible.

Among the other services that form crucial elements of Vodafone 360 is an app store and access to Vodafone’s music store. Vodafone 360 is all about sharing. Part of the services includes a Web store which backs up the handset’s contents automatically and through which you can share things like photos, music and your location with others. Providing they are signed up.

That’s the rub for Vodafone. 360 will only really be a success if people sign up to it and join the community. Which means Vodafone needs to push them hard.

The lure at launch is the H1 plus Vodafone 360 services for contracts from £35 a month. Details here.

Panasonic’s Toughbooks are well known as super-rugged notebooks for specialised use. But there is a little more to the range than that, and the ‘business ruggedised’ line includes a number of machines aimed at the besuited business traveller who needs a little more solidity in their notebook than usual crop of machines can provide.

There are several options in the range, and I’ve been taking a look at the CF-T8.



The design is startling. The magnesium alloy casing can withstand 100kg/f of pressure and while I can feel some flex in the lid the outer casing is a long way removed from the display so there is plenty of protection as far as that is concerned. There are ridges on the outer casing which look distinctive and help disguise the overall thickness of the notebook.

Inside the keyboard and touchpad are spill resistant and feature a water drainage system. There is a carrying strap on the back of the shell which helps you balance the notebook in the crook of an arm when standing up. There is a touchscreen which you can use while standing – or sitting, of course. This is finger-responsive so there’s no need to fiddle with a stylus.





The notebook is surprisingly light at 1.3g, and quite small at 272mm x 214mm x 28-48mm. The thickness varies greatly with the deeper measurement at the back. This gives the CF-T8 a very sloping profile when on the desk.

There is no optical drive – but look around the CF range if you need one of these. The screen is relatively small at 12-1-inches, and a squarer shape than we are used to seeing these days. Its 1024 x 768 pixels seem somewhat behind the times.

The round touchpad looks distinctive and was not actually too tricky to get used to. You can equip the CF-T8 with mobile broadband, and Wi-Fi comes as standard. Windows Vista Business is pre installed and there’s a downgrade option to XP. There is no mention of Windows 7 at the Toughbook Web site yet.

The 160GB hard drive has shock proofing. Ports and connectors include three USB ports, Ethernet and modem, PC Card and SD and compatible card reader, monitor connector, headphones and microphone jacks and a port replicator connector. There is a manual toggle switch for wireless on the front edge of the casing.

There’s more about the Toughbooks here.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been using the Virgin Media Freedom Netbook. It is yet another broadband-in-a-tiny-computer offering that is ostensibly free if you sign yourself up to a longish contract.

The netbook itself is solidly built, with a good keyboard. It is small and light, as you’d expect (256mm x 182mm x 26mm x 1.1Kg). Its features are fairly standard netbook fare with a 10.2-inch 1024 x 600 pixel display, 120GB hard drive, 0.3 megapixel Webcam, Wi-Fi, Atom N270 processor and Windows XP Home.

I’m not sure whether Virgin Media thinks anyone will enjoy using the bright red, heavily branded neoprene slipcase, or will make any use at all of the range of stickers that are provided for you to personalise the netbook’s shell, but these things are not deal breakers.

There are just two USB ports, one on the left and one on the right side of the shell, with headphones and microphone slots also on the left side. Unusually the battery is housed on the underside of the casing so that the back is available for connectors as well as the left and right edges. The back houses VGA-out, Ethernet and a flash memory card reader slot, that latter in what is probably the least ergonomic position possible.



There’s no Bluetooth, but Wi-Fi runs to b/g and n. Microsoft Works is bundled, which means you should be able to do some useful things right out of the box.

It is all pleasing enough, but battery life is a stinker. The battery is 3-cell, offering 3300mAh which Virgin Mobile says provides two and a half hours of life. I felt lucky to get two hours of browsing and streaming from a full charge.

I was amazed that Virgin Mobile did not bother to bundle their 3G dongle with the netbook, a PR faux pas of magnificent proportions. But I used the netbook consistently with a Vodafone dongle with no ill-effects.

I’m really not sure about these free netbooks. To get this one you have to embark on a 24 month contract. There are various tariffs, and they include home broadband, telephony services and TV services. If you are already keen on Virgin Media for those, then maybe it makes sense, but I can’t see anyone being drawn by the mobile broadband offering on its own. There is just too much competition out there at the moment.

You’ll find all the current tariffs details at the Virgin Media Web site.

Researchers in the US have proved what most of us already know to be true. Walking in a straight line while talking on the phone seems to be impossible for many of us.

A team at Western Washington University has carried out some work which suggests using a mobile phone adversely affects our ability to see and interact with our immediate environment.

The study points out that those using mobile phones “walk more slowly, change directions and weave more often and fail to notice interesting and novel objects.” One such object used in the study was a unicycling clown.

The research says that phone users are ‘twice as oblivious’ as non phone users. Which, I suppose, means they are twice as likely to miss seeing something.

We all know there is a problem. How many times have you had some idiot walk into you while talking on their phone? How many times have you been on a call and some idiot not on the phone has walked right into you? Obviously you didn’t notice you were swerving and the ‘idiot’ was walking in a straight line.

On a serious note, I wonder what this really says about us. My elderly neighbour, an irregular user of a mobile phone, gets perturbed by seeing people on their phones when out and about, believing they are wrapped in their own little bubbles and that they can’t possible know what is going on around them.

She means this in a big sense as well as in the smaller sense of walking into somebody. And maybe she is right. Are we a more selfish, inward looking society now than we were twenty years ago? And if so, have mobile phones (and/or personal music players, PSPs, etc) got anything to do with it as either cause or effect?