I just got the Logitech V450 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks (Black) and the Western Digital WDML5000TN My Passport Elite Portable 500 GB USB 2.0 Hard Disk Drive (Titanium) I ordered during Black Friday sales today.

I bought the Logitech V450 Nano to use when I travel with my notebook. I still prefer my corded Logitech MX518 for playing games (especially first-person shooters), but the V450 Nano will be much more convenient for browsing, e-mail, and other “every day” use when not at home.

I’d been wanting to pick up a V450 Nano ever since my wife bought one to replace her previous cordless mouse, but waited until a great Black Friday sale to buy it. The battery life on my wife’s V450 Nano has been ridiculously long, so I’m expecting great things from mine as well.

I’d also been wanting a new Western Digital Passport external hard drive since I’d nearly filled up my 160GB Passport a while back. The new 500GB Passport comes with a stylish light gray (or “titanium”) matte finish and an oh-so-fancy carrying bag. The drive’s capacity gauge (which consists of a series of lights that indicate how much data is on the drive) falls into the “it’s not entirely practical, but it’s cool in that not-too-distant future sort of way” category.

Windows 7 Home Premium recognizes the drive as having 465GB free when formatted using NTFS (the drive comes formatted as FAT32 by default), but that was expected as most hard drive manufacturers use a different definition of kilobyte than operating systems.

The matte finish means the case won’t be woefully susceptible to fingerprints like past Passport models, but the newer model lacks the rubber bottom, which helped the old models grip the desktop and not slide around, which is a handy design feature for an external hard drive.

All in all, I’m very pleased with both purchases (especially considering the prices I bought them for). Using my notebook away from home will be easier with the new mouse and more storage capacity is always nice (especially 500GB more).