Windows Phone Thoughts: Hey Martha! Get the Cat, There's a Mouse on my Pocket PC! (Stowaway BT Travel Mouse Reviewed)

Pairing
I would strongly recommend printing off either the User Guide or the Quick Start Guide, which are also located on the CD, before attempting to load the drivers and pair up the mouse with your Pocket PC. While the screen prompts are fairly straightforward, there are some nuances to the way the loading, setup and pairing occur that are a bit different. Following the instructions given, the pairing was simple and worked the first time, but I suspect that if I had tried it without reading the manual first, I might not have been as successful.

I won’t go through the entire initialization/pairing procedure here as it is well documented in the Quick Start and User Guides. Suffice it to say that it requires about 10 steps and will involve at least one soft reset of your Pocket PC, after you select either the Enhanced or Safe Cursor modes.


Figure 6: After selecting Mouse setup, selecting Enhanced or Safe Cursor mode.


Figure 7: Verifying the Bluetooth connection using the mouse for the first time.

Although the Enhanced mode worked fine on my iPAQ 2215, I tried switching to the Safe mode, just to see if there was any difference. The pictures below show how the cursor appears on the screen. I didn’t notice any significant difference, other than it seemed the arrow was a bit larger and the tracking didn’t seem as smooth. ThinkOutside suggests you stick with Enhanced mode, unless you start seeing traces of the mouse cursor following it, or encounter difficulties in re-establishing a connection after a soft reset.


Figure 8: The Today screen with a Safe mode cursor.


Figure 9: Safe Cursor mode in Textmaker.