MousePhone

Bill Buxton's Notes

This mouse takes a page out of "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where Scotty picks up a Macintosh mouse, thinking it is a microphone, and speaks into it. Well, it works on this one, as long as you are calling a person and not trying to speak to the computer. It has a regular phone embedded in the mouse, the dial keypad on the back, and a second cable that just plugs into the phone jack on your wall. A seemingly quaint idea at the time. Yet, with the popularity of voice over IP, this quaint idea is starting to come back and get some traction. Perhaps timing isn't everything. But it is something that is often the difference between goose and hero.