You may recall my post about finding three-button padless optical USB mice
for the Mac.  I was planning to buy a cordless Contour PerfitMouse (they are
due out the first quarter of this year, apparently) since it has three
buttons and a wheel.  I wanted to avoid the usual two-buttons-and-a-wheel
design.  (The wheel makes a lousy button.) I had also planned to buy a
cheap mechanical 3-button mouse until the PerfitMouse came out.

But seeing the MouseInABox in the shelf and feeling somewhat impulsive, I
decided it would probably suit my needs and bought it.  I'm still deciding
if that was a good idea.

Good features:

price: $29.95 (a bit more than twice as much as a cheap mouse, $10.95)
padless optical
resolution: 400dpi (same as the Apple padless optical mouse -- I understand
  that all these mice use a common Agilent chip anyway, so I'm sure they
  all have the same resolution)
five buttons (the box says four but the wheel is a button too)
more or less G4-like color scheme
a bit lighter than the Apple mouse (you may or may not prefer that)
ambidextrous (you may or may not prefer that)

Useless feature:

"Tail light" LED that shines out the back

Bad features:

the wheel is a button (in the box, the mouse is protected by a layer of
  plastic; I was able to click the regular buttons but not the wheel;
  I assumed the wheel wasn't a button; after I opened the box I found
  that it is; I think that's annoying but I suppose it could be remapped)
slow tech support (and were they giving me ads for daytimer.com or did I
  misunderstand the recording?)
MacOS sees CD as ISO format (the box says it supports the Mac, so perhaps
  they didn't bet on the MacOS recognizing the ISO partition, or perhaps
  I got the wrong CD; the software is on their Web site though)
two buttons unrecognized by MacOS (perhaps the USB spec allows only three
  buttons and Kensington had to do something creative with the other two,
  or the MacOS recognizes only three buttons, or Kensington just wanted
  to make the other buttons unavailable without special code -- soemthing
  they have done in the past)

Unknown feature:

NetBSD support of all five buttons (X only says it supports three and I
  have been unable to get debugging messages out of the ums driver)

The NetBSD support will probably determine whether I keep the mouse or
try to return it.  See my other post.

-- Derek

P.S.  "MouseInABox" is a registered trademark of Kensington.  Really!