Living with Logitech T650 Touchpad

During Spring Festival JD had a coupon, 200-50, so I couldn’t help myself and chopped off the Logitech touchpad that normally sells for 199, the T650. It came to 149. I’ve been using it for a while now, so let me talk about how it feels. Since I mainly use Ubuntu, I’ll focus on that.

For the summary crowd, look here: works, usable, serviceable, but not what you’d call nice. Fine as a backup.

Actually, at first the shop owner said for ten extra yuan he’d throw in a knockoff copy of something like a black-and-white bear thing, and I refused……

First off, I spent no more than two hours with this touchpad under Windows 8, but basic swipe gestures are supported pretty well, the drivers are quite complete, and you can add all sorts of custom gestures. In practice though the uses are about what you’d expect, and I figure intros to this stuff are all over the place, so I won’t waste words.

Solaar

As I said earlier, I mainly use this touchpad under Ubuntu. To use Logitech wireless devices in a Linux environment, first I recommend installing Solaar. Don’t get hung up on PPAs; compiling and installing per the instructions below is also very simple.

Actually Solaar doesn’t have any special options when managing the T650, but at least you can see its remaining battery precisely, and use Solaar to manage the Unifying receiver.

Upgrading the firmware

This should be the most important step. You see, after getting the T650 I found there was no way to get tap-to-click working for the left button under Linux. Yeah, exactly, the thing laptop touchpads do. If you want to left-click you have to press down hard on the left side of the touchpad, right side for right-click. It’s tiring and not cool. Plenty of Linux users complain about this, and a Google search turns up lots of results. But in February 2014 Logitech released new firmware that supposedly fixed the click problem for some users. In practice, after upgrading this firmware, the T650 can do tap-to-click under Linux.

There’s also bad news: upgrading the firmware has to be done under Windows. I tried a virtual machine, and it failed. For the specific tutorial, go dig through Logitech’s official site.

Gestures

Like that Mac touchpad, the Logitech T650 works well under Ubuntu’s Unity. You can do one-finger tap, two-finger tap for right-click, three-finger tap for middle-click, two-finger scroll, three-finger left/right swipe for forward/back, three-finger swipe up for the Super button, three-finger swipe down for a separate key combo, and so on. Also worth mentioning: swiping in from the edge of the touchpad is its own separate button, with no function by default. I set it to switch between the left/right workspace.

Shortcomings

I’ve never used a Mac trackpad, so I can’t say which of the two is better. At least on system support I’d guess Apple is a step ahead — after all, I still can’t do the fancy stuff like three-finger swipe to drag windows or four-finger swipe to switch workspaces (I hear KDE and XFCE can do it with customization, not sure). Purely for browsing web pages and simple operations, this touchpad is decent enough. Don’t even think about gaming. The touchpad is rechargeable, and a full charge lasts about two weeks. JD often has it on sale for 199; if you can get it under 150 yuan, buying one as a spare is a good deal. At least compared to a mouse that wrecks your wrist or a trackball that wrecks your thumb, a touchpad lets one of your hands “get a full workout”……