IFA 2011: Hands on: LG LSM-100 SmartScan mouse review

LG had a number of interesting bits of kit on its IFA 2011 stand, but nothing was quite like the LG SmartScan Mouse.

It's a mouse that has the added bonus of being able to scan documents for you as well.

Like any good superhero, for the most part the LG SmartScan mouse masquerades as a normal computing peripheral most of the time but by tapping just one simple button situated on the left-hand side of the mouse, you can also scan any document up to A3-size with the device.

The idea of scanning something with an unsteady hand may not sound appealing but the technology inside the device means that you can literally swipe the mouse over the doc and it will appear on your screen as if you were wiping a window clean – then you just go over the areas you missed before.

It does feel like LG is creating a solution to a problem that isn't really there with the LG SmartScan mouse but with our short try with the device it was great to use – and the time between scanning and it appearing on the screen was very short. The scans appear in 300dpi and the mouse also has text recognition on board.

Once you have scanned the images, then they can be saved as a number of files (the usual PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PDF, XLS or DOC formats).

The LG SmartScan mouse is out now and is priced around £85.

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Review: Genius Wireless Pen Mouse

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Whatever you do, don't mistake the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse for a replacement for a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch graphics tablet, or even Genius' own G-Pen M609. This isn't a device for graphical artists to replicate their brushstrokes on the computer, and if you bought one thinking it was, you'd be disappointed.

What the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse actually is, is a pen-shaped mouse. Dragging the tip of the pen across a desk, we were able to control Windows pretty well. Pressing down on the nib replicates a left mouse button click, and there is another button on the shaft for right mouse button clicks.

It works rather well, with the familiar shape of a pen allowing you to get used to the new input device pretty quickly.

We found that the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse is best suited for working on large and multiple monitors, as you can move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other quickly, in a small space. You might find the Genius Wireless Pen Mouse a bit over-sensitive when you first use it, with its 1200 DPI sensor, but changing the mouse cursor speed in Windows can make a big difference.

It's a device that works well, and we can certainly see the appeal of it. It's not quite good enough to completely replace the traditional mouse for most tasks, however.

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