Don't toss out your mouse and keyboard just yet

The Leap Motion controller is well-constructed and relatively inexpensive. However, it's more a novelty than a tool -- best served as a means for entertainment, not productivity.

It's simple. It's fast. It can see your hands in great detail. And at $80, it's pretty cheap considering what it can do. But that's just it; what it can do is impressive. What it does do? Not so much.

The Leap Motion Controller lets you interact with your PC or Mac in an exciting new way with responsive and intuitive gestures, but the app store is fairly limited.

Leap Motion's Kinect-like PC motion controller has its moments of magic, but right now it's more toy than productivity tool.

It's a cool concept, and Leap Motion pulls off the execution reasonably well -- for the surprisingly low price of $80. But it definitely raises a few questions, starting with: What would you actually use this thing for? And does it have any practical business value?

Even if it worked perfectly, I’m not sure how useful it would be to the average person. I could see it enhancing certain computer-aided tasks ... Yet I’m not convinced it would make these activities that much easier or better than performing them with existing tools.

The Leap Motion Controller is a piece of sci-fi futurism available today, and it's cheaper than you think. But while it's magic when it works right, it's maddening when it (frequently) doesn't.

Eventually, we can envisage a time when Leap Motion’s technology is simply built into your laptop or keyboard; until then, eighty bucks is a low-cost way of bringing some sci-fi magic to your desktop.

With a mouse or even a touchscreen you cannot learn about a frog's heart as if it were in your hand ... That's why, even despite its current imperfections and bugs, the $80 Leap Motion still seems like a computing leap worth taking.

Motion control is here to stay, but the question is: can it ever become a basic part of how we interact with machines? Perhaps, but the Leap Motion hasn't quite made that case.

It hovers somewhere between gimmicky toy and impressive proof of concept – but at a price that screams 'buy me anyway'.

Each app has its own set of gestures, so you end up constantly learning new movements, often for the same commands. There needs to be a common language uniting them all. Besides that, the body overheats, there's no single "wow" app and too much of the software is expensive and/or disappointing.

Whether we were slicing watermelons in a Fruit Ninja demo or drawing minuscule curlicues in a 3D-drawing app, the Leap followed our phalanges' every move on all three axes with nary a hiccup.

The demo unit allowed you to use the controller to navigate Google Earth, and the functionality felt ready for prime time to me, as this was the first time I’d ever used the Leap Motion. The controls seemed intuitive, and within a few minutes I was flying around the globe pretty handily.

The Leap Motion itself if just watching your hands intently and sending all that data over to the computer as fast as it possibly can.

I played with this device for all of 15 minutes in a controlled environment (LeapMotion's SF office) but that was a glorious quarter hour; I felt like Tony Stark using the Jarvis UI. July 29th can't come soon enough.

Gestures make most activities more fun — in the digital world and in the real world — but until the Leap Motion Controller becomes more deeply integrated into an operating system so it can replace a mouse or touchpad, this gadget will only sate a niche audience.

The Leap is neat, but it's not much more than that. It's absolutely not in the same class of convenience as a touchscreen, primarily because interaction with it is so iffy and inconsistent.

've seen photos and videos of the device before, but didn't realize how small it was until I tried it out for myself. The controller fit in the palm of my hand, and is light and elegantly designed — much like, well, an Apple product.

In person, The Leap is even smaller and more Apple-like than it seems in pictures. It’s incredibly lightweight, slim, and sleek. It’s nothing like some of clunky hardware accessories we’ve seen that give laptops and computers next-gen capabilities.

The Leap is the kind of device that can change the game, but the innovation cannot move forward without some major software and hardware tweaks first.