Apple’s Multi-Touch Magic Mouse Revealed

Apple’s getting a bit of touch pad on its newest mouse, hereby dubbed the Magic Mouse. In classic Apple style, the device has just one clickable button, but the difference is a hard acrylic touch pad that picks up motion gestures. Brushing one finger across the surface scrolls in any direction, like you would on an iPhone, while swiping two fingers left or right advances Web pages in Safari or moves through photos in iPhoto. Sadly, there’s no pinch-to-zoom, but you can hold your keyboard’s Control button and slide a finger up and down to zoom instead. If you really love the right click, you can enable it as a touch function through your Mac’s preferences, and in a loving nod to lefties, this function can be assigned to either side of the mouse.

Other features include Bluetooth (which means you’ll need a Bluetooth-enabled Mac), four months of battery life and laser tracking, instead of optical. And because the Magic Mouse uses Mac software to handle multi-touch gestures, you’ll need a Mac running Leopard version 10.5.8 or later. If you meet all the criteria, you can buy the Magic Mouse on its own for $69, but it’s included with every new iMac. [Apple via Engadget]