I received a nice little package in the mail today. Yes, little. The mouse came not in a box but a tiny case. I like that Apple is trying to reduce the amount of packaging it uses. After a full day of using Apple’s new Magic Mouse, I can definitely say I love it and I hate it.

I Love It

I love it because it revolutionizes scrolling. Seriously. Gone are the days of scrolling 3 or 5 lines at a time. The mouse reacts perfectly to the speed of your finger, dynamically setting the speed using “scrolling with momentum.”

Move your finger slowly to smoothly glide a webpage or document up and down. Flick your finger to throw a web page up and down. It feels very much like scrolling on an iPhone. And two dimensional scrolling really streamlines your workflow in design apps like Photoshop.

I Hate It

But it seems like Apple focused so much on creating a multi-touch mouse that they sacrificed some things. First, the mouse doesn’t feel right to me. It’s simply too flat to lie naturally in your hand. I like the curved feeling of my Razer Orochi.

Second, the forward/back swiping is difficult to use. You have to hold the mouse close to perfectly still and get just the right swiping motion with two fingers to get it to work. In my first day I would say I got this right less than 50% of the time. Maybe I will get better the more I use the mouse, but I would almost rather have two buttons on the side for forward/back.

Third, I really miss the scroll wheel click. Why? Because when I browse news sites I like to click the scroll wheel to open links in new tabs — it allows me to open all the pages I want to look at while staying on the main page with all the links. It really speeds up my browsing.

Lastly, like the touch pad on Macbooks, you can’t customize what each multi-touch does or add new multi-touches. I would, for example, like to use two-finger swipe up/down to switch tabs in Firefox. Or add three finger swipe up/down to switch apps. I find the current multi-touches insufficient for my needs.

So, What Will I Do?

I’m only one day in, but I can already tell that, despite some of my frustrations, the power of touch scrolling is so awesome that I’ll ignore the mouse’s drawbacks. Scrolling webpages and Photoshop documents is such a pleasure.

Yet, the ability to customize multi-touches is the one thing holding this mouse back from being truly magic. I guess I’ll have to hope Apple updates the multi-touches or someone creates a Multiclutch for the Magic Mouse.