GAMING ON THE WEIRDEST MOUSE EVER

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This is a mouse like you’ve never seen before. Forget your wrist-breaking ‘conventional’ mice, forget the ergonomic vertical mice, no this is the ultimate is convenience and productivity. This is the RollerMouse Pro2. Now, I know what you are thinking, it sure as hell doesn’t look like a mouse, it doesn’t have a trackpad or even a trackball, so what gives?

Well, you’ve probably seen a trackball mouse before where your thumb rolls a ball around much like the OG mice did before optical and laser sensors came about, although in that case it was the desk surface that moved the ball and you moved the mouse, but the functionality is the same. Now what would happen if you took that ball and squashed it into a cylinder instead? Well, you’d get a bar, which, coincidentally, is what we have here.

This is the tracking device, it spins around itself for vertical control, and slides left and right for horizontal movement. But you might have noticed a problem – see when a trackball mouse wants to move really far left or right you can just keep spinning the ball until you’re there, but a bar that slides? Well now you’ve got finite limits to how far you can scroll side-to-side at a time. Luckily, the folks at Contour who designed this thing thought of that, and added microswitches to each end which when pressed lock the cursor into a straight horizontal movement while the switch is being pressed.

Ok, so you can move the mouse around, but what about all the buttons? As you’ve probably already noticed, they are here, in a cutout section of the wrist rest. You’ve got your scroll wheel, left and right click, but also two buttons in black just above them, and a third button in the centre below the scroll wheel. The top two by default are copy and paste, although you can remap them to anything you like including back and forward, and that middle button? That’s double click. Yeah! It will press the left mouse button twice, letting you run programs or select a block of text with a single button press. It’s great! Although if you’d rather that be something else, that too can be remapped in their software.

Oh, and just in case you don’t want to reach for the left click button, you can also just push on the roller bar to left click as well. Keeps things easy. And actually, speaking of easy remarkably this had an incredibly short learning curve. My first impression of this, once I knew how it’s meant to work, was that it looks painfully unintuitive. I thought it would take weeks to get used to using it, much in the same way many ergonomic keyboards with completely different typing paradigms can take ages to get to grips with, but within a couple of minutes of me plugging it in and using it, I got it.

It makes so much sense, why take your hand off of your keyboard to move your cursor an inch when you’ll just put it back again to carry on typing? With this you can scroll, click and type all with barely any hand movement which is fantastic. The technique for pinpoint accuracy does take some time to build, I’ve taken to using most of my fingers for now instead of my thumb as I have rather shaky hands meaning fine control with a single digit is pretty difficult. What that does mean though is my thumb is then free to use the scroll wheel or buttons while my main fingers move the cursor.

I should make it clear, the main advantage to using this mouse is for the sort of person who is almost always typing and who only needs the mouse occasionally – I mean it literally has legs to rest your keyboard on so it butts up against the board’s lower edge. While it is perfectly possible to use with more complicated mouse movements – as you’ll see in a second – it’s not perfect. Remember those microswitches at the end of the travel? When engaged, they move the cursor at a fixed speed. You can change that in software, but for very wide displays or for multiple monitors, that’s something that’s pretty difficult to get used to as you go from being able to control the position and speed fully, to a reaction time game where you wait until it’s in line with where you want to go and release pressure. In practice you generally want to go past your mark, so that you can then move the bar away from the limit switches so again it can be a bit tedious.

An effect of this being a rather obviously used model is that those limit switches, and the press-to-click switch too actually, are rather light and non-tactile. It can often not register your clicks, or give no kinesthetic feedback when enabling or disabling the limit switches. As for the wrist rest pieces, well those have clearly seen better days too as the faux leather – much the same way all faux leather items I’ve ever owned – is falling apart. Luckily, Contour isn’t Apple, as you can disassemble this really easily, without any tools. There are a few tabs on the bottom that hold both pads in, including the plastic surround. When you unclip them, you’ll also be able to remove the plastic and get access to the edge where the faux leather is glued to the backing piece over some foam. Since this is actually one of their older models, this is the Pro2 model from I think around 2010 or 2011, you can’t buy replacements anymore but you could easily repair this yourself without too much fuss.

Ok, enough talking, let’s answer the burning question… Can you game with it? I have no idea, so let’s find out!

Unsurprisingly, an ergonomic mouse designed for office use isn’t the best for gaming, and if you were thinking of rocking a dual mouse setup like many of us (including me) already do, there is an extra drawback. Their software to change things like the sensitivity and scroll settings just changes the Windows pointer settings, meaning it affects your regular mouse movements too. Sure you might be able to find a middleground setting where it’s slow enough to make the rollermouse usable but still be fast enough for your regular one, but for me it was much too wide a gap meaning I couldn’t daily this.

Which is a shame, because for programming I really like this. It’s efficient, makes writing out a bit of code, jumping up or selecting something in a new panel then back to the code really easy since I don’t have to move my hand off my keyboard. I totally understand how someone could reasonably replace their mouse for this in an office environment and be more efficient, not less.

Of course, as with any product that comes within a 10 mile radius of the word “ergonomic”, these aren’t cheap. The newer version of this one, the RollerMouse Pro3 sells for around £150, and their newest line, the ‘red’ series, starts at £250 and wireless models are more like £300. That’s a lot to drop on such a weird peripheral, but for the right work, once you try it I can’t imagine you’d go back to a regular mouse.