Price

It's $90, both MSRP and on Amazon.

Verdict

I generally don't like ambidextrous mice. SteelSeries says they spent three years researching the ergonomics on Xai, and while it sounds crazy, it worked. The form factor is so good it feels almost like an ergonomic mouse. Bucking the trend of growing fatter and more bulbous (have you seen some of Microsoft's mice lately?) for a more streamlined, average form factor, it's an amorphous enough shape that most people will like, and no one will hate (or, conversely, truly love). The one flaw is that you're going to hit the two periphery buttons that are on the opposite side of your thumb whenever you pick up the mouse to move it, so I wound up disabling them altogether.

Xai has a monochrome LCD carved into the bottom of its ass, which sounds excessive, but it's actually quite functional: You can adjust any setting, and any of your five on-board stored profiles (which includes macros, CPI settings, etc.), directly on the mouse (bye bye, crappy mouse software). It's supremely useful. Though if you're doing more than switching from one profile to the next, you'll want to wait until you're in between matches, otherwise you're gonna get killed since the whole process of saying, changing your CPI count to slow down or speed up the mouse can take up to 30 seconds.

An issue, though, is that you only have immediate access to two CPI settings—the triangle on top flips between two alternate CPIs per profile, meaning if you want to cycle through several different speeds, you've gotta turn the mouse over and switch to a whole different profile, so if you're an aggressive mouse speed switcher (like if you're a serious sniper), that could be a dealbreaker.

There is a certain amount of spec horseshit you're swallowing with all gaming mice, most commonly couched in terms of dots per inch. SteelSeries attempts to differentiate by more precisely referring to counts per inch, which is basically the same thing—the number of increments the mouse can read in one inch of movement. Real world—well in gaming anyway—it basically translates into how fast you can turn or move your cursor, which speeds up as you ramp up the CPI. As you can imagine, the speed gets progressively more pointless, with the current "standard" of 4000DPI being about as useful as tits on a boar. Xai's money spec, if you will, is that it processes 12,000 frames a second at 5,001 CPI at movement speeds of 150 inches a second using a 10.8MP "high definition" sensor.

Guess what? I didn't test that while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 or Team Fortress 2, because no one moves their arm 150 inches a second. I will say, though, it tracks as well as—though not noticeably better than—any current generation gaming mouse, both on regular pads, and the 9HD special "HD" gaming pad SteelSeries has released for it.

If you want a gaming mouse you can use with either hand, I'd say you can't do better than Xai, though I might wait until it's a little bit cheaper. Also, I wish they'd drop the stupid, meaningless "HD" spiel. It's a mouse, not a TV.

Awesome ergonomics for an ambidextrous mouse
You can change any setting directly on the mouse
Changing settings on the mouse is a little slow
It's $90!
The HD thing is dumb

[SteelSeries]

Look at that thing! It's got solenoid valves, controllers, indicators, circuit boards, and a pneumatic actuator. And while I don't know what half of those things do, I certainly know that they catch and slaughter lil' mousies.

For Jerry's sake, I'm hoping that Tom doesn't read Gizmodo tonight. [Telovation]

Presumably membership at this ultra-exclusive dating site would gift each user with the Rotastak-esque tubing device for transporting your mouse, which features a docking system for them to, ahem, meet formally. Don't get me wrong, I'm the last person to laugh at online dating, but this whole concept is one of the most hilarious things I've heard of. [Vanessa Harden via DesignBoom]

Price

It's $35 at Amazon.

Oh, Balls

I want you to do so something for me. Take your arm place it on your desk, next to your mouse, in a natural pose. (Or trackpad, whichever.) Note the position of your hand, the amount of arch in it. Your current mouse very probably fits in there, give or take. The Jellfin doesn't.

You've either gotta arch your hand or your fingers to hold it, like you're about to throw a curve ball. And, uh, it's not very comfortable after a couple of minutes. I tried relaxing my hand more, different positions, different grips, different mousing surfaces. It's like a hellish, glorified Taiwanese OEM spin on the most miserable mouse Apple ever produced, the hockey puck.

The physical feedback from the buttons kind of sucks, too, because of the squishy gel coating that surrounds the orb (which otherwise, I like a whole lot, actually). Oh, and the whole thing feels cheap. The one decent piece of design work is that the scroll wheel is inverted—that is, you physically scroll upward, toward yourself, to scroll down on screen, which feels more natural with the way you hold Jelfin.

