Xebec Tech M-touch wireless optical mouse

Apple set a trend with its Magic Mouse, which doesn't have any buttons – instead it has a touch-sensitive top surface that the user taps or strokes to perform various actions (it's easier than it might sound).

The Magic Mouse is expensive at £55, so a cheaper alternative would be welcome, and Xebec Tech's M-touch is just that – a wireless mouse that has no buttons, so it relies entirely on gestures to perform actions.

The M-touch comes with a CD for installing the mouse driver and software. The software lets specific actions be programmed for different gestures on the mouse. So, for example, sliding our fingers to the left made our web browser navigate backwards through the websites we had visited.

Sliding two fingers across the mouse can be set to display the desktop, open the Run command box or lock the PC. It sounds great in principle but in reality, nearly all of the gestures failed to work.

The mouse was unresponsive at best and even performing a right-click was a chore as the mouse rarely recognised what we were trying to do. More complex gestures that required sliding fingers across the mouse hardly ever worked, and often the mouse mis-recognised them, doing one thing when we had made the gesture for something else. This made using the gestures almost impossible.

While it looked good, we found the M-touch was awkwardly shaped and too small to be comfortable. It was both narrow and short, which made using it for prolonged periods irritating.

The Xebec Tech M-touch has some clever ideas, but it seems to have proved that there's a reason the Apple Magic Mouse is so expensive: the cheaper alternative just doesn't work.

The M-Touch mouse is available from Digiland - click here for details