Review: Orbita Mouse

I like it when someone tries to solve long-standing problems using completely fresh approach. I also like electronic gadgets and I am not afraid to learn new skills in order to use them. For example, I consider Fingerworks Mini to be an amazingly useful and visionary product and I am very sad Fingerworks is out of business.

It's only logical I was intrigued by Orbita Mouse from Cyber E Sport when I wanted to replace my trusty old Logitech mouse. Orbita Mouse tries to do some established stuff in a radical new way so it's vitally important you understand the concept well:

The mouse itself is shaped like a puck. On its top side, there are two buttons - round one and a triangular one. You can click the top of the puck (apart from the two buttons, the rest of the top side is one giant button). The sides of the puck can also be pushed and act as a button.

The mouse operates wirelessly and communicates with its receiver (which is also a recharging station) using WiFi. The receiver is connected to your PC using standard USB.

Using the included (Windows-only) software, the mouse can be configured to do various things. I'll try to explain the default setup, which I found to be most useful (although you can have several different mouse profiles, you can only switch between them using the Windows application).

The triangular button is only used for mouse calibration (this is a big mistake because you won't be using it during your normal work and it only gets in the way and you'll find out you keep pressing it involuntarily instead of pressing the main "top" button).

You move the mouse on your desk as with any other laser mouse. The selling point of Orbita mouse is the fact that it detects when you rotate it and translates this rotation to mouse or keyboard events (by default, rotating the whole mouse left or right translates to rotating mousewheel up or down). This also means that it doesn't matter which way the mouse is orientated. When you move it away from you, the mouse arrow moves up, regardless of how the mouse is rotated (that's why you must re-calibrate the orientation each time you take the mouse to different location).



Pressing the top of the puck works as a standard left-click. This button is very sensitive so you cannot actually rest your palm on the mouse. The problem is, you'll often be pushing one of the two buttons (round or triangular) instead of the main "top" button.

Pressing anywhere on the side produces standard right-click event.

The round button on the top acts as a sort-of Shift button. Its default function is to switch the rotation effect between horizontal and vertical scrolling.

From the technical standpoint, the Orbita Mouse works perfectly. However, there are some important flaws in this whole concept which made me wonder what exactly the designers hoped to achieve when they came up with this concept.

First of all, the mouse moves really effortlessly, almost as if it was the puck in Air Hockey. This is unusual at first (that's why beginners should first use the interchangeable "beginners' ring" which has more friction and then move to the "normal" floating ring) but after 10 or so hours I grew accustomed to this and I really liked this smooth, floaty movement.

However, there are some important problems because of this smooth movement. For example it's not always easy to rotate the mouse and operate its buttons without involuntarily moving the mouse (and thus the mouse cursor on your monitor). The worst offender is the right-click key. Ideally, your should be able to perform a right-click by pressing anywhere on Orbita's side. But in reality, the side is not a single circular button but three buttons, each of them covering slightly less than 120 degrees, thus leaving three rather large areas which cannot be clicked! This means than when you press the sides of the puck, you cannot be sure if you are pressing the button or if you are moving the mouse. This is made even more problematic by the fact that the mouse rotation constantly changes during the standard use so you cannot really know where exactly the three "blind spots" are currently located without visually checking mouse's current orientation.

The rotation itself is very useful for quickly scrolling through long documents. However, it's maddeningly inefficient when you want to scroll by exactly one step. That's because you have no idea how far you have to rotate the mouse for the next scroll step to be generated. When I tried using the Orbita Mouse for zooming in and out in GIMP, it was almost unusable because I always either zoomed too far in or out or didn't zoom at all.

It's very difficult to use Orbita Mouse quickly and it's absolutely impossible to use it in action games that require pressing the mouse button(s). That's because you really cannot press any of the mouse buttons (and/or rotate the mouse) and move the mouse at the same time with any usable precision.

I spent about 40 hours using Orbita Mouse and after about 30 hours mark, I stopped improving. I could operate it but almost everything felt more cumbersome than standard mouse. The only highlights were scrolling through large documents (fast scrolling, not precision scrolling) and playing Flash games that don't require mouse presses.

That's why I returned the Orbita Mouse and bought myself Logitech G9x which I can wholeheartedly recommend. It's advertised as "mouse for gamers" but it works perfectly for all my needs and stores up to five profiles locally (in its own memory) so that you can switch between them without need for any special driver, under any operating system!

Also, if the makers of Orbita claim that their mouse is "3D" (while it actually has only three buttons and one scrollwheel), the G9x with its scroll wheel, tilt wheel and 7 programmable buttons should probably be called at least "5D".

Thanks to Alza for lending me the mouse.

Squeezebox: It just works - and more!

For a long time, I wanted to write something about Logitech Squeezebox line of products. From my experience, they are different from most other home electronics: Not only they really do everything they should do. They also do much more than advertised. In fact, their capabilities are so vast, most people don't even understand what this system is capable of.

