My brother has a post in his blog about how he is happy with his wireless keyboard and mouse. Originally I wanted to write a comment there with my reasons against wireless inputs, but than I thought that it would be handy to have it here (makes referring to it later kind of easier).
I don’t like wireless keyboards/mice at all. Here are my reasons:
- Slow and inaccurate. Try playing an intensive game of Quake3 and you’ll see for yourself.
- More work without much gain. Charging and replacing batteries is boring. Battery life sucks for those who spend a lot of time on the computer. Meanwhile, the distance you can move the devices is not that great. Not even a medium room diagonal.
- Space saving is a myth. All of these keyboards that I’ve seen come with stupid multimedia functions which there is no good use for. They are always there to hide the size expansion that is needed to fill in the batteries. Keyboard cable takes much less space and is much more flexible (you can bend it).
- Weight. Because of the batteries wireless devices are havy. That is not so noticable with the keyboard, but mouse will provide for some extra body shaping. If you can stand it that is.
- Price. These things are more expensive than there cord counterparts. Plus you have to buy the batteries once in a while.
"Slow and inaccurate…"
I agree that it is impossible to play Quake3 or something similar with wireless, but it also comes from optical mouse :) so to play games it is better to have cable mouse with ball.
On the other hand, usual typing and navigating throught windows is ok.
"More work without much gain" – it takes almost a month for the batteries in mouse to do empty and keyboard – it seems that it doesn’t use electricity at all :)
The distance is also quite big (I tested it with the keyboad I have and it was around 3 miters I could still type and use mouse). Maybe it was not the best type of keyboard you were using some day?
About multimedia keys – it is hard to find a keyboard without em even non-wireless one :) (although I don’t like em as well)
"Weight…" – to be honest, I don’t care about keyboard weight (until I can move it away to clean my table and put it back) and mouse – I like when my mouse is a bit heavier. It depends on ones wishes :)
"Price." – nowadays the difference is not too much, but still I can agree with you that it is there :)
[1] I guess you don’t type a lot, and when you do it, you do it slowly. :) I used some Genius wireless set and I regularly typed faster than it could cope up. And I am not the fastest typer around. Also, batteries were dying after about a week of coding.
As for the distance – I wanted to use the keyboard as a remote control for the computer that was attached to the TV. It wasn’t getting any signal while I was on the sofa. That’s about 3-4 meters or so…
I guess it was long ago, because now the signal is much stronger, so you can use new keyboards for your remote control. The speed is ok as well :)
[3] It was a couple of years ago or so…
If you will ever get a new type of wireless keyboards (like the one I spoke about) – try it, and maybe your opinion will be changed :)