I Have a New Toy

Being me, I have a slight fetish for tech toys. My new one came yesterday and I'm smitten.

I have a Mac Mini that is attached to a large flat screen TV in my living room. It functions as a media center, server and one of my design/development machines. Sitting on the couch, drink in hand, while working or watching a movie in Plex is a pretty wonderful thing.

Having a full keyboard and mouse laying around all of the time was a
little cumbersome... Especially if it was for just navigating Plex or when using Illustrator/Photoshop key commands rather than typing. Enter the Logitech diNovo Mini:

It's a nifty little bluetooth keyboard with a trackpad/D-pad on the upper right. If you have a PS3 you can connect to that as well. The Logitech site said that it was only compatible with Windows/PS3 and not OSX. There was press saying that it would connect to the Mac though I found press with a Logitech spokesperson saying that the keyboard would work but not the track pad. So I was a little worried it wouldn't work well, especially after the move to Snow Leopard. But it was just too unique and visually stunning to pass up.

The good news is everything works flawlessly... Even the media buttons and the shortcut keys for page-up/down, etc. Whee!

It's a little over palm sized and fits comfortably in two hands. The keys aren't unusably tiny like on those miserable Blackberry keyboards and they are backlit, which is nice for watching movies in a low light room. I wouldn't necessarily use this to write a 20 page dissertation, but it works comfortably for me for typing chunks of text.

There's a switch to turn the track pad into the D-Pad in the picture while also lighting commonly used media keys. Perfect for being used as an HTPC remote! As usual, the Windows hot-key is the Command key and the few Windows specific functions do nothing. The track pad is a little finicky but I wouldn't replace my mouse with a trackpad any day and it performs fine for small tasks. It would probably be a good choice for presentations if you need more functionality than a simple remote/pointer and don't have a podium.

My inner dork is sated... for the time being.