by , 3:45 PM EDT, August 15th, 2005

Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has weighed in on Apple's new Mighty Mouse and declares it inferior to Microsoft's latest Wireless Optical Mouse 5000. While the latter is currently only available as part of a keyboard and mouse bundle that costs more than US$100, Mr. Mossberg notes that Microsoft will start selling it solo for $54.95 next month. Apple's Mighty Mouse retails for $49.

Mr. Mossberg observes that Microsoft's entry in the mice wars "isn't as slick-looking as Apple's new entry, but it's better, in my view. The Microsoft mouse has an innovation: It allows you to instantly magnify any portion of your screen without zooming into the whole display. That's a great help to people doing detail work, not to mention to the increasing number of baby boomers with declining vision."

He faults Apple's "stubborn homage to the old dogma" -- the one-button mouse -- as part of the Mighty Mouse's problem. He says that tests conducted by himself and his assistant showed that right-clicking with the new mouse was "unpredictable ... We needed to press the right side repeatedly to get a single right click, slowing us down and annoying us, well, mightily."

He also had little luck with the mouse's scroll bar, although he does write that the ability to squeeze its sides and launch Expose worked "much better." In addition, he was frustrated by the lack of wireless capability in the Mighty Mouse.