With Ultrabooks making laptops more slender than ever, it feels somewhat counterproductive to continue lugging a full-sized mouse around if you can’t get on with the touchpad. Logitech claims to have the answer with the incongruously named Cube.

As you’ll see from the photo, it’s not a cube – in fact, when I first saw it on the table at the CES Showstoppers event last night, I thought it was a discarded box of matches.

However, this diminutive little device is a portable mouse cum presentation clicker. The entire upper surface of the device is touch surface. You tap the top of the Cube for a left-click, near the middle for a right-click, and run your finger along the surface to scroll. To move the cursor, you drag the little box of tricks around like a mouse.

It’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker

I’ll stress that I only had chance to spend a couple of minutes with the Cube at the Logitech stand, and this should by no means be considered a definitive judgement, but… I really don’t like it.

The Cube is obviously very light, and that makes it hard to move the cursor with any precision. I’m not the biggest fan of trackpads, mainly due to their lack of accuracy, but I can’t see the Cube being any better in that regard. Having to retrain your muscle memory for left- and right-click could also prove an obstacle. And it’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker.

I do like the way that the Cube becomes a presentation clicker when you pick it up: you “click” the Cube to advance to the next slide, and flip it over and click the other side if you want to go back. It’s also unobtrusive: a little USB receiver sits almost flush in one of the laptop’s ports and the battery is rechargable via USB.

Whether that’s enough to justify the $70 (around £45) price tag is, at this stage, highly questionable. But I’ll reserve full judgement until we can literally get our hands on one in the PC Pro Labs.

Yes, seventy English pounds.

Thankfully, Microsoft’s at least attempted to justify this high price by cramming it with some pretty impressive technology. For starters, it’s possible to snap the Arc’s curved back into a totally flat position, which turns it off and makes it easy to slip into pockets and bags. It’s also absolutely tiny: 14mm thick at the business end, and just 7mm from top to bottom at the rear.

This rear portion is constructed from rubberised material with a steel frame beneath, and snapping the mouse to its prone position is oddly satisfying – especially at the end of a long day, when it can be whacked into submission. It’s not likely to break, either: Microsoft boasts that the flattening mechanism has been stress-tested for 40,000 actions.

The underside is also magnetic, and can be used to store the tiny USB receiver that connects the Arc to your PC.

The front section of the Arc is thicker – it contains a pair of triple-A batteries and Microsoft BlueTrack optical lens – but there’s one notable omission: the scroll wheel. Instead, the Arc boast a capacitive touchpad that can be used to scroll up and down pages. Haptic feedback can be used to replicate the feel of a wheel, and the touchpad’s sensitivity can be customised.

So, the Arc serves up a capacitive touchpad, a snappy flattening mechanism and design that makes it look like Jean-Luc Picard’s phaser – but we’re still not sure that this particular rodent is worth its exorbitant price.

That capacitive touchpad, for instance, might seem smooth under the finger, but scrolling still feels as jilted and jerky as it does with old mechanical wheels and, while using the middle of the pad to open and close web pages is a neat idea, it requires a double click, which initially proved annoying. The pair of buttons are better, with a reasonably comfortable action, but they’re small and require a fair amount of precision to hit, which proved especially annoying as our fingers slid around the cheap, glossy plastic that Microsoft has used for the Arc’s business end.

The Arc’s crammed full of gimmicks, then, but we’re not convinced: while the flattening mechanism makes the Arc easy to store and is about as innovative as mice get, the capacitive touchpad and glossy buttons feel more mediocre than we reckon a £70 mouse should. Check back next week for our full review.

Unsurprisingly, I’m really impressed. The new chassis is wonderfully neat and tidy, sturdy and not as heavy as I was expecting. It’s certainly a good looking machine. I’ve only got one little criticism (if you exclude the hefty price) – the touchpad.

Getting rid of the button is an inspired decision. Under Mac OS X I rarely find myself using the physical button at all, opting instead for a light tap on the pad itself. This works perfectly well, all the time, as you don’t need two mouse buttons. The problem here is that Apple has chosen to make the whole pad a physical button, instead of just taking away the button below the pad. Press firmly and the whole thing depresses, and it’s distracting.

I found myself trying to press and stroke as lightly as possible, so as to not press the button. Sure, after a week or two I might get used to it, but my first impressions are not good. I seriously think that if I was to replace my current (and suddenly very old-fashioned) MacBook, I would have to attempt to open up that innovative new case and jam up the button with a thin piece of card.

Of course, I could always just opt for another manufacturer, but it seems unlikely. That case is very good looking…

Choose a suitable spot on your lid, peel off the backing and press it into place, then just slide the groove on the base of the Nano onto it – hey presto! you’ll never lose your mouse again. Phew.

It also comes with a remarkably small receiver, which slots neatly inside the mouse itself – it couldn’t really get much more portable. Check back on Monday for the review.

Since using both of these quite intensively, I have developed what I think is trackball-specific RSI – a sharp pain in the muscle group up at the elbow end of the forearm, when I make certain movements which involve grip with the middle (longest) finger.

Watching what I do when trackballing, it looks as if quite a lot of the fine movement with a ‘ball is done with the arm frozen in tension and the index and middle fingers moving very slowly, also in tension – which gets a lot worse when dragging. It could be that I’ll have to go back to the good old mouse to give my arm a break: at least, it’s that or buy that first sign of decrepitude – a shopping trolley…