Genius Ring Style Wireless Presenter Review – Anything But Conventional

IMPRESSIONS AND TESTING

From the exterior alone we can deduce that the Genius Ring Style Presenter is incredibly easy to use, and has little touches here and there for added comfort and functionality. The rubber coating and finger groove in the back give it that soft feel, while the clicky plastic interface bring the ruggedness.

Using PowerPoint, the play/esc button at the very top enters and exits slideshow mode in fullscreen. The previous and forward buttons on either side  cycle back and forth slides respectively. The middle button is the blank button which hides the screen by overlaying a blank page on the slide (cloaks the screen using the background colour/picture). Finally, the bottom button is for the laser pointer. The pointer would have a better layout if the laser button and blank button had swapped places. The laser button in the middle makes sense as it would be used considerably more often than the blank.

Outside of PowerPoint or other presentation suites, the Ring Style Presenter functions differently. The play/esc button acts as F5/refresh; previous and forward are page up and page down respectively; finally, the blank button simply inputs the letter ‘b’. It can be used to quickly scroll through web browsers, but it is optimized for presentation programs.

During our testing we never ran into any problems. Everything worked flawlessly, without any interference – including the 2.4GHz receiver. The red diode laser on other hand is surprising. We took it outside to test the 10m range, and indeed the laser dot disappeared beyond that amount.

Inside the house where sunshine is more limited, the laser range doubled to 20m, but the wireless range faltered at 15m. At night with predominantly ambient lighting, the range of the laser reached about 40m, which is quite substantial. You would never need a magnitude higher than 10m for a device made for presentations – but it is fun to test anyway. Note that that laser only projects the dot, not the beam, and only comes in red.

Battery life for the Ring Style Presenter is very good, with eight hours of constant use, and 24+ with moderate/low usage. Remember that the laser will die first at around the six hour mark, but you will still be able to use the buttons for a time without having to recharge.