if you want to add a mouse and a numeric keypad but don't have enough room for both
our friends at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company have the solution
yes it's the product you've all been waiting for the 3M keypad mouse
featuring a numeric keypad and a two button mouse with a scroll wheel and a retractable USB cable
in the same package now you can finally move your mouse cursor and type in numbers at the same time
yes this is a real product that 3M sold I doubt they had anything to do with designing it but
obviously someone at 3M took a look at it and said yeah that's what we want in our product
lineup there on the bottom it says 3M model number LX451 keypad mouse it's made in China
and it is an optical mouse
I can't find much information about the 3M keypad mouse except that it was introduced
in 2004 and 3M's original description for it was two devices in one means
less peripherals to carry they actually meant fewer not less no more hunting and
pecking for number keys on notebook computers include scroll wheel travel
bag and retracting cable and it wasn't cheap in 2007 it had a price of $89.99
and I found this article from 2011 saying that Apple filed a patent for a mouse with
a built-in touchscreen numeric keypad it would have a display inside that would project its
contents through collimated optical fibers to a curved touch sensitive surface which you
would then use as a keypad obviously Apple never ended up making anything like that
but the article does mention that 3M offered a mouse with a built-in numeric keypad the LX451
now there are a couple obvious problems of combining a keypad and a mouse into one unit
which I'm sure you're already thinking of first is that a mouse is designed to move around easily
while you want a keypad to stay put while you're typing on it on this one it moves fairly easily
as a mouse but when you want to use it as a keypad you really have to be pushing straight
down on the buttons otherwise if you go in an angle it tends to slide around on you
so it really sacrifices ergonomics as a keypad in order to be usable as a mouse
and also the other way around
you don't want to be pushing on these buttons when you're just trying to use it as a mouse so
it drops off at a pretty steep angle so there's no support for your palm when you're using it as
a mouse so if you use this for any extended period of time as a mouse it's going to be pretty painful
another aspect in which the keypad mouse is less than ideal is its size
for comparison here's a standard full-size USB mouse and you can see how much wider the
keypad mouse is but yet if I compare it to some keycaps taken from a regular full-size numeric
keypad you can see how much smaller its keys are in comparison so it's too big to be comfortable to
use as a mouse and too small to be comfortable to use as a keypad at least the mouse buttons
feel about the same as a regular mouse still nice and clicky but nose will be less hollow sounding
and with this retractable cable it begs comparison to one of the
compact mice designed for laptops and you can see the difference right away
it does have the little dot on the 5 key with the intention of making it possible
to find your position and type numbers on this without looking at it but if
you're switching back and forth between your full size keyboard and this keypad
the difference in size of keys is going to be disconcerting so you'll probably
end up having to look at it anyway to figure out where the numbers are
probably to reduce the chance of accidentally pressing those keys if you do happen to rest your
fingers on it when using it as a mouse the keys on the keypad are unusually stiff they're just
standard rubber dome key switches but they have a very snappy feel to it so they have a rather
high activation force the enter key is especially stiff it even sounds different than the other keys
it has an equals key which you don't normally get on a numeric keypad as well as a backspace
key but that's down here in the corner where it's not very convenient to get to
okay enough talk let's actually try this thing out so I'll plug it into my
laptop running Windows 7. installing device driver software it found a USB composite device and two
USB input devices and as I move it around the pointer moves around how exciting so yes it
functions perfectly fine as a mouse the buttons work clicking and dragging works everything works
the scroll wheel works so working fine as a mouse
now let's try the keypad here I wanted to start typing some numbers on the keypad mouse but as
you can see nothing is appearing on the screen and that's because I discovered an undocumented
feature of the keypad mouse and that is when you don't have num lock on it actually acts as
arrow keys so here I switched over to an image on the screen and if I press the keys on the keypad
it acts as arrow keys and also page up and page down home and end
and all the usual functions you get on a keypad if you don't have num luck on
I suppose that could be useful for some games which use both the arrow keys and
the mouse with the keypad mouse you can do both functions in one device
and while we're in a web browser one useful function of having a backspace key on the keypad
is that you may be able to use it as a back button for your browser now unfortunately most modern web
browsers no longer support that I guess because people got tired of accidentally hitting that to
correct a mistake not realizing they were not in a form on the web page and it ended up going back
and losing all their work so that's probably why they eliminated that feature for most web browsers
but if yours still supports it this could be used as a back button for your web browser
but now I'll press num lock on the main keyboard
and now I can actually use it to start typing numbers
see I'm already running into the problem that it's moving around on me when I'm trying to
type numbers see like I said you really have to push straight down on it to be able to use it
as a keypad without it sliding around on you and while using it to do some calculations
I realized that having this equals key is redundant because in any
normal calculator application the enter key serves as the equals key
in fact I don't think it's really any more practical than using the numeric
keypad that's embedded into the main keyboard of just about any PC laptop yes the numbers are
arranged at an angle but at least they don't move around on you when you're typing on them
and thinking back to 2004 many people were not comfortable of using the trackpoint eraser head
pointing device found on many business class laptops even though I love these
things I'm actually faster using one of these than a regular mouse and also
many early track pads were quite small and difficult to use of any degree of precision
so that may have been part of the reasoning in introducing the keypad mouse but within a few
years trackpads became larger and finally figured out how to do scrolling properly
"but you know what I found out when I got this two
finger scrolling it's like a Mac oh my God it's amazing"
and with the increased demand for larger widescreen displays more and more laptops
started including a numeric keypad built in
thereby rendering the keypad mouse obsolete the keypad mouse can also be used with a Mac or it
might make more sense because except for the original Macintosh Portable from 1990 Apple has
never offered a laptop computer with a numeric keypad however I think Mac users are generally
perfectly comfortable with using a trackpad so they wouldn't have as much demand for a numeric keypad
that doubles as a mouse they would prefer to just have a regular numeric keypad on its own
so that's about it for the 3M Keypad Mouse it's not a very good mouse and it's especially not
a very good numeric keypad and it looks like most people who use the 3M keypad mouse were
equally unimpressed on Amazon it has a rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars but still
somebody thought up the idea of combining these two devices and you have to give them
credit for actually making it and selling it even if it wasn't a very successful product