There's no reason to ditch your mouse to get this one. Buy a more ergonomic mouse if you need one. Buy a stress ball if you need one of those. But don't buy this thing.

Scrolling's intuitive
Squishy
Uh, it's not very comfortable
Buttons suck
Feels cheap

[Jelfin]

At first glance, I thought this was an actual mouse, and that you were supposed to drag a numerical keypad and a couple USB cables around the desk during use, but it's just a trackball mouse that's meant to stay put. Looks like it's got a standard 17-button keypad and two USB ports, and it connects via USB. If you're one of those Golden-Tee-loving types who's into trackballs, it's available for a kinda expensive 5,290Yen ($60). [RedFerret via OhGizmo]

A very long, detailed account over at tom's hardware lists your stereotypical, horrifying buying experience. The money is sent; the package doesn't arrive; an email is sent; a bullshit email is sent back. The email cycle repeats with choice phrases from the company contact like "Get out of my f***ing life!" and "Make this world war III or handle this in a civil manner."

Of course, it's not just this one story, but the many since that have surfaced like it (tracked down by tom's hardware and in our own comments) that force us to pull our recommendation. Needless to say, companies often treat us more sweetly than they treat you, but those instances can be tough to predict. [Tom's Hardware]

Sure, it's not that attractive looking and it's probably awkward as all hell to use, but the prospect of programming all those buttons has me giddy. While the guy who designed the mouse thinks it'd be great for World of Warcraft or OpenOffice tasks, I know I won't be wasting a single button for either of those things. Anyone got better suggestions? [Open Office Mouse—Thanks, Joel!]

And you thought that the Magic Mouse was expensive. Seriously, who the hell spends $1200 in a mouse? [Intelligent Design via The Design Blog]

Major findings (and we use the word major so loosely we might as well not have bothered): The Magic Mouse uses the Broadcom BCM2042 Bluetooth chip, it's covered in capacitive sensors from the Apple logo on up, and it's hard to break into. Science fails to beat magic once again. [iFixit]

As we said in the hands-on, the mouse has one piece of clear white plastic on the top, curved, like a Dove bar. It has both right and left clicks, like the Mighty Mouse, but differentiates itself from other mice with its touch-sensitive scrolling and two-fingered gestures. That's the big selling feature (other than the fact that it is a beautiful looking mouse).

As a mouse

The Magic Mouse is a very, very pretty mouse—something you wouldn't feel like you had to hide when not in use—and looks different enough from other mice that people will ask who made it, before awkwardly mumbling a nevermind as they spot the grey Apple logo.

Compared to ergonomic mice, the Magic Mouse is really low and aerodynamic, which means it doesn't contour to your hand and doesn't give the sensation that the mouse is a part of your hand, like Logitech mice tend to. But it is Bluetooth, so you don't need an extra dongle, and it's powered by two AA batteries, which get up to four months of use per charge, according to Apple.

Physically moving the mouse and mousing is fine and smooth, since there are two plastic bars on the mouse's underside that minimize contact with whatever surface you're on.
Even though there's no clear delineation between right and left buttons on the mouse itself, the Magic Mouse knows to interpret a click on the left or right half appropriately (though right click needs to be activated from inside System Preferences before you can use it).

As for tracking, it's a pretty standard laser technology that tracks decently on most surfaces, including jeans and chairs. Still, the Magic Mouse doesn't have the crazy tracking ability that Logitech's MX mice just introduced—so it can't track on glass, and it can't track on glossy surfaces like the 13-inch MacBook.

The scrolling

The one thing Apple did completely right in the Magic Mouse was the touch scrolling. It's fluid, natural and works with any amount of fingers on over 75% of the mouse surface (all the way down to the Apple logo). Flicking up and down gets you up and down web pages fast, as long as you have "momentum" turned on in the settings. Turn it off and you get fine-grained 1:1 scrolling—good if you want to slowly navigate through a PDF doc.

You can also click with one finger and scroll with another, letting you highlight blocks of text like you would on a normal scrolling mouse. On the whole, there's no major piece of scrolling functionality (other than a middle click) that you lose transitioning from a standard scroll wheel to this touch-sensitive solution. You just get the ability to scroll in 360 degrees as a bonus.

The only flaw is that you sometimes activate the left (or right) click when you're scrolling too emphatically. I suspect this is just something you'll get used to over time, but it can be annoying when you're trying to scroll and you navigate somewhere else instead.

