The HP WiFi Mobile Mouse (LQ083AA) Review
If there's one thing you touch more than your phone everyday, would be your mouse.
I've had my share of mice in my life, but this HP mouse is probably the only mouse of it's kind. HP has never been known for making accessories, so what makes this so special? Actually, this mouse landed on my possession by coincidence and being the tech geek I am, I couldn't resist trying it. Why? Because I simply have not seen a WiFi enabled mouse before. Plenty of 2.4GHz wireless dongle type. Plenty of Bluetooth enabled ones. But WiFi enabled? How does it even work, since I need my laptop WiFi for the Internet, will I need to disconnect my WiFi connection first?
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| HP's special little rodent. |
The first thing you need to know is that this mouse only runs on Windows 7 and above. Yes, you can't use it on a Mac. Secondly, you to install the mouse driver from HP for it to work. This driver is around 60MB in size and can be downloaded from here.
After installation, you need to run a pairing process with your laptop. Take note that not all laptop supports the SoftAP protocol which is required for this to work. Once pair, your mouse is ready to be used. Or at least that's ideally what happens. In my case, the mouse stopped working after one minute. Baffled, I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, and it started working again. But this time, it stopped intermittently.
I really wanted to like this mouse, as it has everything that is a perfect mouse to me. It was able to track on white smooth surfaces (which my normal mouse struggled), had a forward and backward botton, and the ability to change DPIs of up to four settings. But unfortunately, due to the erratic behavior, I cannot stand to use the mouse. The problem I believe is the interference of WiFi signals in my office where the mouse is unable to cope with the senses overload.
All in all, this mouse teaches us a lesson on product development:
1. Don't build something for the sake of building it. Bluetooth mice are already a very stable technology. Why go with WiFi?
2. Don't sell a commodity product that can only support a limited number of users (i.e. Windows 7 and above).
3. Making a product with a more complex installation process makes education and customer support difficult. Why is it not Plug n Play, which is expected of mice these days?
4. If you really want to release a product with a different technology, you better make sure you test it well enough to release it. In this case, it felt like the mice was not tested properly in enough environments to root out interference issues.
5. If your product sucks, then you are gonna have a lot of trouble with returns and customer support requests.
So the bottom line is, skip this mouse. It costs too much and now it is apparent HP has also given up on it (the last driver and firmware update was more than a year ago).
After installation, you need to run a pairing process with your laptop. Take note that not all laptop supports the SoftAP protocol which is required for this to work. Once pair, your mouse is ready to be used. Or at least that's ideally what happens. In my case, the mouse stopped working after one minute. Baffled, I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver, and it started working again. But this time, it stopped intermittently.
I really wanted to like this mouse, as it has everything that is a perfect mouse to me. It was able to track on white smooth surfaces (which my normal mouse struggled), had a forward and backward botton, and the ability to change DPIs of up to four settings. But unfortunately, due to the erratic behavior, I cannot stand to use the mouse. The problem I believe is the interference of WiFi signals in my office where the mouse is unable to cope with the senses overload.
All in all, this mouse teaches us a lesson on product development:
1. Don't build something for the sake of building it. Bluetooth mice are already a very stable technology. Why go with WiFi?
2. Don't sell a commodity product that can only support a limited number of users (i.e. Windows 7 and above).
3. Making a product with a more complex installation process makes education and customer support difficult. Why is it not Plug n Play, which is expected of mice these days?
4. If you really want to release a product with a different technology, you better make sure you test it well enough to release it. In this case, it felt like the mice was not tested properly in enough environments to root out interference issues.
5. If your product sucks, then you are gonna have a lot of trouble with returns and customer support requests.
So the bottom line is, skip this mouse. It costs too much and now it is apparent HP has also given up on it (the last driver and firmware update was more than a year ago).
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