Some ideas are so obvious that you wonder why nobody thought of them before. For road-trippers doing office work on a Pocket PC, the Think Outside Stowaway Travel Mouse is one of those ideas. If you do any document editing on your Bluetooth-equipped Pocket PC, it's a must-buy.

The Stowaway is a comfortable little Bluetooth mouse that helps turn your Pocket PC into a tiny little quasi-desktop setup. You can type memos (if you have a keyboard) and mouse around without ever having to pick up a stylus and reach over to tap on the screen. The mouse makes remote-access software and Web browsing a lot more fun, too.

The left mouse button and scroll wheel work right off the bat, and Think Outside's driver software lets you configure the right mouse button, the tracking speed and the scroll wheel button. We set our right mouse button to click on "OK" boxes, which greatly speeds up working on Pocket PCs.

We tried the Stowaway Mouse with QVGA and VGA PDAs and with two Pocket PC Phone Edition handhelds, and it worked with all of them. But we found that simultaneously using a Bluetooth headset or keyboard with the mouse on a Pocket PC Phone Edition causes problems; we heard clicking in the headset and the mouse tended to drift. Disconnecting the mouse stops the clicking; disconnecting the headset or keyboard stops the drifting. Think Outside says the culprit is the phones' Bluetooth radios, which generate errors on two simultaneous connections if one of them is streaming large amounts of data. Bluetooth keyboards worked fine with the mouse on non-Phone Edition devices, and IR keyboards worked well with all Pocket PCs.

You can also use this mouse with a Bluetooth-equipped Windows or Mac PC, but the breakthrough here is in never having to pick up a stylus while using Pocket Word again. If you want to get more done on the road with your Pocket PC, this little mouse roars.