Targus presenter
From TMUG - The Triangle Macintosh Users Group
The Targus BlueTooth Presenter, made for Mac.
Physical design: The Presenter is a white and grey plastic candy bar, with a nice heft to it and a fairly solid feel and comfortable curves. Power is provided by two AA batteries (included!).
Clustered at one end are a handful of buttons and a disk that houses the optical "touch scroll" sensor. This works in much the same way as an optical mouse, only, rather than dragging the sensor across a surface to track movement, you drag your finger across the sensor. It's a much better solution than many handheld mice I've used that tried to incorporate a small trackball or joystick-like mouse. The only real drawback to the optical tracker is that the cursor often jumps a bit when you lift your finger off the sensor.
This is more than a small problem, considering the buttons for left- and right click are separate from the sensor itself, and to click on something, you need to lift your finger off the sensor. In use, I found I was constantly flying off the target of my click just before I was able to select it. In fact, the intuitive thing, and the first thing I tried, is to press down on the sensor for a click. Unfortunately, Targus decided that the big shiny button should trigger the built-in laser pointer, and not a mouse click. If you don't see the little red dot appear on a wall somewhere, you're likely to think the button is broken, as it has no other visible effect.
The default functionality is easy enough to get used to, but seems like a design flaw to me. Also, the left/right click ring button is the only part of the Presenter that feels cheap. The button has a lot of flex and play to it where the other buttons all feel more solid.
I suppose the laser pointer makes sense when the Presenter is used in "slideshow" mode, rather than "mouse" mode, but since most of the other buttons have multiple personalities depending on which "mode" is selected by the sliding mode select switch, it would make sense for the most accessible button to be the mouse click when in mousing mode.
This brings up another annoyance with the button layout in mouse mode. To click and drag, it takes both hands, or a pair of nimble fingers. It's impossible to hold down the mouse button and drag at the same time without employing at least a second finger.
Installation and software:
Installation was straightforward, however there was a small but annoying glitch that needs to be worked out or worked around.
After turning the remote on for the first time, the central LED should begin blinking, indicating it is ready to pair with your Mac. I set my iMac to "set up BlueTooth device" selected "mouse" and the Presenter was found right away. Everything worked fine, but as soon as the connection was confirmed, a dialog box popped up asking for more details about the keyboard I had connected. Since I didn't connect a keyboard, I dismissed it.
When I deleted the Presenter from the iMac and added it again, this time searching for "any device" instead of specifically a mouse, and specified an empty passkey (BlueTooth devices usually need a key to identify which computer they're supposed to pair with. In some cases, like mice, there's no way to input a passkey on the device, so it needs to be set to "empty"), everything connected without trouble, and there was no annoying keyboard confusion.
Once that was worked out, the mouse part of the Presenter worked as advertised. The optical sensor tracked my thumb reliably, and was easy to configure for a comfortable tracking rate using the keyboard & mouse preference pane.
The supplied software doesn't add much in the way of additional configuration, except to define the custom keystrokes for two of the Presenter's buttons. The rest are pre-set, and can't be changed.
In fact, the two programmable buttons are only programmable in mouse mode. In presentation mode, they are hard-coded to "blank screen" and "start slideshow" - presumably these are keyboard shortcuts in Keynote or PowerPoint. I was able to test with Keynote, and all the functions worked as advertised, I would be surprised if it were any other way, considering Targus is advertising this as specifically "for Mac."
A few remotes I've used have had extra buttons that either didn't do anything in Keynote (being designed specifically for PowerPoint) or had some undesired effect when pressed.
Use:
As a mouse (see above) the Targus Presenter is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. As a presentation remote, it's pretty good. It's comfortable to hold in the hand and small enough to slide into a breast pocket. The addition of a built-in laser pointer (fairly standard for presentation remotes i've used) and keys that do more than the usual "next/previous" functions are also a nice feature.
Being BlueTooth, the Presenter has some advantages and some disadvantages to those that use RF. Both of my test machines have BlueTooth built-in, and paired up right away (with the small issues listed above). To use this with any machine that doesn't have BlueTooth, you would need some kind of BlueTooth dongle - not included.
RF remotes typically come with a USB dongle that plugs into any system with USB, and translates the remote's signal to those of a standard USB mouse. If you're presenting on someone else's system, they may or may not have BlueTooth.
Also, the BlueTooth connection works easily on a Mac. Thankfully there are no additional drivers necessary; even the included software is an optional install only. Undoubtedly, BlueTooth pairing to a windows machine (presuming it has BlueTooth installed) won't be as straightforward.
Conclusion:
Pros:
comfortable, ergonomic design
presentation functions work great in Keynote
connects and pairs without additional drivers
two programmable buttons for extra functionality
easily replaceable aa batteries
Cons:
weird "keyboard" issue when pairing via bluetooth
click and drag requires two hands
cheap feel of left/right click buttons
limited customization via software
BlueTooth format may require additional BT dongle
