With Ultrabooks making laptops more slender than ever, it feels somewhat counterproductive to continue lugging a full-sized mouse around if you can’t get on with the touchpad. Logitech claims to have the answer with the incongruously named Cube.
As you’ll see from the photo, it’s not a cube – in fact, when I first saw it on the table at the CES Showstoppers event last night, I thought it was a discarded box of matches.
However, this diminutive little device is a portable mouse cum presentation clicker. The entire upper surface of the device is touch surface. You tap the top of the Cube for a left-click, near the middle for a right-click, and run your finger along the surface to scroll. To move the cursor, you drag the little box of tricks around like a mouse.
It’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker
I’ll stress that I only had chance to spend a couple of minutes with the Cube at the Logitech stand, and this should by no means be considered a definitive judgement, but… I really don’t like it.
The Cube is obviously very light, and that makes it hard to move the cursor with any precision. I’m not the biggest fan of trackpads, mainly due to their lack of accuracy, but I can’t see the Cube being any better in that regard. Having to retrain your muscle memory for left- and right-click could also prove an obstacle. And it’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker.
I do like the way that the Cube becomes a presentation clicker when you pick it up: you “click” the Cube to advance to the next slide, and flip it over and click the other side if you want to go back. It’s also unobtrusive: a little USB receiver sits almost flush in one of the laptop’s ports and the battery is rechargable via USB.
Whether that’s enough to justify the $70 (around £45) price tag is, at this stage, highly questionable. But I’ll reserve full judgement until we can literally get our hands on one in the PC Pro Labs.
