Software
Rather than do our typical collection of photos and screenshots of the software we are going to just including a video of everything. This way you can see all of the features, something that is hard to do when just using photos. One thing is for sure, SteelSeries has spent a lot of time on their software from the Xai to now. It’s not that their software was bad at all, in fact we had no problems. But the updated software is more in-depth and very easy to use. The software is the same as what was use on the SteelSeries Shift also. They are calling it the SteelSeries ENGINE, I would expect to see it included with all of their products in the future. All of the Sensei’s lighting can be programed to any color at all for each of your profiles. Any color is much more than the limited number that most companies give you; this time around you have 16.8 Million colors to pick from on each of the 4 options. We went with a blue and orange theme, I wonder why!
I love the ability to create as many profiles as you would like. The mouse itself holds 5 on-board, but you can swap them out as needed through the software. When programing the seven programmable buttons on the Sensei I noticed right away that SteelSeries didn’t include any special rapid fire or any other special use features like most other mice. You have a basic Macro mode and the seven different key options included with the mouse. BUT, even without any of the special key layouts we were able to create anything we needed using the macros. Once programed it becomes a custom action that you can add to other profiles later on. To give you an example, we were able to set the hard-to-reach mouse button 6 on the right side of the mouse to open Chrome and take us right to the LanOC website. To go along with it I created a macro that triple taps the left mouse button without any delay in between that gave a great burst mode in an FPS. Oddly enough you could even program that burst right to the left mouse button, something most other mice won’t let you do.
To go along with our LanOC profile we created a bitmap LanOC Reviews image and uploaded it to our profile. You can find the image HERE if you are interested in doing it on your mouse, if you send an image of you running it we will even include it in our review! The ability to upload your own image isn’t new but it is new to a SteelSeries mouse, and it’s a welcomed addition in our opinion. Overall the new software is a huge improvement over their old software but we did notice that you now can’t set macros to up and down on the scroll wheel. I’m not sure that anyone will miss it, but it is worth noting.