Mele Fly Sky Air Mouse

The Mele Fly Sky Air Mouse is a really nice device.  I have been using the remote for a few days on the MK802.  Being part mouse, part remote and part keyboard can get a little confusing for users.  One side of the Air Mouse is a full querty keyboard.  The other side is 1/2 mouse and 1/2 remote control.  When holding the device as a remote control, it is the perfect size.  It contains up/down/left/right buttons that you would find on a remote control.  The center button inside of the D-buttons is the mouse left click however.  Above the D-buttons are Enter and Back keys.  If you are using the D-buttons and want to select something, you have to use the Enter button, not the left mouse button.  I find it very counter intuitive, but you learn.

The Home button does not take you to the home screen.  The Settings button does open the settings menu, however.  The Volume up and down buttons to adjust the volume, but the Mute button does not Mute.  It is worth noting that almost every button that DOESN'T have a default action does get sent to the app.  In a future post, I will give out all the integer codes for the Air Mouse.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the arrow keys worked in far more Android interfaces than I thought it would.  It is almost like the Android developers has some foresight that someone would want to use a D-pad to navigate.  This was nice since using the mouse took a little effort.

The mouse kind of acts like a WiiMote in the sense that waving the Air Mouse moves the mouse pointer.  It is not a pointer, though.  Just pointing to the icon you want to click won't work like it does on the WiiMote.  If I had to guess, I think the Air Mouse contains a gyroscope.  The gyroscope measures changes in pitch and yaw.  Yaw changes move the mouse left and right.  Pitch changes move the mouse up and down.  The hard part to get used to is the fact that the mouse moves based on the change of pitch and yaw, not the absolute value like a WiiMote.  For example, point a WiiMote toward the ground.  The tilt it up 45 degrees. Since you only tilted up 45 degrees, you are still mostly pointing toward the ground.  The Wii's mouse pointer won't move.  Now do the same thing with the Air Mouse.  The mouse pointer moves up!  It doesn't matter what direction the Air Mouse is pointing; the mouse will move based on the pitch and yaw changes.  It takes some getting used to, but I adapted pretty quick.  Another thing to note is altitude, roll and side-to-side changes do not impact the mouse pointer.

There are some pluses and minuses of this setup versus the WiiMote pointer style.  WiiMotes can get shaky when trying to select something.  The pointer drifts because most people can't keep their arms perfectly still.  For the Air Mouse, you will find that the mouse pointer doesn't have this shakiness.  If you are currently pointing at what you want to point at, it doesn't move away from it that often.  The Air Mouse only moves the mouse if you have changed the pitch or yaw enough.  This threshold is set frustratingly high, but I have a feeling it is set that way to prevent some of the jitters that the WiiMote suffers.  It does make it hard to select small buttons on the screen, however.

The keys on the keyboard were large enough to hit very easily, but the keyboard was a little too wide to type at a fast rate.  I think this was a design trade off with being a remote and a keyboard.  If they made the keyboard width smaller, then the remote wouldn't be as long and it might be a little awkward to hold as a remote control.  Because of that, I can't fault the designers for this.  I found the Shift and FN keys a little counter intuitive.  The Shift key acts as a standard Shift key.  It only makes things upper case if you hold down the Shift key while typing a letter key.  The FN key is a mode, however.  Every time you hit the FN key, it switches between the white and the orange keys.  This gets difficult when you are typing something that requires you to go back and forth between white and orange.  The FN key doesn't always work so you don't know which mode you are in until you type.  This can be deomonstrated by typing in a url.  You start with H, T, T, P in white, then Colon in orange, then Slash and Slash in white.

Overall, I am very happy with the device.  The one mouse has had slight problems that required a reboot (there is a small button to press on the side), but it hasn't happened often.  I have been able to navigate throughout most interfaces with ease.  I can switch between using it as a remote, a mouse and a keyboard to navigate, configure and use my Android TV.