Review Logitech NuLOOQ navigator - Mini review

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Keith
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LOGITECH NULOOQ NAVIGATOR

Available at a few online retailers at around the fifty quid mark.

I bought one of these a few months ago largely out of curiosity, it seemed like it could be a useful little device and anything that helps the worklflow has to be a good thing. So often with impulse buys like this you end up thinking 'what the hell did I buy THAT for!'. This little beauty is just the opposite, I now wonder how I could ever manage without it. It took me no time at all to adapt to it, it just feels so natural and intuitive in my hand.

Discretely placed to the left of your keyboard, it doesn't interfere in any way with your accustomed way of working but adds a whole extra level of control for your left hand. It can be configured to work just how you want it to in various applications. You can, if you want, configure it completely differently in Photoshop to any other application. I have mine set up so a delicate stroke clockwise or anticlockwise of the top (in true ipodesque fashion) changes the brush size of whatever tool I am using. A gentle tap of the centre top resizes my image to screen. A twist of the main ring zooms effortlessly in or out and a nudge left/right or up/down scrolls intuitively around a zoomed image. I have the buttons on top configured to work best for me, I have, for example, one button programmed simply as an ALT so I can pick cloning or healing source points without moving my hand from the navigator. You can program the five buttons to do whatever you want. Outside of Photoshop I have configured it to do whatever is appropriate at the time, for example when I'm not in an application the touch sensitive top controls the volume on my PC at a stroke.

The only slight negative I would say about the NuLOOQ is that it took a little tweaking to fix it before my PC would recognise it in PS3, not a big deal though and this may well be fixed by now in updated drivers.

Apart from the great functionality of this little device, a big plus for me is the overall quality and feel of it. It's just one of those things that feels 'right' in your hand, the sort of 'feel' you expect when playing with the controls in a luxury German car perhaps or the intuitiveness of an ipod.

So, I guess you get the idea that I like this device! My only fear is that it doesn't sell well and they discontinue it and stop supporting future releases of the popular apps... it would be a sad loss if they do so I urge you to go out and find someone with one of these, give it a try and spread the word. This should be as popular as a mouse for the left hand!

Flashy
 
I have been looking at trackballs to augment my laptop and this poped back into my head. I thought about it for a while but then realised that I would still need a mouse or trackball, and since I didn't want to have two items connected to my laptop I've had to discount this.

That said, it does look promissing and surely has the cool factor added to it .. of course I couldn't vouch for its practicality but reading your mini-review makes me now reconcider my initial plan and may be, just may be, I may give this a shot.

Thanks for the review ... good and to the point.
 
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