3DVelocity would like to thank Cruzbroker Kuopio (Savon Ruoska OY) for their help and courtesy in providing this mouse for review.

Introduction

Cordless seems to be the future with everything. We have wireless LAN adapters and home networking systems. Then of course we have mobile telephones and laptops that are using WLAN network cards or Bluetooth technology to connect to internet or external communication devices and other networks. Then we got those fancy wireless headphones so that you can go dancing around the house without your neighbors going postal.

 

My dream PC would be one without any wires and that's were Logitech steps in. WithLogitech's cordless keyboards and mice you are able to lose a few of those extra wires. The problem is that this wireless thing-a-magic just doesn't come free. When the first cordless keyboards and mice came to market they were using infrared to transmit data between the transmitter and receiver. Infrared is surely good for some applications such as remote controllers but it just doesn't fit on other peripherals. The problem is that with IR the space between transmitter and receiver needs to be free. If I look at my desk it just sounds so ridiculous to have free space on it! That's where the new models using radio-frequency for data transmit steps in. Radio waves doesn't mind if you have a big pile of books and stuff blocking the way to your fancy new mouse. Now this starts to sound good! I can control my computer from the other end of the house! Well actually that is possible but that high transmitting levels would need a lot of power and that's the biggest problem with wireless products. That's why the mouse reviewed here has only a usage range of approximately 2 meters. Of course I had to try how long the range actually is and the the mouse worked from a little over 3 meters if there were absolutely nothing in the way.

Details

I must admit that the first time I saw this mouse I immediately wanted to lay my hands on it. It just looks so cool. These pictures can't really show what it looks like in real life because it looks actually really weird! Even though the shape is somewhat strange it felt rather good in my hand. At first it didn't feel that comfortable after using the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer for a year or so but did get used to the feels of this beauty and started actually to like it. This mouse is pretty much the same sized as all the standard mice out there so it should fit quite nicely in anyone's "standard sized hand". To give you a little better idea of the size and shape of it here are a few photos of the Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical besides Microsoft's IntelliMouse Explorer.

The mouse has three buttons and the normal wheel to scroll the webpages or change weapons in your favourite FPS game. The wheel works also as fourth button and by default clicking it opens Logitech's own WebWheel software menu. WebWheel is Logitech's own software that brings all the common browsing options and favourite links close at hand. The third button can be found right under your thumb and you can define whatever action you want to it, just like to all the other buttons on the mouse.

This mouse uses two normal AA-batteries to power up the radio transmitter and the optical sensors and lights. The biggest problem with cordless mice have always been power consumption and thus all the cordless mice until now have used the old fashioned opto-mechanical technique. Using optical sensors to collect the needed data for mouse movements is more precise and works better on a lot more surfaces than the older opto-mechanical method. The engineers at Logitech has been hard at work with this problems and have managed to minimize the power consumption of their newest cordless optical mouse. They teemed up with Agilent Technologies to find the best solution and managed to come up with a next generation chip that allows lot longer battery life that former chips have allowed. Along with better power saving technologies the new chip also features higher 800DPI resolution while other sensors has only about half of that. Logitech promises a battery life of more than 2 months with the batteries that comes with the mouse. The status of the batteries can be monitored with Logitech's Mouseware software.

Usage, Installation

I had the mouse for a couple of days and for the time I tried it in both WinME and WinXP build 2535. I played some MaxPayne, Quake3 and Emperor - Battle for Dune. At first the mouse felt quite nice because there were no wires to slow the usage but after a couple of hours of hard work with Photoshop and normal work with Windows and Office I started to get a little irritated with the mouse. The precision wasn't quite as good as what I have been used to with my Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer. Actually I couldn't notice any difference in normal Windows use or in gaming but when it comes to precision, for example when editing photos, this just isn't quite as good as it could be. In most games this is a great mouse but if you wan't your sniper rifle to be as accurate as possible this mouse might not be the best one. The mouse has a great 800DPI resolution it doesn't actually help that much when the PS/2 refresh rate is only at 50Hz.

To quote our dear friend Wayne, I'll say that "Installation was as easy as crashing Windows, the drivers were right on the money and the supplied documentation was clear and simple. What more could you ask for?" Just plug in the transmitter/receiver, install the software and push the connect button on both the mouse and the transmitter and you're done. I also tried it in WinXP and even though Logitech doesn't currently have any XP specified drivers it worked perfectly with W2K's drivers and software.

Conclusion

This is really a great mouse for normal everyday office use and gaming. But if you are a hardcore gamer or graphics enthusiast this one just may not quite cut it. Of course there is the issue of batteries but if you can live with changing the batteries every two months or so there'll be no problems. The looks of this thing are really cool and it feels quite nice in your hand but if you have really big hands the size might be somewhat too little.