Using two finger swiping to navigate web pages, on the other hand, is a bit more awkward. You'll need to pinch the mouse on the sides with your thumb and fourth/pinkie finger while you're scrolling, forcing you to make a painful eagle claw all the time.

What it can't do

As good as the swiping gestures are, they're limited in what you can actually accomplish with them. You can't use more than three fingers at a time, because you won't have enough fingers left to hold the mouse. There's also no option for touch-sensitive clicking, like in trackpads, something that would have been cool to have just as a bonus. You also can't tell which side is up just from touch until you click down and feel nothing happen.

So far the Magic Mouse is only compatible with the iMacs that they ship with, but will get broad support soon.

It also can't manage to stay free from scratches, similar to white MacBooks that also get scratched very easily. But the blemishes don't interfere with the mouse's functionality—it's just painful to watch any new product lose its pristine finish so quickly.

Is this the best mouse Apple has ever made?

Yeah, it is. The Magic Mouse is much better than the Mighty Mouse, which people hated, and might actually be good enough that non-Mac users might want to pick it up as well, supposing that they don't really care about ergonomics. Since it fills the gap between a tiny travel mouse and a full sized desktop mouse, the Magic is in a good position to grab users on both ends.

It looks very nice

Touch scrolling works well

Swiping is less comfortable

Not very ergonomic

The strange thing about the Magic Mouse is not how it works. It is that you have different gestures than on a standard Macbook Pro trackpad.

One obvious example: Since you move the cursor by moving the whole mouse with your hand, there's no point in also using one finger to move the cursor, like on the trackpad. Moving your finger on the surface of the Magic Mouse allows you to scroll in all directions, 360 degrees around.

You can also scroll with two or three fingers, if you move them up and down. But if you swipe them from side to side while using a web browser, your browsing history moves forward or back.

Physically, the mouse is beautiful, and feels nice. The top is made of white polycarbonate that matches the keys on Apple's keyboards. It is one seamless touch surface, and, logically, there is no Mighty Mouse scroll nipple.

The surface can also simulate the left and right buttons. Unlike in previous Apple's mice, the two buttons work perfectly. This time they also added physical feedback, so when you click the buttons, you actually get the entire surface to click—like the original clear Apple mouse.

The mouse runs on AA batteries, and Apple claims 4 months of use per set. You can get it with the new iMac or pay $69 separately.

There was a small thing I noticed, though: the mouse would sometimes move when I tried to scroll — I can maybe get used to this, but it was a thing that happened to me and my presenter who definitely had more time with the mouse. The other reason why Apple went with fewer fingers for swipe and scroll gestures, besides the issue of pointing already being taken care of by the mouse's table action, was because you need your ring finger to hold the mouse properly or the thing slides on your desk.

Also, the mouse will be software configurable for lefties.

Apple Introduces Magic Mouse — The World's First Multi-Touch Mouse

CUPERTINO, Calif., Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced the new wireless Magic Mouse, the first mouse to use Apple's revolutionary Multi-Touch™ technology. Pioneered on iPhone®, iPod touch® and Mac® notebook trackpads, Multi-Touch allows customers to navigate using intuitive finger gestures. Instead of mechanical buttons, scroll wheels or scroll balls, the entire top of the Magic Mouse is a seamless Multi-Touch surface. Magic Mouse comes standard with the new iMac® and will be available as a Mac accessory at just $69.

"Apple is the Multi-Touch leader, pioneering the use of this innovative technology in iPhone, iPod touch and Mac notebook trackpads," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Apple's Multi-Touch technology allows us to offer an easy to use mouse in a simple and elegant design."

Magic Mouse features a seamless touch-sensitive enclosure that allows it to be a single or multi-button mouse with advanced gesture support. Using intuitive gestures, users can easily scroll through long documents, pan across large images or swipe to move forward or backward through a collection of web pages or photos. Magic Mouse works for left or right handed users and multi-button or gesture commands can be easily configured from within System Preferences.

The Magic Mouse laser tracking engine provides a smooth, consistent experience across more surfaces than a traditional optical tracking system. Magic Mouse uses Bluetooth wireless capabilities to create a clean, cable-free desk top and its secure wireless connection works from up to 10 meters away. To extend battery performance, Magic Mouse includes an advanced power management system that works with Mac OS® X to automatically switch to low power modes during periods of inactivity. The wireless Magic Mouse is powered by two AA batteries which are included.

