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

Once the pairing is established, you can turn off the power to the mouse at any time and stick it in your pocket. When you want to use it again, simply power on the mouse and press one of the buttons for a second or so, and the pairing will be re-established. I found the pairing even survived removal and replacement of the batteries while I was shooting pictures of the packaging!

It was also fairly easy to pair up the mouse with my laptop running WinXP SP2 and a Belkin F8T001 USB Bluetooth adapter. However, the mouse would not pair up with my Nokia 3650 phone. Not for a lack of trying, though. The phone recognized the mouse, but it wanted to establish a secure connection with a passkey, and there was no way to set a passkey with a mouse, and no way to tell the phone to set up a non-secure connection.

Unfortunately, you also cannot pair with two devices at once. There was no way I could get the mouse to be recognized by both the laptop and the Pocket PC at the same time. This makes sense, since Bluetooth is supposed to establish a ‘virtual cable’ connection, so it wouldn’t be right to have a mouse with two cables coming out of it. Unfortunately, that means that if, like me, you want to use the mouse on both the laptop and the Pocket PC, you need to disconnect it from the current connection by placing the mouse in Discovery Mode, then re-establish the pairing with the other unit. This isn’t a difficult chore and on the Pocket PC, it’s not necessary to go through the entire set up procedure (i.e. selecting Enhanced vs. Safe Mode and soft-resetting the Pocket PC) each time. You just need to re-establish the connection by tapping on the Connect Button in the Mouse driver, then pressing the Discovery Mode button on the bottom of the mouse, then any button on the top of the mouse.

Fortunately, the same driver supports ThinkOutside’s BT keyboard as well. Because I had replaced the driver, I had to re-establish the pairing with the keyboard, but that was pretty straightforward.