I decided to upgrade my mice both at work and at home.
My number one priority is: no cables. I’m so tired of seeing inextricable piles of cables around my computers that I’m now actively on a mission to eradicate them all. A secondary priority is that I’d like the mouse to be fairly neutrally shaped, since I use my left hand. I’m right handed, but more than twenty years ago, it occurred to me that I should probably try to save my right hand as much as possible, and moving the mouse is an activity that doesn’t require a lot of accuracy, so I tried to switch. It took me about a week but it’s actually a lot easier than it sounds, and yes, you can be an effective left hand mouse user even for games. But let’s save this for a future post.
Since I play video games at home, I wanted that mouse to have a few additional functionalities, such as a high resolution and adjustable DPI.
Finding decent wireless mice turned out to be harder than I initially thought, even despite a few recommendations on Twitter and Buzz. A few people suggested the Mighty Mouse but I quickly ruled it out for a few reasons:
- It’s very, very small.
- It doesn’t have adjustable DPI.
- The touch features strike me as awkward (you have to curl your finger and make sure you don’t move the mouse while you touch it) and, worse, they look like they will greatly increase the risks of Repeatitive Strain Injury.
For work, I ended up picking the Logitech Marathon M705:
Its two minor weaknesses is that it’s a bit smaller than I would like and that clicking on the middle button requires some training, but overall, I am pretty happy with its feel and performance.
For home, the only mouse that met all my criteria is the Razer Mamba:
The Razer is by far the best mouse I have ever used. Ever. It’s just incredible, it’s the kind of mouse that you would expect Apple to produce except that Apple seems to be really terrible at designing mice. First of all, the Razer feels fantastic in your hands. It’s light but not too light, the side buttons are very well positioned, even if you are using your left hand.
The Razer is very easy to recharge: no fumbling around trying to find minuscule connectors, just place the mouse on its charging stand. Another clever feature is that if you’re running out of battery but you still need to use your mouse, you can just unplug the cable from the stand and plug it into your mouse, turning your Razer into a connected mouse while you need it. I’ve only had to do this once, though, because I hadn’t placed the mouse on its stand for more than a week.
The Razer is expensive, though ($129.99) but considering the amount of time I spend using a mouse every day, it’s absolutely worth it.
#1 by Don on March 28, 2010 - 7:39 pm
I agree with your observation that the Magic Mouse is problematic from an RSI point of view. This is ironic because although it’s a product that uses the same multitouch technology as the MacBook’s multitouch trackpad and is a chronological successor to it, it’s a huge step back as regards strain. (Exactly for the reason you point out; it requires you to curl your fingers.) If you’re concerned about RSI, the state-of-the-art is unquestionably the MacBook trackpad. No mouse comes anywhere near. (I’m a musician who got paranoid at the first hint of RSI years ago and has used a variety of devices including graphics tablets.) The two-, three- and four-finger swipes on the multitouch trackpad can be done with almost zero pressure and with the hand in a natural position. I use an ever-so-slight movement of the entire forearm, so the fingers don’t need to curl. For the most common one (i.e. scrolling), I use the third and fourth fingers (rather than index and second) as the hand is in a more natural position. (Less “ulnar deviation” as the RSI people would have it. You’ll have lots of ulnar deviation with any mouse on the market. And that’s enough for something really nasty and intractable to kick in at an arbitrary point in the future.) Years ago, it was the case that you would expect to have more satisfactory input devices on a desktop setup and would have to slum it a bit on a laptop. The irony is that now if I am using a desktop Mac, I would use my Macbook keyboard and trackpad as input, via screen sharing, purely from RSI considerations. If my work was Windows- or Linux-only, I would run them under virtualization on my MacBook, purely for the trackpad.
#2 by gene T on April 6, 2010 - 5:10 pm
Good roundup. For wrist /anti-RSI therapy, I actually like the smallest USB mice i can find, which generally are teh cheapest.
As an aside, cables on mice wouldn’t be so bad if they ran out the tail, towards you, so you could position the mouse between your thumbs and close to the keyboard