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It’s been almost half a century since the first computer mouse squealed its way out of California’s Stanford Research Institute back in the 1960’s. The evolution of what is considered to be such a trivial and unappreciated little device today impresses me quite a bit. 

Still in my mind, no computer sy stem could be complete without it to its side; which is a statement that makes me sound like I’m about to be deprecated, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.  The Mouse isn’t even an item I would think of changing or innovating on – it’s just there and does the job well for the most part. Surprisingly, in a world where touch is taking over some companies beg to differ and a new rodent is on the block. 

Before the dawn of the Graphical User Interface, text-based hyperlinks were manipulated with a mouse and generally intended for use with the NLS computing system, or what was also known as the “On-Line  System”. It was the very first system to employ the practical use of such hyper-textlinks, the mouse (co-invented by Douglas Engelbart and colleague Bill English back in 1963), as well as an array of other modern computing concepts that we thoroughly enjoy today. It was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force. The concept of these links was then refined by researchers at Xerox PARC not too long after and was extended to on-screen graphics to be primarily used for the Xerox Alto computer. The GUI was born and from that moment forward our computing experiences would never be the same.

Of course, most of us can recall the Pirates of Silicon Valley’s story of how Apple took the concept off of Xerox’s green hands and incorporated it into the Apple Lisa PC (priced around a whopping $10K at the time) which introduced the menu bar and windows control concepts to the masses in 1983. It was like taking candy from a baby! Without a doubt, Microsoft had to one-up the Apple Lisa by bringing the version of the IBM PC mouse to market in the same year. It featured two buttons – that’s the “one-upped” part – and retailed for $195 each. The price sounds shocking today, but the same will apply to today’s technologies tomorrow. The two following years were special for the mouse as the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and legendary Macintosh 128K leveraged the mouse to be a core functional tool, but also a unique selling point in the mid-80’s emerging personal computer market.

I realize that innovation comes in many different forms, but it’s always a force to be reckoned with and some of the very best ideas tend to be staring me right in the face. With the evolution of touch, mice are no longer as exciting as they were back in the early 80s, but I recently came across the new LSM-100 Scanner Mouse by LG and it’s a damn cool new gadget that does exactly what you think – perhaps a bit more too!

The good build and durable materials that makeup this critter   don’t reveal the real magic under the boot. Turning the Scanner Mouse over reveals a clear sheet of rectangular glass packed with five LEDs for the camera to see the image being reflected off of a mirror inside. Simple and to the point, you click the side scan button, the software will activate and scan away! Anything you run the mouse over will be picked up and intelligently stitched together with image recognition technology and the help of 4 lasers split between the top and bottom of the device. It picks up the direction of your hand’s movement and makes the scanning experience exceptionally smooth. Image output from this handy mash-up is top notch for use on the go and maximum convenience as it produces 320 dpi and can scan up to an A3 size piece at any one given time depending on your own computer processing power. Formats such as JPEG, TIFF, PDF and PNG are exportable to your favorite social networks, and you've got basic editing functions to make your scans just right as well.

It’s pretty awesome and I never thought I’d say that about such a simple item in this day and age, but the real reason why I came to be so awestruck by this rodent is because it saved my life and literally hours of it. The Scanner Mouse’s OCR ate up half of the towering stack of a couple hundred business cards I’ve collected over the past six months in just about half an hour. The info was translated accurately about 95% of the time and prevented hours of loss of life. All I had to do is copy and paste the info in my address book and voila!

LG has done a pretty good work here, I should probably start taking more note of them. On the other side of the fence, I can’t help but feel that the LSM-100 will be marginalized by the newer technologies on the market. More people are on the go, and more businesses are digital in all they do, so typically less scanning is being done in general.Moreover, track pads and magic-mice have incorporated multi-touch capabilities that are becoming far more customary and integral to new software functionalities. With a price-point of around 100 Jordanian Dinars (141 USD), it may be that this rendition of the mouse is a tad bit too late for our times, but till time proves it to be obsolete it’ll remain a close tool and maybe a new friend.

Here’s a preview of the little guy in action:

	The Scanner Mouse and its subject: The March 2011 edition of Entrepreneur Magazine.
	A quick press of the scan button on the Scanner Mouse’s side puts us in scan mode and we simply fly over the areas of the image that we’re looking to capture.
	After the scan is over, another push to the side button will take you to the edit section. Here some minor adjustments to the output’s color and brightness can be done.
	Other image manipulations and side adjustments can be done at this stage as well.
	You may also crop the image and immediately extract it from the LG client.
	Another final cool feature is the instant share-ability built right into the LG Scanner Mouse client. With one click, everybody can check out your new photo.