Almost ten years ago I bought my first wireless mouse and keyboard. I loved it, it was great not having any cables to worry about. Of course, the downside of it was having to every now and then change batteries in them – but it was a small price to pay to be freed from the prison of the cables.
Over time these accessories developed further. I replaced the mouse after a while with another cordless mouse, but this one had an optical sensor instead of the ball-wheel type mouse previously. It also showed how much technology develops, because earlier me and all my friends had written off an optical cordless mouse as completely impossible. We felt that it would gobble batteries like a meth-addict going on a bender.
Well, we were proven wrong and indeed there started existing cordless optical mousen. I still kept my original keyboard, but a while down the road I replaced the mouse with yet another cordless optical mouse. This one had the improvement of faster response and precision, something the previous mouse suffered from. Now the cordless mousen was on par with their corded brethren, and I was quite happy with this mouse. It also had the benefit of being able to recharge its own batteries when placed in the cradle provided with it.
I used that mouse for a while, until I replaced it with yet another upgrade a year or two later. This new addition was cordless, and instead of an infrared optical mouse it used a LASER to sense movement. It also had the same features as its predecessor, with some added niceties such as a indicator of battery-charge for easy assessment, and a built-in battery providing much better power and longer usage.
This seemed to be the ultimate in mousing, and I was very happy with it. So happy in fact that I kept using it for more than five years.
During this period, however, I replaced the keyboard with a new corded thing. The old cordless keyboard had been badly abused through the years, and after about eight years it needed replacing. Since I felt that cordlessness wasn’t a high priority on a keyboard (you don’t tend to move them around a lot) I accepted a corded keyboard and felt perfectly fine with it.
But alas, my trusty mouse started to give up on me after more than five years of loyal service. I felt very reluctant to replace it, since none of the proposed replacements seemed to suit my needs. They were either button-infested monsters with a million features I wasn’t interested in, or they were aimed squarely at gamers and could be adjusted with weights, had gaudy colorschemes and other trinkets that didn’t appeal to me – or, lastly, they were cheap crap that no self-respecting computer user should use.
So, I bit the bullet, re-assessed my needs and bought a corded mouse. Which I’m quite happy with, except for the occasionall annoyance of having the cable catch in something on my desk.
But it’s interesting how I’ve now come full circle after almost a decade. Going from hating cables to a cordless fascist and then back again to the feeling that, who cares about cables really?
That keyboard is really nice. Good feeling. My only gripe with it is that my right shift is flaky. I don’t think this applies to the whole model though, probably just my keyboard.