The Trackman Marble had no roller wheel, just the regular three buttons. It worked great and still does to this day, though the buttons aren't quite as responsive as they once were (but close) and I've found that I actually do like the wheel. They did release a wheel-enabled Marble and I did get one, but the action on the trackball itself was all wrong. It's like they took a few pennies out of the trackball frame for the wheel, and it showed. That one got relegated to rarely-used server mouse usage pretty quickly.

I decided to try something new and got a Logitech MX700, thinking that the optical mouse and its sleek styling and large button count would be a radical-but-worthwhile departure from old faithful. I even sprung for an X-Trac optical mouse pad. I spent many hours and even a few emails with the president of X-Trac discussing the utter failure of the MX700... it jitters like I'm on my 10th cup of coffee at the worst possible time. The MX700 itself is great, and if you're on the right surface at the right place it tracks nicely and moves smoothly, but I could actually reproduce jitter points on the X-Trac and any other surface. Bad bad bad.

I eventually shelled out $30 or so for a new Logitech trackmouse, the follow-on to the trackman marble, and while I was a little put off at the radical change in button placement, I found in short order that it was quite comfortable. I thougth for sure that I had found my new favorite mouse device, and while the ball itself would occasionally jump up a bit, it was generally flawless.

I should point out that I place my mouse device in an unusual place. I have about 4-5 inches between the edge of my desk and the near edge of my keyboard wrist pad, and a tiny little mouse wrist pad perpendicular to that at the half-way point (I'll post a photo some day). I found some time ago that it was easier to move my right hand from the trackball to mouse to the keyboard from this position, rather than moving from the right side of the keyboard. Thus, the mouse or trackball is oriented -90 degrees (90 degrees ccw), and in the case of my new trackball I found that movement "up" on the ball (to the right on the screen) would sometimes lift the ball up off the teflon supports, and this was disconcerting.

A few weeks ago, I found that I could no longer properly clean the trackball or teflon supports so that the ball would roll smoothly. There was a large amount of static friction on the ball (making it difficult to move small distances from a stop) and the kinetic friction was high as well, making control of the cursor difficult and frustrating. Whatever was causing this problem, I knew that my trackball was about to be fired. A day or two later, news of the MX1000 spread across the web, about a day or so before it appeared on the Logitech website.

My local Fry's Electronics had a few, so I picked one up. $80 or so for a laser mouse. Hmmmmmm. I plugged it in to charge it up, and a couple of hours later I got around to plugging it in to my linux desktop machine to give it a try. I'll check off a few pros and cons before I render judgement:

Pros

• Precise movement, probably as advertised. 20x more precise than normal visible light opticals? Who knows, but it feels quite sharp.

• Comfortable. Not quite light, and maybe not for smaller hands, but it seems nice and doesn't lead to mistaken button-clicks if you relax your hand on it, from my experience thus far.

• Buttons are good. There are a bunch of them, and they seem okay, except for two issues (see Cons)

• Battery life is great. The charge indicator is quite convenient, and non-gamer usage leads to maybe five days or so of use between charges.

• The charging cradle is sharp. A lightened version of the MX700/900 line, it acts as the receiver and charger and looks nice enough.

Cons

• Feet too large? I've found the static friction with this mouse is higher than with the MX700. Moving on the X-Trac pad, I find that the MX1000 can sometimes get "stuck" when trying to move that one or two pixels for finer on-screen control. There are four larger feet on the mouse-bottom, while the MX700 has five smaller feet. The material look similar.

• Kinetic friction low, causes some button weirdness. Occasionally the use of the roller wheel will move the entire mouse back or down, sometimes the pressing of the roller wheel will move the mouse forward or up, and pressing the side buttons can move the mouse to the side. If I had one MX1000 wish, it would be a magical transfer of friction between static and kinetic.

• Roller button and up-down buttons not perfect. Clicking on the middle button (the roller itself) can sometimes lead to clicking the scroll-down button that surrounds the roller. I have not taken the time to get the left-right scroller motion to work with XFree86, but I can tell already that the side-clicks will be strange as well (mostly with mouse sliding, though).

• Larger footprint. The mouse is comfortable, but it is larger than the MX700, which means running out of mousepad sometimes. Given the unusual orientation and setup I described above, you can imagine that I am not using even the 8x11 mousepad that I have. The edges of the mouse will bump into whatever is around your mousing surface sooner than normal, from what I've seen.

• All that having been said, I like the mouse quite a bit. The X-Trac mousepad works much better with this mouse, and I've had zero jitter to date. It has replaced my Trackman completely, and I keep the MX700 plugged in if the MX1000 runs out of battery (which means I have to put up with jittermouse for a couple of hours sometimes). I got the teflon tape from X-Trac to add to the mouse feet, and from what I can tell it did not help the static friction at all... in fact, I think it got a little bit worse. X-Trac does have a couple of new products out there, so for $10 or so maybe I'll pick up a new one and see if that helps (the X-Trac HS has my attention).

  Last word: Buy