Gyration Air Mouse - Tech Review
Welcome to another DigitalLifestyle.com video show, today I’m going to be looking at the Air Mouse from Gyration. And this is slightly different at your usual mouse as well as it’s just being a nice small mouse, it’s also got motion sensing on it, Gyration, if you can think bit like the Wiimote from the Nintendo Wii, it has some similar things to that. And wait a minute, there may also be of interest to media center users, if you’re using your media center PC hooked up directly to your TV, there some commands that you can use this remote for to control your media center. So, this is the packaging, it’s fairly small mouse, it comes with a drive CD, which you don’t need unless you want to use specific gestures functions of it. It comes in a little pouch, and it comes with a little USB dongle. Say, you don’t need the drivers for that bit to work, but I installed the Gyration software. Connect that over there, flip on, and next thing you’ll notice is, it looks like a normal mouse. You’ve got left and right click buttons on there, some extra buttons which I’ll show at in a moment, we got scroll wheel, and this extra here on the button under here, which is the trigger to the Gyration. So, if I use it as a normal mouse, you can use it, see that on the screen, where the Gyrations kicks in, you pick it up, hold down the trigger key, and you see I can click away bit there. So I’m holding this down now, just moving it out, so if you imagine that you’re, you know, you’re back on the sofa and this is hooked up to the TV, really you don’t need to put it down and you can just pick your files and you can pick wherever you wanted to click on. You can click, so, quite nice, easy to use function, great acidic for your digital TV. And one extra thing is it’s got which is the Gyration software, extra software that tool that it comes with and you see here, this is the gestures that you can do, now, it’s got actually gesture button on here. So you hold down the gesture button and then move the mouse and then use these directions and it will initiate these commands. So what you can see on here, I reposition the camera so now I’m using the, so, what I can do here, I can say, go to the media center navigation, that one is the home key. So, I can drag that up and I would like that one, and, what do we got here, back button, I would choose that one, okay. So now, when I hold down the, the center button on here, I move left, that’s the back button, when in media center, I hold on the center button and move that way, I got whole, you can see, you can move any of these directions around. Let’s have a look at your media center now, so, before I close this off and, it takes of getting use to. So I got back, okay, and let’s stick, oh it’s got again data on, got on there, and TV on, okay, let’s try the downward. Okay the downward play, it’s a bit of a show this window in there, let’s see if the back actually work. Okay, I hit the play on there, so there’s probably the first problem, is to remember what the commands are. If you hold down the middle button there, and that’s what I got on now, okay, that’s alright. Hold the button down and we got the guide, very good. And now I’m going to play, pretty good. And you can also install the Gyration functions, pause that, and stop that. Let’s try some of the playback command, let’s try that, that one. Here we go, so nice and easy for a bit of forward and back, pausing. Although, not as easy as a touch screen. Alright, the other one I got here are these shake gestures, so let’s try what we got here. Let's find nice, easy command. A hold button on there, I’ll shake, so sort of shake up, let's try, let’s get a look now, hold down the trigger left to right and that’s the whole page, so it does seem to work. So overall, it’s a mouse, it’s a nice little compact mouse, in fact, it’s quite nice, you can throw it to your laptop bag and it makes a nice point for mouse. If you’ve got not a good desktop area, the gesture in the Gyration is really good. And I can see it being use, if you got hooked up to your media center machine, hooked up TV, and you’ve no mouse pad on your knee, you can use this, and I can see it being very good for that. I’m not sure by the gestures and the play and pause and the shake to do stuff, you shake to pause and all, left and up and the screen commands, you can see them, I’m doing that. I’m really not sure about those, they’re a bit fiddly, maybe you get use to it, but also the same with media center, you can use it more on transport controls with a remote with the mouse. So I can see you using this in some, maybe a laptop user or you got enough place, great for presentations, if you’re, if you do dPowerPoint presentations and when you wanted and you haven’t got a flat surface for mouse I can see, not sure about the, that sort of shaking and I think it’s a bit straight, but all over that, it’s a nice little mouse, and I quite like it and I have link on all the details and show notes and all price as well. Thanks for watching, bye.