Performance
I spoke a little about the comfort in the last section; the design of the Wireless WoW Mouse is a lot like the last model. Having said that, it’s not a shape that I am a big fan of. I always prefer simpler designs. When you try to conform the shape to someone’s hand like this, you will run into a lot of people who it doesn’t work for (ask all of the left handed people). Although the mouse is large, I felt like my hand was too big for it. The main issue I ran into was with the new larger button section in the middle of the mouse. Many times I went to click on the left trigger and ended up hitting the left middle button. This was the biggest problem I ran into actually, because even after adjusting to the mouse I felt like I had to TRY to push my trigger finger over to the left to avoid miss clicking.
One area that they changed up considerably is in the sensor. The Legendary Edition was sporting an optical sensor and this time around we have a laser sensor. As it turns out it has the Avago 9800 sensor, the new version of the 9500 sensor that we have enjoyed in the Sensei/Xai. This sensor is known to have a little negative acceleration when using it on a soft mouse pad. I personally prefer a hard mouse pad and don’t run into the acceleration.
The part I was most excited to test was the wireless performance of the Wireless WoW Mouse. I know a lot of people hate on wireless mice, but I would love to have a wireless version of the Sensei for example. As far as actual performance I had no issues at all with the wireless. I was able to use the mouse even away from my desk 5-7 feet away without issues and there wasn’t a noticeable lag at any time during my testing. On the battery life side of things, I wasn’t a big fan its performance. I ran into two issues with the battery. As a whole I would have liked it to have a little more battery life from fully charged to dead. I spend most of my day at my pc between work and play and I was able to kill the battery before I went to bed each time. Lucky for us SteelSeries did think of this issue and placed a USB port directly on the mouse so it could be turned into a wired mouse as well. My second issue was with forgetting to turn the mouse off. Multiple times I went to bed and woke to the mouse being dead because I forgot to flip it over and turn the switch off. I understand completely that this mouse is going to use more power than a typical laptop mouse, but for years now I have had laptop mice that turn off automatically after a short period of inactivity. These mice have battery life in the months not hours. It would be nice to see future wireless mice from SteelSeries look into ways to extend the battery life, if only slightly.
