By Jasmine Osada

Take a look and Apple's latest wireless mouse and you probably won't take too long to notice quite a few things are missing from the pointing device's design.

While most conventional mice feature two clickable buttons and a scroll wheel, the Apple Magic Mouse is just a single, flat surface with neither lines nor buttons.

Minimal as its design might look, the Magic Mouse, Apple's latest offering for the 2009 Christmas season, can do much more than most other computer mice are capable of.

As the world's first multi-touch mouse, the entire surface of the Magic Mouse works as part of the device's control.

Think of the Magic Mouse's surface as something like the trackpad on your laptop. Users can scroll up and down, as well as pan across pages and swipe through photos or frames using multi-finger gestures without the need to manipulate any specific buttons or parts.

With it's smooth, curved lines, the Magic Mouse feels comfortable to hold, though guys with larger hands might find it on the small side. Being a Bluetooh mouse, the lack of wires means that mouse is very clean and spared from the mess of wires.

The added weight of two AA batteries in the device might make it heavier than conventional, wired mice. But I still found the Mighty Mouse easy to use and not as heavy as to feel burdensome when sliding it across any flat surface.

To save power, the Magic Mouse also switches itself to low power modes during periods on inactivity.

In our hands-on session, I found the mouse to be very responsive with no discernable lags. The mouse recognizes left and right clicks just like other two-button mice, and the mouse depresses with a good tactile feeling.

Finger gestures too, worked beautifully. Even though there wasn't a trackball or scroll wheel, I had no problems with the 360 degree scrolling or the regular up and down page navigation.

Swipes though, might take a little getting used to as it involves moving two fingers across the surface of the mouse and might not come quite 'naturally' to some. Those with larger hands too might find the mouse a little too slim to detect swipes the first couple of times, though it seems one gets better at it after a few tries.

Apple's Magic Mouse certainly looks very promising and the device's all-new concept and technology certainly has a lot of potential.

The Apple Magic Mouse will ship as an accessory end October 2009 as an accessory for $98, or comes standard with Apple's new range of iMac desktop computers. The mouse also requires Mac OS X Lepoard version 10.5.8 or later.