Perhaps I should extend my reviews to mice as well. Although I don’t go through nearly as many as I do keyboards, I suppose that could be changed… Anyhow, today, I did also receive the Wireless Laser Mouse 5000 that I had ordered earlier this week. I’ve plugged it into my Powerbook at home to replace my Logitec MX1000 laser mouse.
My initial impressions after plugging it in:

• It’s noticeably lighter than the Logitech. I’d say about 2/3 the apparent weight. Which makes moving it around a lot easier, but also feel less steady.
• The tracking seems like it sends position updates less often. This makes the motion feel less smooth. It also seems to be much more sensitive than the Logitech. I had to turn down the mouse tracking sensitivity in the System Preferences a notch.
• The scroll wheel has no clicking feedback. It is completely smooth. I’m not sure if I like this. In some ways, it agrees with me in that it often is the case that you want to scroll by pixel and not by line. One scroll click per pixel is somewhat arbitrary, and instead, having a more granular mapping from scroll wheel rotation to actual document scrolling seems desirable (having the smooth scrolling feels similar to the two-fingered scrolling that is available with recent touchpads). On the other hand, there are a few certain situations, like Terminal scrolling, where having the click feels almost necessary.
• I thought the wireless receiver would be one of those that look like a USB thumb drive. Turns out it’s a normal receiver on a chord. But it doesn’t look as ugly as the Logitech’s receiver and charger in one thing.
• Latency seems at least as good as the Logitech. I guess latency issues with wireless mice are a thing of the past.

The main reason I bought this mouse was to free myself from the routine of having to charge my wireless mouse. The Logitech runs its battery out maybe once a month or so, and remembering to stick it back in the charging stand before I left for work turned out to be a rather difficult task for me. This Microsoft mosue claims up to 6 months of operation on a couple AA’s. I can definitely afford a pack of AA’s a year, and its worth it if it frees me from having to worry constantly about re-charging.
Note that I haven’t actually installed the Microsoft mouse software yet. I’m a little hesitant since my experience with Microsoft input device software even on Windows has historically been less than pleasant.