Tablet owners, Microsoft has a new keyboard you should know about. Yes, it's meant for Windows 8, but the Bluetooth-based Wedge Mobile Keyboard will connect with any current operating system -- tablet, computer, or otherwise. The keyboard itself is sturdy and responsive, but just as useful is the rubber cover that doubles as a tablet stand. To be priced at $79 when it goes on sale in late September, it's one of the more expensive tablet keyboards. Still, a simple, versatile design for the stand, the strong keyboard, and an assortment of thoughtful touches make this keyboard one of the best tablet accessories to date, and an easy recommendation.

At roughly 10.25 inches long (almost 10.5 with the cover) and 4 inches deep, the Wedge Mobile Keyboard is one of the smallest tablet keyboards available, coming in under both the Logitech Tablet Keyboard and Apple's Wireless Keyboard. The Wedge Mobile Keyboard's suggested retail price is higher than that of either of those devices, which are $69, but street prices for all three should be considerably lower.

Made of an aluminum base, plastic keys, and a rubber cover/tablet stand, the keyboard weighs exactly 1 pound with its two AAA batteries installed (there's no provision for rechargeable batteries, but if that's a concern, you can always invest in a set of third-party AAA rechargeables). Its size and weight already make the keyboard an easy travel companion, but Microsoft has gone the extra mile in terms of its on-the-road friendliness.

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By default, the Bluetooth® Wedge Mobile Keyboard pairs with most tablet PCs through secure simple pairing (SSP) with a passkey. Some tablets, however, may not support SSP well with a passkey. To successfully pair your Wedge Mobile Keyboard to such a tablet, use the following alternative pairing mode. Pair your keyboard through SSP without a.

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With the rubber cover on, the device automatically turns off, meaning you don't need to remember to hit a power button. The battery tray is also convenient. The batteries slide into one end of the rubber wedge on the bottom of the keyboard. Simply push the battery icon in and the tray slides out, but only far enough to slide in a pair of AAAs. Since you can't completely remove the tray, it can't fall off or get lost.

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The keyboard itself has shallow, tapered keys with a 17.5mm key pitch, close to that of a full-size desktop keyboard (typically 18mm to 19mm). Typing on the Wedge Mobile Keyboard simply feels right; the keys have satisfying bounciness without feeling mushy. The biggest size sacrifices come with the supersmall arrow keys and the function row keys. There is also no number pad, but you do get a series of four Windows 8-specific hot keys, Search, Share, Devices, and Settings, each mapped to a 'charm' icon function in Microsoft's new operating system (I'll let our review of the most recent Windows 8 build provide the full background).

If you believe what you read about Windows 8 and touch, the mouse will be dead in October. And yet, I'm here to tell you that that's premature...for now. Microsoft, in fact, is making its own set of touch mice in advance of Windows 8's formal launch. The smallest of them, the Microsoft Wedge Touch Mouse, doesn't aim to reinvent the PC's long-standing companion so much as to make it a lot smaller. You may be using a full-size touch pad with your Windows 8 desktop, but for tablets you might crave the opposite: a mouse to make that touch-controlled computer feel more like an old-fashioned desktop.

There's a reason why mice make more sense for Windows tablets than for full-fledged touch computers: some tablet keyboards, like the Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard, lack a touch pad. A mouse can substitute for that missing touch pad and provide needed navigation, in a way the iPad currently can't. On a portable tablet, adding a keyboard and mouse can transform your tiny device into a full-fledged workstation.

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The 'touch' in the Wedge Touch could seem misleading: this isn't a multitouch pad grafted onto a free-moving mouse. It's really just a design evolution of the touch mice Microsoft already has on the market. Touch, in this instance, is relegated to a few basic scroll functions. You can drag your finger against the mouse's angled matte top surface to scroll in four directions. That basic touch control is all you'll get in the Wedge Touch: no added multifinger gesture language as for the larger Microsoft Touch Mouse. Microsoft may or may not have additional gestural plans for the Wedge Touch mouse in the future, but right now it's a pretty basic affair.

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The rest of the Wedge Touch Mouse's mechanisms are standard: right and left click zones in the front have a pleasant tactile response and work even on the front edge. BlueTrack technology, used in other Microsoft mice, does an excellent job of tracking the Wedge Touch's movement on any surface, even glass. Finger scrolling works as well as advertised, too. The Wedge Touch Mouse has inertial scrolling that works intuitively based on how hard you flick, and it worked particularly well on a test PC here at CNET with Windows 8 RTM installed. The Wedge Touch works equally well with a Windows 7 laptop, and even a Mac (on the Mac, however, inertial scrolling felt less smooth than with Apple's own Magic Trackpad and mouse). Android users, the Wedge Touch will even work for you: on a test Acer Iconia Tab, the mouse and even its four-way scrolling worked fine (single-click only, though).

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The shape of the Wedge seems incredibly nonergonomic at first, but it makes sense once you use it. The thick end stays at the rear, while your fingers grip the metal sides. When holding it, my hand automatically assumed the position it would be in holding a regular mouse; the Wedge Touch just eliminates the extra bulk. My hand made a lot of surface contact with my desk, almost as much as the mouse itself. This could be completely uncomfortable for some people, and I have no idea what long-term use of such a small and strangely designed mouse would feel like, but I found it easy to adjust to.