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Anyone who reads Street Tech faithfully knows I'm not a big fan of trackballs. I'd even gotten to the point of thinking maybe I shouldn't review them anymore. So imagine my surprise when I gave the Trackman Marble FX a whirl and actually liked it. "Mikey likes it! He never likes anything!" The first thing you notice about the Marble FX is that it's freakishly large. At 7.3" long, 3.3" wide, and 2.5" high, it looks like a big limp plastic foot. The Marble FX uses an innovative type of optical sensor technology. The bright red "marble" is printed with a random series of dots. When you roll the ball around, a beam of light illuminates a section of dots on the glossy surface. The reflected image passes through a lens and flashes onto a sensor chip 1000 times a second. The changing position information is transferred to your computer. This design means that there are no mechanical parts inside to clean or get gummed up with the ol' hand salsa. The Marble FX has four buttons: the primary button (located under your thumb to the left of the trackball), a right button (to the right of the ball) and two small oval buttons located above the primary button.
The Marble FX is controlled via Logitech's MouseWare software. Similar to Kensington's MouseWorks, MouseWare allows you to customize button assignments, assign shortcuts, tweak cursor controls, etc. Two potentially useful features (with unfortunate names) are the CyberJump and HyperJump cursor menus. These are little 8-function shortcut menus, one for the Internet and one for Windows, that pop up at the cursor position whenever you click the buttons you've assigned to them. CyberJump can display the bookmark window for your browser, add a bookmark, jump to the vertical or horizontal scrollbars, activate the Win95 start menu, stop a Web page load, go back a page, and access the regular Windows menu (in a hierarchical pop-up). The HyperJump lets you scroll, resize, recall previous window, etc. in Windows. OK, so it's not that big a deal to access the regular Windows menus, but I like having the option of these shortcuts anywhere my cursor is on the screen. With the monster monitors many people have these days (at 17", 19", and 21"), cutting down on cursor travel time is becoming a real asset. The Marble FX form-factor (let's just call it "the foot") is a reasonably comfortable fit (even for me). The ball is bigger than the one on the Orbit but the same size as larger trackballs (like the TurboMouse). I found it easy to roll and easy on my hand and fingers (at least to a point). The optical sensor design is supposed to deliver smoother performance. While I certainly didn't find it any more sluggish than a mechanical mouse or trackball, I didn't notice any big performance improvements either. If you're finicky like I am about trackballs and have yet to find one that feels right, you might want to truck on down to your local Akbar and Jeff's Computer Hut and test drive the Trackman Marble FX. - Gareth Branwyn [6/10/98] Other pointing devices reviewed on Street Tech: |
