Mice

Kensington’s Orbit Wireless Mobile Trackball is a compact mouse replacement, designed to be relatively portable with a tiny USB receiver and wireless connection. Installation is simple: on the test systems we used you could opt to install Kensington’s trackball software, but it would work irrespective of this across both Windows and Mac systems. Mouse movement of the trackball is smooth and consistent, although the ball’s small size may not suit everyone’s hands.

The wireless Explorer Touch Mouse rounds out Microsoft’s range of new gesture-based mice and despite the robust-sounding name, it’s actually the smaller sibling to the Touch Mouse we reviewed last month and the Arc Touch Mouse. Aimed squarely at the on-the-go business class and natively compatible with both Windows 7 and Mac OS, it’s an ambidextrous, glossy fingerprint magnet using BlueTrack sensor technology, which claims an impressive 18-month battery life on a single pair of alkaline AA cells.

From a gamer’s perspective, there are two main obstacles faced by wireless mice: weight and lag. The former is mostly due to the batteries, as a couple of AAs can feel like you’re dragging a brick around your desk. The latter is due to the nature of wireless tech — it takes longer to encode control signals, send them over the air and decode them again at the other end. The Logitech G700 manages to overcome both these issues, so much so that in the thick of gaming we forgot it was wireless.

It’s likely that anyone willing to spend $70 on Microsoft's new wireless Touch Mouse has the interest in tech and disposable income to already own a smartphone. Which is what makes this mouse both a great idea and frustratingly flawed. With only one button and a touch-sensitive surface, the Touch replaces a scroll wheel, right button and a couple of other bits with swipe gestures familiar to anyone who’s played with an iPhone or tablet.

Did you know that awful products are much easier to review than straight-forward successes? If Thermaltake’s eSPORTS Azurues mouse, for instance, featured 28 impossible-to-use buttons, came packaged with a little sachet of anthrax in every box or exploded on contact, we’d be all over it. As it is, there’s not much to say about this simple gaming mouse except that it’s cheap, it’s comfortable and it works real good.

Full points for effort: this high-end gaming mouse from Gigabyte is undeniably well-spec’d and designed with an eye for aesthetic detail, featuring very sensitive optics, wired or wireless operation, high-quality materials and even a patented (albeit kind of naff) battery system, all in an aggressively styled and priced package. To a large extent that effort pays off: though the M8600 is a fairly heavy mouse (148g with the battery), that weight combines well with its 5,600dpi sensor and maximum 1,000Hz polling rate to make for an accurate pointer that feels very steady indeed.

The gaming mouse market is nothing if not diverse. Here, for example, we've reviewed the macho, high-spec'd Gigabyte Aivia M8600, the tiny, twitchy CM Storm Spawn, and the more conventional, but still impressive, Mionix Naos 5000. Some, such as the Spawn, are highly specialised gaming devices, while others, like the Naos 5000, are more versatile, and ideal for gaming, image-editing and other productivity tasks.

While some gaming mice differentiate themselves from competitors with some degree of eccentricity each (the M8600’s aesthetics and the Spawn’s size, for example), the Mionix Naos 5000 treads a fairly sedate path. As a result, it’s not especially exciting (unless you hyperventilate over quality optics and smooth tracking), but it's significantly less likely to turn off any users. A wired model with a 5,000dpi sensor and 1,000Hz polling rate, the Naos 5000 comes quite close to matching the M8600 for sensitivity, albeit without many of the latter’s bells and whistles.

Given that it’s squarely aimed at gamers, it’s arguably redundant to note that the CM Storm Spawn’s appeal rests on how much of your computer time you devote to video games, but this really is something of a niche mouse, only truly suitable for one purpose. If that’s your thing, great. This tiny mouse’s uncommonly small dimensions, which require an initially uncomfortable claw-like grip to manipulate, make it incredibly twitch-friendly — a boon for first-person shooters and other games requiring snappy reactions.

The Roccat Kone[+], not to be confused with the original Kone, has a slightly doughy name and the sort of customisable LED lighting that makes you wonder what you’re doing with your life as you decide whether it should pulse, glow or lose it. However, it’s also a great gaming mouse with accuracy and comfort to spare. This moderately expensive wired mouse comes with an impressive 6,000dpi laser sensor, boasts a comfortable (albeit right-handed) design and has just enough (eight) buttons to be useful without overwhelming, all while offering very smooth, low-friction movement.