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Kensington Pro Fit Ergo TB450 Trackball -- REVIEW
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Jun 22, 2024
Does your wrist hurt after a few minutes of detailed work with your trackpad or mouse? It's time for you to switch to an ergonomic trackball, and few companies know the space better than Kensington! Tech expert Dave Taylor checks out the Kensington Pro Fit Ergo TB450 Trackball with Bluetooth and a 2.4Ghz dongle and finds it's a great alternative for Mac, Windows, even Chromebooks. Check it out at: https://www.kensington.com/ Visit Dave's Q&A Web site at: https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ #kensington #trackball #ergonomics #rsi #health #trackpad #mouse #askdavetaylor
View Video Transcript
0:00
Tired of mice and trackpads? Let's check out this new trackball
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Dave Taylor here and I've been using mice and trackpads forever for a really long time and
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there's lots to like about them especially the ones that are built into laptops and such
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but they often end up having your hand at a weird angle and if you use them for a lot of time
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you can end up with what's known as repetitive stress injuries or RSI and it can hurt your
0:37
wrist can hurt I've seen people pretty debilitated from it so one of the things that makes a real
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difference is changing the angle of your wrist while you're doing a lot of these sort of detailed
0:50
repetitive motions enter trackballs now this is the Kensington Profit Ergo TB450 trackball and
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it's for their entry-level trackball and it's really cool it shows the many many generations
1:06
of design that the company have gone through on all of their many trackballs so one of the things
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I think is most fun is that with trackballs it's often hard to keep them clean this has as you just
1:19
saw a simple removal mechanism just a little button on the bottom and then you can take this
1:25
out and give it a quick clean because you're not dragging it around it's not picking up dirt from
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your work surface but there's often dust and dirt and pollen and maybe fur if you're working from
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home and you have pets and that can collect and it can start to impact it now the coolest thing
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about this is it actually has an optical sensor in that hole and there's a little button on the
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bottom and you can change the sort of resolution of the trackball you can step it from 400 to 800
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to 1200 to 1600 dots per inch or dpi meaning that when I make a motion then depending on the
2:06
resolution that will either be a little bit of cursor motion on my screen or a lot of cursor
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motion and as you can see this is designed where it's just for your thumb so a lot of trackballs
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are like a full hand or you use your palm this is a different design it's sort of somewhere between
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a trackball and a mouse really because my right hand my fingers are actually going to sit on a
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set of buttons and then there's a track wheel too and the wheel's really cool because it lets you do
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like scrolling up and down but it also you can push it and you can get that mouse click too so
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in practice it takes just a couple of seconds to adjust and your thumb's moving the cursor around
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and then the wheel is letting you actually scroll because often we're reading content on pages
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and then you can just push a button and if that's not the right button you can move your finger
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over and you can access the three different buttons that are there too so most importantly
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it's designed for ergonomics you can see my hand is at a very different angle than it would be if
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i was using a trackpad or if i was moving around with a mouse and it's the three buttons plus the
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track wheel plus the trackball and there's two different ways you can connect the way i have it
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connected to my macbook pro is through bluetooth and it uses bluetooth low energy one double a
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battery is going to give me 15 months of use with bluetooth and on the bottom as you can see in this
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close-up there's an on off switch and then that lower button is for dpi and the big button on the
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top i already demonstrated is how you can pop out the wheel if you need to give it a quick clean
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super easy so bluetooth low energy but the battery compartment has a secret thing too if i take it
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out then there's actually a little dongle in there too that's usba the rectangle and you can
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plug this into your pc most typically and this is a 2.4 gigahertz connection and with this it'll work
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for 18 months a year and a half on a single double a battery it's pretty good battery efficiency i'd
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say even better is it's using 128 bit aes encryption so if you're in an environment where there might
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be people sniffing the data in the air to try to figure out what you're doing well you're safe
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it's encrypted i personally don't work in an environment where i have to worry about that but
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if i was worried about it it's really cool to know that this is having you know is protecting me
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from those nefarious data sniffers so in terms of the design 50 of the plastic is recycled which
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is great it's easy to clean and it comes with a really cool app so let me open this up and let me
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spin you around so you can see what's on my screen as you can see the app gives you access to all of
5:05
the different functions and it's kind of cool if you just move the cursor over you can see where
5:10
the different buttons lay but you can also click on one and you can choose what should happen when
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you push on that button or in the case of middle click what should happen when you push on the
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wheel and honestly it's almost overkill there's so many different controls here but i'd rather
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have too many controls than too few now we go to pointer and you can see that on the right hand side
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i can choose how fast it goes i can actually make a number of different modifications and then on
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scrolling same again i can adjust scrolling speed and perhaps the most important of all of these
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i can adjust scrolling orientation now i do want to point out that there is some duplication with
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these features and controls in the operating system but you can see kensington works gives
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you the ability to tweak and fine tune exactly how your mouse works so i want to reiterate that
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same point again is that all of the functions in the kensington works app are great but they're also
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redundant with what your operating system also gives you and this will work with mac or windows
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or chromebook or linux or really any operating system that has the ability to have an external
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pointer and interaction of device of some sort and that's pretty much all of them so you can use this
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with your chromebook for example and just have this huge improvement so quick tour with some
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close-ups there are the three buttons and the track wheel here's the track ball and then on the bottom
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again is the on off switch and the dpi button and the ability for you to change and pop out
7:00
that little ball so you can clean it so really that's everything there's not much more to talk
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about with this product other than the price but before we get to the price i'm going to ask if you
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could subscribe to my channel click or tap on that subscribe button give me a thumbs up if you found
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this useful and interesting i appreciate that great this is the kensington profit ergo tb450 trackball
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and it's 49.99 at kensington.com simple straightforward and elegant straightforward and easy to use plug and play ready to rock and roll solution for any computer you have where you
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want to just get away from trackpads and mice that pick up all the dust and dirt and just go into a
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different way of interacting with your system these are game changers and if you have an achy
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wrist or you have pain shooting up your arm number one go talk to your doctor but number two change
8:00
the angle of your hands while you're working and that's another thing this is really good for
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it is designed for ergonomics it isn't designed to just fit into the overall chassis of your
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computer or something so that's all i got i'm going to go back to my work so i'll have to catch you
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in my next video so
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