Hands on with Apple's Magic Trackpad

 

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Posted on 29 Jul 2010 at 10:45

The Magic Trackpad is an external, multitouch-capable touchpad that connects to your computer using Bluetooth. The touchpads on Apple's MacBook line of laptops have long supported multitouch gestures. The company's Bluetooth Magic Mouse also supports multitouch, but we found attempting to perform the gestures on the Magic Mouse's small surface to be awkward and more than a little uncomfortable. This shouldn't be a problem for the huge Magic Trackpad which is around a third the size of an Apple wireless keyboard.

We had a brief hands-on with the Magic Trackpad at Apple's London launch event. Using one will be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever used a MacBook touchpad or, to a certain extent, an iPhone or iPad. We had no trouble using it for common tasks such as selecting and dragging icons or for scrolling through long documents and web pages by dragging two fingers up and down the pad.

Gestures which are already supported on the MacBooks are also supported by the Magic Trackpad, such as rotating images by using two fingers to make a turning motion, zooming in and out of images and web pages by pinching and panning around images by dragging three fingers across the pad. All of them feel natural and work well.

A new gesture is the ability to drag a window by simply dragging three fingers across the pad when the cursor is hovering over a window's title bar. Unfortunately, this uses the same three finger gesture as panning through images, so you have to choose which command you want to use with that gesture which is a shame. It does work surprisingly well, but unlike the other gestures we're not sure it's much of an improvement over the traditional method of simply clicking and dragging.

As expected, the Magic Trackpad is designed to work with Macs - there's only basic support for Windows PCs. Windows users can't use the more advanced gestures, such as zooming, panning or three finger dragging. We expect touchpads on Windows laptops will soon replicate Apple's new gestures as they have with the older ones, but we don't expect them to feel as smooth and responsive as Apple's.

Apple is aiming the Magic Trackpad as a compliment to a desktop mouse rather than as a replacement, but we suspect it'll be welcomed as an alternative to a trackball by RSI sufferers. The Magic Trackpad is available now for £59 which is a bit pricy compared to most mice and trackballs, but there aren't any other input devices quite like it.

Author: Alan Lu