Squeezebox is a line of networked audio and control components. Most of them play streaming audio from your favorite source. Most of them are able to display graphical output of various quality. Some of them are designed to control the audio players. All the communication between all components is through WiFi or standard LAN cable. All the components are connected to your home LAN as if they were standard computers (i.e. they have they normal IP addresses and hostnames, you can log into them and hack them, etc.). Any of your home computers can function as both "player" and "controller" of any other component (yes, including command line scripting).



First of all, these components "just work" out of the box. For example, you just connect the player to any WiFi network with access to the Internet, it automatically updates its firmware and is immediately able to play any streaming audio from the Internet. That's all. You don't have to install anything anywhere. In fact, you can just connect it to some public WiFi network and don't even have to own any computer.

However, it gets much more interesting when you have your own MP3 collection and a home computer which is running all the time. You install Squeezebox Server on this computer (it supports Windows, Mac and Linux) and then you can play anything from your music collection on any of your Squeezebox players or on any computer connected to your home network. Of course you can play different albums on different devices and everything can be controlled either via Squeezebox remote or via browser interface from any of your home computers:



Squeezebox doesn't force you into any proprietary solutions and does not lock you in. Your music collections is simply a collection of folders and subfolders containing audio files and cover art images. Everything is indexed according to standard ID3 tags and Squeezebox's private database and indexes don't clutter your music folders - they are kept completely separate.

I now have Squeezebox Player (just a miniature box connected to external speakers), Squeezebox Remote (WiFi remote control with full color display) and Squeezebox Boom (audio system with built-in speakers and large monochromatic display).

Audio quality obviously depends on what kind of Squeezebox device you are using (the most expensive system costs 10x more than the cheapest one) but my mid-range Boom has perfectly clear sound and is totally quiet when not playing.



I know there are many similar soultions but I have never experienced anything that simply works as effortlessly as the Squeezebox. There are lots of thoughtful touches, for example the way the alarms and display dimming work and can be configured so that the device does not disturb you when you sleep and you can be awakened by your favorite song or your favorite radio station.

On the other hand, Squeezebox is a godsend for all control freaks because the configuration possibilities are staggering and all the software (including the server and firmware in all devices) can be fully customized - the server itself is written in Perl and the devices are running Linux. However, I didn't have to do that - I am perfectly happy with the standard configuration options and I don't even use all of them: For example, your Squeezebox device can display your Flickr photos, your RSS feeds, you can play games on it etc...

I really love tech gadgets and I must stress again that there are not many gadgets that I found as useful and as capable as the Squeezebox family of products.

Mini-Review: Fun Beat EM270 MP3 Player

I recently bought this MP3 player which boasts "70 hours of battery life" and other interesting features for rather nice price (I bought 8 GB version). The reason was that I needed some player for my father to listen to classical music in his bed and I figured I could give him my older Sansa Clip and I'll keep EM270 for myself (because it seemed to be slightly more advanced).

Pluses: The packaging actually contains not only the player itself but also earbuds, wall charger, USB cable, holding strap and rubber cover! Also, the device looks quite stylish, although not as stylish as this CG render suggests:

(Image stolen from Alza.cz)

I'm afraid it's strictly downhill from here on.

When I copied about 6 GB of music to the device, the start-up took about 50 seconds! I thought this was because the device indexed my music and cached the song data somewhere but no such luck. The delay is the same for each and every start-up! EM270 also supports microSDHC cards up to 32GB for potentially 40 GB of total storage which could mean several minutes of start-up time each and every time (in theory - I haven't tried it).

All of my music contains ID3 v2.3 tags with artist, track number, genre, album and track names. EM270 allows to me to select music using these tags (meaning the songs actually are indexed using these data). However, when I actually start playing the tracks, only their filenames are displayed. Nothing else. Not even the playing time. This means that when I randomly skip between 500 music tracks, there is no way to see the album and composer details for currently playing song! If your files are named "01.mp3", "02.mp3" etc. then tough luck, you have no way of knowing which song is currently playing.

Setting play method to "Shuffle" means that tracks are played in random order, with no regard to what was already played during this session. That means you can shuffle through 20 track album and hear track #13 four times before you hear track #7 for the first time, for example.

The manual is godawful. It's in Czech and English. The Czech version is briefer and totally omits some menu items while the English version is almost incomprehensible and all screenshots are in Chinese! I was able to discover most of the functionality by trial and error. However, there is an item called "JumpSetting" with different time values in the Settings and I have no idea what it is supposed to be doing. The manual actually contains the following gem:

"This user manual can give you some useful information. Hope it will help you to operate the player well when you are using it. If there is any mistake on this manual, you are welcome to figure it out."

Obviously, I didn't try out all the functionality but from what I've seen it was quite clear to me I don't want to use EM270 for my music playing needs. Some UI choices were very bizarre, for example holding down the Play/Pause button started changing the dozen or so equalizer settings very quickly (i.e. 10 times a second), resulting in a game of roulette of sorts.

If I bought this player for myself, I'd be rather pissed off. However, it will be OK for my father and I'll keep my trusty Sansa Clip. Fun Beat actually seems to be Czech company but their firmware and documentation resembles the worst Chinese crap.

And remember: "Our company remained the final right how to explain for the manual, warranty and some related information."

P.S: This mini-review is based on latest available firmware.