I got a Logitech MX Master last week and it's been a real pleasure from the start. Especially with after my bad experience with the Razer Mamba, the Master is a bliss. I guess it's been a pure coincidence that I'm even at this point. The Master was only released three weeks ago (March 23rd '15), or little over a week when I was looking for my replacement, and the master wasn't really popping up in my search. When I nearly narrowed my choice down it did pop up and that was a pretty easy choice there.
High end mice are not released very often. It's a situational problem for me whenever I look for a new mouse. Granted, this does not happen very often and that's probably the reason for it in the first place: it's not super lucrative.
I had seen the older Logitech mice of course but was not super thrilled by a two or three year old mouse. Like, technology advances. If I'm gonna put down good money I want to have an up to date mouse. That's what
I thought I'd get from the Mamba, after all, and didn't. But since the number of high end mice releases is low you're pretty much stuck with old mice anyways. Well, I guess I dodged a bullet there ;)
So about
the Logitech MX Master. It's actually everything I was looking for, and surprisingly more:
- The normal mouse stuff
- Big grip
- Wireless
- Decent battery
- Easy to recharge
- Toggleable innertial scroll (wow!)
- Thumb horizontal scroll wheel
- Soft rubbery surface nearly everywhere
- Built-in three computer memory, switchable
So the mouse is about as big as the Mamba. My wife says it's even a bit bigger. Either way, it's a big mouse and I like it that way.
It needed to be wireless. I've been trying to unclutter my desk a bit and the wired mouse just wasn't needed. However, the Mamba took me by surprise by only lasting a day tops and 5 hours to recharge, and in my two weeks experience it did not even get that most of the time. Well it got the 5 hours I guess ;) That was actually my biggest beef with the mouse.
So the battery of the MX Master lasts about 50 hours. They say it can recharge a days worth in about 5 minutes but it has no run out on me the past week. That means it's doing a pretty good job of unobtrusively suspending itself when idle. It uses a connectivity dongle so you can charge it from any micro usb cable, whether wall or computer connected. And of course you can use it while it's charging. (In comparison; the Mamba could also be connected to a cable, but that cable had to be connected to the computer. Oh and of course you'd be stuck with it for the rest of the day). No charging station for the Master, but I don't really see the need for it either, apart from a nice pedestal I'd probably never bother to use anyways ;) Oh the battery of the Master is not easily replaceable. Let's hope that's not gonna be a problem.
The scrollwheel. Oooooh goody the scroll wheel had a surprise for me. Innertial scrolling! So the main thing I liked about the
Magic Mouse is the innertial scrolling. I took the (for me) crappy click behavior for granted on that mouse, just for the scrolling. But of course it's vendor lock-in and on linux just wasn't worth the trouble.
I did not even know the Master had this kind of scroll wheel. Out of the box it's doing the tick-based scrolling. However, as you experiment with stuff there's a button at the top of the mouse that toggles between tick-based and innertial based scrolling. Whoooa. And actually, the tick based scrolling seems software based as when the power is off the scroll wheel is unblocked.
Oh innertial scrolling means you flick it and it will pretty much keep on scrolling and only slowly reduce speed. This compared to classic scrolling that has "tabs" or ticks or whatever some audible and where each such tick greatly slows down the scroll speed. With large document, websites, or whatever your reason, the feature is just bliss. I'm using it all the time now. The only downside is accidentally flicking it as it's a bit sensitive. Also you sometimes forget that it's still "scrolling" so if you switch to another app too quickly it'll continue scrolling there. Oh. Well.
The thumb also has a scroll wheel. Meant to scroll horizontally. Positioned okay I suppose. Don't really use it too often myself and probably forget about it when I could. It has the "back forward" buttons as well, but they are too awkwardly placed for me to easily use. That's okay though, I'm happy they didn't go all out on buttons as I tend not to use them anyways :)
The mouse feels great. The rugged smooth rubbery exterior (I don't know the proper name, difficult to search for it) feels nice. The thumb rests on a pad too, and this pad has like a turtle shell. It also has a pretty hard to activate button, which enables mouse gestures (but I can't use that on linux, oh, well) which you don't really activate accidentally.
As far as connectivity goes, it has a bluetooth mode and a proprietary mode. The proprietary mode is something that Logitech uses and I simply don't know about. Out of the box, on linux, I just had to switch it to bluetooth for it to work. But that's fine.
The mouse can remember up to three connections and there's a button on the bottom with which you can switch active computers. So that's nice.
Overall I'm really pleased with this mouse. Yay :)