Pricing & Availability
Magic Mouse comes standard with the new iMac and is available at the end of October through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $69 (US). Magic Mouse requires Mac OS X Leopard® version 10.5.8 or later.

Price(y)

Orochi is $80, which is steep for a Bluetooth mouse, even one that travels well. It's especially painful considering the sensor's finickiness means it doesn't live up to its raison d'tre, even if the mouse does feel great for a portable and you get gamery things like onboard storage of macros.

It feels good, mostly

Orochi pulls off that rare trick where it manages to feel almost ergonomic when you grip it, despite being a symmetric mouse, because the side grooves cradle both your thumb and your ring finger. The rubberized texture is classic Razer—smooth but sticky at the same time, designed for your hand to sweat on and still maintain a grip. In the end though, it is a small mouse—so while it works great in a pinch for a couple hours at a time, the squee size makes sure it's not exactly the comfy La-Z-Boy of gaming mice.

Track this

For a mouse that you're meant to take anywhere, it should have a less picky sensor. While it tracks perfectly on my wood desk and on regular mousepads, it was pretty damn spotty on the faux leathery surfaces covering the desks at the Gawker offices, though they've never been a problem for other mice I've used on them from Microsoft or Logitech (I always considered them to be nearly perfect mousing surfaces, actually). It's unfortunate, too, because the bottom of the mouse itself glides on top of anything like Brian Boitano.

Software and configuratorator

Orochi uses a pretty standard Razer configurator that lets you adjust DPI, program buttons, assign macros, switch the mouse's lighting on or off. There's even a Mac version now. The catch is that you can't configure the mouse when it's connected via Bluetooth, you have to plug it in via USB. But the Bluetooth pairing process itself is painless, and worked perfectly. I didn't get to fully test Razer's claim of 1-3 months of battery life under "normal usage" for obvious reasons, but I haven't managed to kill it with a couple days of what I'd call heavy usage. If the battery does drop, you can always plug it in via breakaway USB though.

If it was cheaper and the sensor could handle more roughage, it'd be a solid pick for fragging in a Starbucks, but it's a kinda risky buy for that much money, as is.

Ergonomics are solid

Yay Bluetooth

No configuring while using Bluetooth

The 4000dpi sensor is a little too picky about surfaces

$80!

Apparently it's difficult to control and study the neurons of a mouse when it's physically moving, and this method makes that easier. The ball is suspended on a jet of air, and the mouse is strapped in place with a collar on top of it (like a giant trackball, sort of). Given that I don't understand psychology at all, or even totally know what a neuron is, I'm going to go ahead and assume this is an elaborate ruse to get a mouse to play Quake 2. Well played, scientists. [Pop Sci]

The entire kit includes a 3-stage, pivoting laptop stand, a wireless keyboard and a wireless M505 laser mouse (along with the tiny, USB-based Unifying Receiver that communicates with the peripherals).

Purchased alone, the components would run you $130 ($50 for each peripheral and $30 for the stand). But combined in this Costco-like bundle, you'll get it all for $100. That's $30 savings, which equates to six McDonald's Value Meals or 30, count them, 30 Dollar Menu items. [Logitech]

A Brief History Lesson

The original MX500 is the sliced bread of mousing ergonomics: The form factor is so good Logitech won't fuck with it more than six years and countless iterations later. The perfectly balanced ergonomic arch and thumb groove precisely straddle the line between suggestive and aggressive, so it feels just right, like Zach Morris.

The MX500 evolved into gamier, glossiers variants with boosted tracking engines, the MX 510 and still available MX518. That, in turn, gave us the original laser-based G5, which saw the loss of a thumb button through leprosy, and had a janky scroll wheel. Logitech fixed it with another take on the G5, adding back the missing thumb button and giving us a scroll wheel that worked, making the mouse great again. That brings us to the G500.

Let's Start with the Good

Like I said, there's a reason Logitech has kept the basic MX500 silhouette around for so long, through at least six other mice: It just works. There are some minor tweaks with the G500, which actually feels slightly more symmetrical, with a wider but less pronounced thumb groove that flows more smoothly into the body of the mouse, but it's basically the same. It's a little more texturally vivid than I'd prefer, with sides that feel like rubberized sandpaper for gripping, but I got used to it fast enough.

