It has been about two weeks since I received the Magic Mouse I won thanks to Mobclix, so I thought I’d share with you my impressions.

First of all, the object is beautiful. It could sit on my coffee table in the living room, and my guest would never guess it’s a mouse. As far as functionality, I think we are facing an evolution jump as big as switching from a mouse with a track ball (do you remember them?) to a laser mouse. No more cursing when the page doesn’t scrool, no more experimenting with new ways of cleaning the scroll-ball, it just works… Beautifully and flawlessly. When you first start using the mouse, the shape could make it a bit uncomfortable; it’s significantly flatter than its predecessor, and the movement to scroll the pages could feel awkward, but after a few days you won’t notice it anymore, and you’ll soon wonder why no one thought of this earlier.

On the downside, Apple decided to remove two of the four buttons: the middle and the “squeeze” buttons. Honestly, if I didn’t win the mouse I wouldn’t buy it for that exact reason. Button 3 and 4 were my access to Exposè, and I just couldn’t live without it. As far as multi-touch control, Apple only gives you two buttons (left and right), the 360 degrees scroll and a double swipe left and right to control the browser history and other stuff, like iChat tabs or to scroll through your e-mail messages in Mail. I was actually surprised Apple didn’t take more advantage of some functions they already enabled for the Macbook’s touchpad, such as multiple-finger movements to trigger Expose and Spaces. But luckily, just a couple of days ago, I found an awesome software that lets me set up all sort of multi-touch gestures and now I fully control Expose and more simply by “caressing” my mouse. I’m sure Apple will release an official driver to do all these things soon, but for now I’m happy with how Magic Mouse and BetterTouchTool are working together.