Canon: an USB mouse with numeric keypad and calculator embedded

"PC Launches" informed us about a curious Canon peripheral device destined to the PC world. We refer to a particular USB mouse, that hides under its body, a keyboard with double functions.

The top part of this mouse can be opened and it contains a small LCD panel as a traditional calculator, while on the underside there's a numeric keypad with buttons for the most elementary operations. The purpose? Provide a calculator and also a keypad in a single device to benefit who must digitize numbers with a great frequency. There are so many users that, following the great notebook diffusion, need to use an external USB numeric keypad because it's hard to find it integrated on the laptop keyboard.

Very often, in fact, the numeric keypad on portable PCs, is available only using the second fuction button, that prevent the contemporary use of other frequently needed keys. Canon choosed to offer an alternative to this method, at a small price of 32$, according to the source.