The laser engine inside now pushes 5700dpi, or exactly 100dpi more than Razer's latest laser engine. Logitech peeing on the pissing match, in other words. It also polls at 1000Hz, the same speed as Razer's sytem. (FWIW, I couldn't discern any difference between Microsoft's 500Hz polling and Razer's 1000Hz in actual gaming sessions.) The G500's tracking and accuracy is excellent, both on cloth pads and my fake wood desk.

Crippling Flaws

The reason I dragged you through a brief tour of Logitech mouse history is because Logitech repeats it with the G500. The original G5 screwed up on the thumb buttons and scroll wheel, and the G500 manages to screw that up spectacularly too.

It's the first gaming mouse MX500 descendant Logitech has graced with the hyper-scroll tech that's been in its high-end consumer mice for a while—it's got a toggle button that lets you pick between regular clicky (but still speedy) scrolling or the hyper-infinite scroll, where one flick of your finger spins the scroll wheel almost forever, shooting you down a million lines in Excel in half a second. Which is great, if you spend a lot of time in Excel or zipping through web pages—not so great if you're flicking through a handful of weapons in Left 4 Dead. Even when it's not in hyper mode, the scroll wheel's still pretty fast and loose—though that's something that you can mitigate with careful scrolling.

What really murders the scroll wheel, though, is that middle-clicking is an act requiring damn near surgical skill. Half the time you attempt to middle click, and you think you have, you've actually just left- or right-scroll clicked. Which is not the same command. Meaning, if you've mapped middle click as a lightning fast shortcut to get back to your main gun after you've tossed out a proxy mine, you're gonna get shot in the face trying to pull out your gun.

The thumb buttons are almost as bad. Instead of two clearly distinguishable buttons, we've now got a nearly seamless button strip that actually contains three buttons for you to press. And, just like the scroll wheel, you'll go to click one button, and wind up hitting a different one, particularly the new "middle" thumb button. You don't know how many people got backstabbed by Spies in Team Fortress 2 after I tried to hit the forward button to yell at them via voice chat but tapped the wrong button.

Don't Buy

Gaming gear, in theory, should be all about precision. That's why Logitech tells us the dots per inch the mouse's sensor can handle and how fast and how often the mouse gets data from the laser sensor. That's why I can adjust the dpi rating on the fly. That's why Logitech includes weights with the mouse, so you can even adjust how much it weighs, down to the gram. Yet two buttons that people use a lot are huge failures in precision. Whole buttons. That negates basically everything else that's good about the mouse, which is a lot, like the heavy braided cable, or built-in profile storage, so you don't have to redo your settings everytime you take it to a different computer.

So, my advice? If you're dedicated to Logitech, wait for the next G500, or the surely inevitable wireless variant. Logitech will probably fix the problems in the revision, just like they did before. Or, just stick with the actually good G5, which is $20 cheaper, at $50. You don't really need 5700dpi anyway. If you're open to other mousemakers, in the same price range, I'd suggest Razer's DeathAdder, which recently got beefed up with Razer's newer tracking engine and a less flimsy cable, Microsoft's wireless SideWinder X8, or SteelSeries' relatively frill-free Ikari.

Classic Logitech ergonomics still great

Crazy fast sensor tracks really well

Scroll wheel design is not great for games

Thumb buttons completely screwed up

So what exactly did those crazy scientists do? They bred mice with the "gene that produces the protein S6 kinase 1 (S6K1)" disabled. The effects of this are a bit extreme:

The change mimicked the effect of keeping the mice on a calorie-restricted diet. Severely restricting the diets of yeast, bacteria, mice and primates have granted these animals unnaturally long lives. For humans, however, maintaining a diet of near starvation would be difficult at best

That last part's the bad news so far, but researchers are conducting further studies particularly targeting the S6K1 protein as it seems to have a direct link to longevity in mice. There are hopes that the benefits will one day be reproduced with drugs so that we don't have to starve ourselves for longer lives and prettier looks.

I do hope that the boys reading aren't too obsessed about anti-aging though, because the last bit of bad news is that "only the female mice benefited" in the study. Sorry, guys. [Discover]

I've never had much control of air mice when giving presentations, but maybe the Elite provides better precision with its bundled MotionTools application. It let's you configure certain actions and gestures for different Windows applications (i.e. Internet Explorer, PowerPoint, etc.). The mouse will also work on your desk and actually looks pretty comfortable. It just blows that Mac support is limited. You can catch the Air Mouse Elite for $100 or $150 with a wireless keyboard. [Gyration]