That said, if you're a die-hard trackballer and can throw down $130 without immediate buyer's remorse, then the Kensington SlimBlade Trackball is a decent alternative. The SlimBlade Trackball places your hands in an awkward position and the learning curve is altogether too high for the average consumer to enjoy. The shortcut buttons and a heads-up display indicator are convenient features, but work better on a mouse with buttons seated adjacent to the scroller. The Kensington SlimBlade Trackball brings back the familiar design and adds the ability to control specific types of media using the extra buttons built into the casing.
However, using it was far from intuitive. While we're still more comfortable with the dual-functioning scroll control on the Logitech MX 1100, we can appreciate the trackball's benefit to users with prolonged wrist pain. You can also turn the ball left and right like a large knob to scroll up and down in an application. That design is quite horrendous.The SlimBlade Trackball's default setting is always in Navigation Mode, where you have complete control over cursor movements just by moving the ball around. THE HARDWARE In order to understand what is amazing about the Kensington Slimblade Trackball, one should be aware of the last redesign of the Expert Mouse. Kensington ditched the ring for the Slimblade and designed it so that scrolling can be accomplished by twisting the ball itself.Sep 8, 2010The two major components of the Slimblade Trackball are the hardware design and the software affordances.
Compare Kensington Expert Mouse And Slimblade Driver To Show
In this case, turning the ball left and right zooms into the screen, effectively increasing the size of words and pictures on a document or Web page. To Kensington's credit, a heads-up display is built into the driver to show you which mode you're in, in case you happen to lose track.The button on the upper right side of the platform puts you in View Mode. Compared to the customizable buttons on the Logitech MX 1100, where you can set a single button to lower/raise volume or change tracks, this feature just requires too much effort to be considered a seamless operation. The SlimBlade adds two extra clicks to access the media shortcuts: one click to switch modes, and one more to go back to navigation mode. The left- and right-click buttons become Play/Pause and Stop, and the knob controls volume and track adjustments.
(Windows also has a built-in magnification feature, though it's somewhat buried.) In contrast, the SlimBlade software keeps the cursor stationary, forcing you to scroll around to find what you're looking for.In addition to suffering from iPhone Syndrome, where fewer buttons are never more, the Kensington SlimBlade Trackball lacks any kind of customizable settings. In fact, Apple takes the convenience a step further by offering the option to keep the cursor in the middle of the screen, automatically moving the cursor, or only moving it at the edge of a screen. Designed for use with Web sites with tiny text, graphical documents, and word processing documents, the zoom feature is certainly convenient for the visually impaired, but we fail to see how this is more convenient than Apple's Vision Assistance feature, specifically the screen magnification setting. Again, the function requires two clicks: one to enter into View Mode, another to get back to Navigation mode.
For everyone else, we highly recommend you take a look at the Logitech MX 1100, which recently earned our Editors' Choice award for its best-in-class comfort and features. Die-hard trackball devotees might want to go with either of these basic Logitech models, which got high marks from CNET readers. The added shortcuts are theoretically clever, but in practice they require more thought than it takes to simply switch applications and press the arrow key to change tracks.
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