Month: October 2017

Microsoft

Microsoft used to make the best mice in the world, but for reasons that have never been entirely clear to me, the company decided to give up on this a few years ago. While the company has continued to make a number of interesting and unusual mice, for the last decade or so its focus has primarily been on mobile mice—the kind of thing you'd chuck in your laptop bag—rather than button-laden feature-rich desktop mice. When my Intellimouse Explorer 3 died after many years of use, I ended up switching to a Logitech Performance MX, because Microsoft no longer had anything comparable.

Announced today, the Surface Precision Mouse may be something of a return to form. It's a full-size desktop mouse. It's an ergonomic design that's only really suitable for the right-handed—a design that seems extremely familiar to users of the aforementioned Logitech. It has a wheel, of course, and the wheel has a button that toggles between notched mode, beloved of gamers, and free-wheeling mode, designed for scrolling and zooming. On the left-hand side, it has an array of three thumb buttons. It supports both wireless connections over Bluetooth and wired connections over USB. When using Bluetooth, the mouse can pair with three different devices simultaneously and has a little switch on the bottom for picking between them.

Enlarge (credit: Garmin)

At a recent Amazon event, the company announced BMW would integrate Alexa into its 2018 models. It's no secret that Amazon wants to stick Alexa anywhere and everywhere it can, and BMW is only the beginning. The latest company to announce a collaboration with Amazon is Garmin: the wearable and navigation device manufacturer revealed the new Garmin Speak today, a small disk-like device that installs on your windshield and brings Alexa voice commands into your car.

Describing the Garmin Speak device as "disk-like" is the polite way of drawing a comparison between it and Amazon's Echo Dot speaker. Essentially, the Garmin Speak is a smaller, 1.5-inch-wide version of the Echo Dot, complete with a circular, glowing blue LED status light. Inside that circle is an OLED display that will show arrows, icons, and numbers as it provides audible turn-by-turn directions. The Garmin Speak comes with a windshield mount, making it a device you could easily confuse for a dash cam with just a quick glance.

But the Garmin Speak does not have the essential outward-facing camera like dash cams do. Instead, the device is solely a home for Garmin Speak software and Amazon's Alexa. As with any other Alexa-toting device, you can summon Alexa with your voice through the Garmin Speak, asking for news, weather, sports, and other updates. You can also use Alexa to ignore or accept phone calls, and you can also control music search and playback so you can ask to hear a new song, artist, or genre without taking your hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. Alexa's smart home controls work when you're in the car as well, so you can ask Alexa to turn on your lights before you pull into your driveway.