Next on the block in my series on mice is the Logitech MX620 cordless laser mouse. Of all the mice that I am reviewing in this series, this is the first one that I had not used before. It’s pretty slick-lookin too.
It’s a laser wireless mouse, but this time instead of using that giant half-moon thing as the receiver, it uses a little USB dongle about the size of a memory stick. Much easier to manage, and it implies that the wireless bits work better. The mouse has two normal buttons, a scrollwheel button, a dedicated search button, and two thumb buttons. It uses two AA batteries.
The Good
The most interesting thing about this mouse is how the scroll wheel works. It has two modes: “gear” mode is when the wheel “clicks” as you roll it…chunk-chunk-chunk. Very good precision, and it doesn’t get knocked accidentally. In software you can adjust how far to scroll with each “click.”
The second mode I call “free-wheelin’” mode: the wheel spins without any “gear” feel to it…but beyond that, it’s also very low friction, so if you spin it quickly, it keeps spinning…and spinning…and spinning. This is very handy for getting to the end of some huge web forum post or long document or something…just spin the wheel, and watch stuff fly by. To stop, just touch the wheel…it stops spinning, and the page stops scrolling. The scroll wheel is metal, so when you spin it it just keeps going.
It does take some getting used to, but once you are used to it…wow, it this feature ever useful! I never paid attention to how much scrolling I was doing until I went back to my old PC and a mouse that uses a gear wheel. I have to say that it was annoying to not have the free wheelin’ mouse wheel.
The wheel itself has another new feature (to me at least): horizontal scrolling. If you push the mouse wheel to the left or right, it will scroll whatever page you are on to the left or right. I didn’t see the point of this one until I used it to start bombin’ around in a zoomed-in Photoshop file, where it replaced the spacebar-drag combo. Turns out it’s pretty useful after all.
The dedicated search button can be configured either to search Google or to call up Spotlight. Either way, very useful.
This mouse feels good in your hand: it has a pleasing shape, and the sides are covered in some kind of rubbery material. It glides very well.
The included software works similarly to the MS software in that it allows you to adjust all mouse settings, including making application-specific configurations.
The Bad
Well, not bad really, but there are two things to know about this mouse.
First, because the mouse uses AA batteries, the weight of it will be directly related to the batteries you use. I used AA NiMH rechargeables but I’m assuming that lithiums would make the mouse lighter. Just something to keep in mind.
Second, as cool as the free-wheelin scroll wheel is, it does take time to get used to, maybe a day or to. It is very sensitive, at least how I had mine set up. And some of the new Adobe apps don’t like it…scrolling through the font list in Flash CS4 for example was not possible for some reason, it kept closing the list. Adobe apps were the only ones affected by this however.
Conclusion
I like this mouse a lot. It has a good shape, the scroll wheel is killer, and there is no gooney wireless receiver to clutter up my desk.
…Mike
ETA: After noticing some strange behaviour with the mouse wheel using the MX Revolution in PhotoMechanic, I went back and did a few more tests.
The gist of the problem is this: unless the wheel acceleration is set to None, scrolling through images in PhotoMechanic is uneven and unpredictable. But even with acceleration set to None, there is a delay of about half a second between a movement of the wheel and the advancement of the images. This is a huge deal when editing, and will likely eliminate this mouse from being the only mouse attached to my system.