- With two finger: Easily Browse Function: Tapping, Magnifier, Rotate, Zoom -/+, Vertical/ Horizontal Scroll
- With three fingers: Windows Function: Tapping, Switch Window, My Computer, Page down/up
- Click and Right Click buttons with Calculator and Back functions
- Touchpad and Number pad mode switch button and LED
Product Description
Specification:
Hot Keys : 3 Hot keys (Mode, Mouse click, right click keys)
Cable Length: Around 80 cm
Connector Solution: USB only
Support OS: Window XP and Vista
Paul C. Easton @ 6:49 am
I was hesitant to buy this product because it seemed a little too good to be true. I prefer touchpads over mice because of RSI. Touchpads are much easier on my hands than mice and can be used on any surface, including leaning back in a chair and holding it in the palm of my hand. There are very few good options for external touchpads. The most common are the Cirque touchpads, but they are expensive and don’t support multi-touch.
This cheap, generic touchpad is perfect for my needs and sells at a great price. There is a branded version at a higher price point that I saw on Amazon, but it is the exact same thing as this device, except it has a logo. Save your money and get the generic. Perhaps you’ll lose out on tech support, but at this price, I wasn’t that concerned about support.
The device is a bit bigger than the average man’s palm. It is light but feels pretty solid. It is ideal for mobile use and it is easy to stow in a laptop bag, which I do. I carry it everywhere I carry my laptop. Why carry an external touch pad with a laptop that has a touch pad? Several reasons: (1) because of RSI I put my lap top on a mount (a Cricket portable stand when I travel)and use an external keyboard (I use a Goldtouch portable ergonomic keyboard when I travel). (2) This touchpad is more advanced than my laptop’s. My laptop doesn’t support multitouch and all the touchpad shortcuts that multitouch can provide. (3) This external touchpad doubles as a numeric keypad. I find using a dedicated numeric keypad far more comfortable than using the embedded keys in a laptop. If you use the calculator a lot on your laptop, having a dedicated numeric keypad is handy.
Installation was simple. Plug in the USB cable and windows automatically installs the drivers. No need for a CD or to download anything. I use it with Windows 7 and it works perfectly. I did not test on any other OS, but I assume that it will work fine on Vista. The manual says it also supports XP. Seems that Mac OS is not supported.
In addition to the expected one-finger mouse-replacement functionality you’d expect from a touch pad, it supports at least 11 two and three finder gestures. The configuration options are rather simple, basically allowing you to toggle support for various guestures on and off. You can’t create your own gestures or map gestures to your own programs. You also can’t us this for hand writing or doodling. It also doesn’t work with Scrybe, a gesture macro program that works with some touchpads. But what it does offer more than meets my needs and more than I would expect for such a low price.
I really like the fact that it doubles as a numeric keypad. Some may not like this, expecially since they add some raised dots to give tactile cues to differentiate the number “keys”. Because of this it doesn’t have the glassy smooth glide feel of many touchpads. This doesn’t bother me, but I could see it bother some people. You toggle between normal touchpad operation and numeric keypad with a large “mode” button. When switch to numeric keypad mode, an led lights up. I thing they could have made device smaller if they got rid of the LED and mad the mode button smaller, but it does make it very easy to switch modes. When in numeric keypad mode, the primary and secondary mouse-click buttons are remapped. The left button fire up a new instance of the windows calculator and right button acts as a backspace.
The touch pad operation has been very good. It is rare for a tap to not take and the sensitivity is as good as my laptop’s touch pad. Two and three finger guestures work as advertised and I now use the touch pad exclusively to scroll pages up and down, page up and down, zoom in and out, open windows explorer, and other actions that I had to use the keyboard for in the past.
This little gadget has been one of the nicest surprises of any recent purchase. It is cheap, works great, and travels well.
Brent Foust @ 8:47 am
This trackpad purports to let you scroll, zoom, rotate, and otherwise interact without a mouse. And at that, it partially succeeds.
What works:
* Single-finger cursor movement
(But it’s not accelerated. That is, this is very slow on a large screen.)
* Three-finger swipes for Forward/Back in a Web Browser
This is far more handy than one would expect, allowing browsing, scrolling (with workaround described below), and quick back/forward navigation.
It should be noted that speed and accuracy is not this product’s strong point, though, and sometimes you’ll get a click where you meant a 3-finger swipe.
* Numeric Keypad
Works well. The Mode button is easy to press, out of the way for normal usage, and clearly lights a blue LED when in numeric keypad mode.
Fast digit entry seems to work well and there’s even a backspace button (the right-mouse button) and Enter (=) key, along with +, -, x, and divided-by.
When the blue LED is lit, the left mouse button brings up the Windows Calculator.
This feature works so well that it might be worth it for this feature alone, for someone who needs a portable keypad to use with their laptop on occasion.
(Note: there is no tactile feedback. And each key has a small indentation to find the center of the key (and edges) by feel.)
(Tested in Windows 7)
What doesn’t:
* Zoom
Doesn’t do anything useful (if anything at all) in most programs. Can’t even get it to do something in Photoshop.
* Rotate
Doesn’t do anything. Displays a Rotation icon, but doesn’t have any effect.
Again, couldn’t event get it to work within Photoshop.
* Scrolling
The scrolling uses two finger swipes. But it scrolls only one line at a time
(even on the maximum setting), so it’s basically useless.
Workarounds:
* Scrolling
If you have a driver installed that allows scroll-locking by pressing the middle mouse button
(or scroll wheel), then there is a nice way to activate that feature:
A 3-finger tap.
Now one finger gives continuous scrolling (up or down), then tap to cancel it.
This is NOT the Apple Magic Mouse by a long shot. But it gets you partway there on Windows for only 20 bucks. If you don’t need quick navigation on a large-screen, this may just work for you. The cursor movement is too slow for me, so the decision of whether to keep it will rest on the usefulness for occasional left-hand navigation to give the right hand a break.
N. Williams @ 10:39 am
Sorry, but I can’t match the praise of the earlier reviews. The price is great, but the irratic operation is driving me nuts. Even with the touch tapping set to the most sensitive, half the time tapping doesn’t register at any pressure and I have to resort to using the left button to select or hit enter. The pad is quite clackey when tapping. Also, there is often a lag in executing the commands. Scrolling is fine as is screen forward and back. But this pad is going back. I have the new Apple Magicpad for my Mac and it works great. I was hoping for a similar experience with this pad for my PC at work but it doesn’t compare at all.
Smoot @ 11:39 am
Couldn’t get the multitouch driver to work with my desktop running XP Service Pack 2 (trying to make use of some legacy hardware) but it works great with laptop running Windows 7. Given its great price, I would definitely consider purchasing another.
J. Zhang @ 2:37 pm
When firstly insert, Windows 7 detects and loads drivers correctly. It works as a Non-MultiTouch TouchPad. To get multitouch/gesture work, you need to install drivers either from CD or from here ([...], choose STP-600 for Windows 7). Yes, it kind of works on Windows 7, but not well.
First, the pad has to be unplugged when Windows is booting. Otherwise, the control program installed with the drivers will crash, and you don’t get multi-touch functionality. You can plug it back after logging-in.
Second, the gestures are not Windows 7 standard gestures. In another word, this device handles multi-touch by itself. Its software translates them into traditional Windows messages. It does not use new Windows 7’s supporting of touch. Gestures such as panning or press and hold does not work because of that. So strictly speaking, this is NOT a Windows 7 multi-touch pad. I was disappointed because of that.
The drivers software provides a lot of configure options in Windows Mouse Settings. However, you can not change the mapping of gesture to function.