In my experience, which is, I’ll admit, limited, these are poor substitutes for their wired counterparts. I had used a Logitech wireless mouse for a short while while at an old job, and the main thing I noticed was the severe latency between mouse movement and corresponding cursor movement on the screen. Based on my subjective experience with LCD panels of differing response times, I’d guess this wireless mouse had a latency of about 30ms.

Apparently, many (or most) people don’t notice this sort of thing, but it was a deal-breaker for me and I went back to a good old wired optical mouse. The other problem was with the wireless mouse was that its batteries died after about a month of use. Speaking of batteries, too, it used AA batteries, which meant that the mouse itself was larger and heavier than its corded cousin which draws power through the cord.

In further experience, my recent purchase of a wireless keyboard wasn’t that much better. I got a nice sleek Logitech keyboard, just because I needed one in a hurry (had spilled Coke into my old keyboard, thereby ruining it), and Best Buy didn’t have much selection in the way of corded keyboards (let alone keyboards in general, but the bulk of them were wireless). So based on the feel of the keys, I picked one out. I figured my experience would be better than my mouse experience, since a couple years had passed (technology’s getting better, you would assume) and the box advertised the quickness of the wireless transmission/encryption protocol.

What I noticed, though, was that there was in fact a definite lag when typing. On the order of 15ms as a guess, but this was per immediate keypress. When typing fast, keystrokes would actually queue up and I could type for a while, stop typing, and watch the letters appear on screen to catch up to what I had entered. This effect was most pronounceable when navigating around a document using the arrow keys, home/end, etc.

Furthermore (this was the main deal-breaker), many keyboards seem to be, for no apparent reason, rearranging the block of keys above the arrows. For example, the standard “101 key” keyboard has a 3×2 block that looks like this:

INS HOME PGUP
DEL END PGDN

So that’s what I’m used to. The Logitech, instead, had a 2×3 block which completely rearranged these keys, and the locations of several surrounding keys. The F1-F12 keys were very small and hard to press.

So today I returned that keyboard and got a cheapie Dynex board, which is quite a relief. The keys are all where they’re supposed to be, and cursor response time is instantaneous.

Conclusion of all this is: Call me old fashioned, but wireless keyboards/mice have a long way to go. It’s all about the response time. My monitor is a 5ms LCD panel, and I can tell when I’m using anything less than that. (That’s my #1 complaint about Macs, by the way: the OS itself is laggy when redrawing the cursor/windows on screen. Not to mention that the iMac LCD itself has a rather high latency. Feels like the cursor is being pulled along by rubber bands connected to the actual position of the mouse, rather than being controlled directly.)