Hasta La Gadget!

The GlideTV is a couch mouse, something pretty handy when a lot of us are watching TV and movies on our computer screens. It works over USB, and you plug a dongle into the machine to play. From there, you can control your cursor with a touchpad, and there are a few buttons which mimic the ones most used on a keyboard, like Escape and Enter. The best part is the rim around the pad which neatly contains a lot of extra buttons. And because it works like a regular mouse and (limited) keyboard, it works with most machines, from Media Center PCs to Macs to PS3s.

But the keyboard is the problem for this otherwise sexy half-egg (it looks like a sex toy, as you can see in the photo of it being fisted, above). If you are using Windows, you can download the GlideTV Navigator software, which will give you an onscreen keyboard, but we all know how quick and easy they are to use (not very, if you were wondering).

Still, the GlideTV, which comes from the brains of the people behind VUDU and SageTV, packs a lot into a tiny device. And at $150, that’s a good thing: For the same price, you could pick up a wireless keyboard with a trackpad or trackball. Then again, the GlideTV will fulfill that other living-room remote requirement: It can be lost down the back of the sofa. Try that with a full-size QWERTY. If only the Glide people would put a vibrator inside. Then it would be perfect.

Product page [GlideTV. Thanks, Patrick!]