Digital Trends

Logitech MX Air

July 15th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing 

Installation is as simple as plugging in the USB dongle, and installing the Logitech software, which requires a reboot to be implemented. Then you open the software menu, adjust settings to your liking, and you are off mousing. 

When using the MX air like a traditional mouse on a flat surface, there are a few new tricks you have to learn. First, rather than using a scroll wheel, it sports a scroll surface that you brush your finger along to scroll up and down. It’s sensitive to the speed of the brush too, so if you give it a light brush it’ll scroll just a few lines, but whip your finger along it and the page will zoom up or down very fast. A cool “clicking” noise emanates from somewhere inside the mouse too, which is awesome. It’s not perfect though, and sometimes a light flick will send the page zooming downward. Let’s just say this new mousing technique requires a little getting used to before you’re completely comfortable with it. You can also scroll by pressing down on the upper or lower part of the bar. 

The biggest issue with the lack of a scroll wheel is that middle-click functionality is lacking, and this is a problem for those of us who use that button to open web pages in new tabs in Firefox. 

Aside from the scroll surface and left-right buttons, there is a back button, a select button which performs a left click, a play button that stops and starts playing songs when a media application is open, and a volume button. We re-programmed the Play button to open a big on-screen menu that allowed us to play, pause, mute, shuffle and totally control iTunes, which is fantastic. You can even adjust the size of the menu between small, medium and large. Pressing the volume button opens a small onscreen slider that you move by waving the mouse left or right. It works perfectly too, and is very easy to use. 

Music Player Screenshot

Pick the mouse up though, and it turns into a remote control that works up to 30 feet away. You are encouraged to flip your hand around and hold it like a remote too, as there’s no need to left-click and right-click from the air usually since the select button performs a left-click. One very cool feature is that when you pick it up the cursor changes to an extra-large arrow, which is vitally important and greatly increases visibility (you can turn this feature off as well, but you’d be silly to do so). 

Once in the air, the mouse tracks perfectly, and you can even adjust the sensitivity as well. The only problem we experienced was once in awhile the mouse cursor would wander over to the edge of the screen, even if we were pointing the mouse directly at the center, so we had to move the mouse over to the edge of the screen, line it up with the cursor, then move it back to center. A “center cursor” button would be handy in these situations. It’s also interesting that the MX Air points correctly regardless of the orientation of the mouse, not that you’d ever flip it upside down to use it, but it works regardless. And you don’t have to physically lift your mouse hand up to go up. You just tilt it upwards and the mouse moves. The in-air pointing is very intuitive and works exactly as you would expect.

Logitech SetPoint Screenshot