Amazon’s Choice Wireless Gaming Mouse – REVIEW

THIS is Amazon’s choice for a cheap wireless gaming mouse. It cost me just £13.59 shipped next day. That’s a frankly insane amount of money to spend on an entire RGB wireless gaming mouse. But is it actually any good? Let’s find out! Inside the box you have… a mouse. That’s pretty much it. No batteries included, no USB cables, just a mouse. Ok, for the price that’s fine. On the bottom you’ll find the battery compartment, which requires two AA batteries, and includes a place for the weird shade of blue USB dongle. The sensor is offset to the side – what sensor? Who knows! But it can do up to 4800 DPI! Oh that’s not special? Oh. Well. There you go.

The mouse itself has a pretty typical gaming mouse shape – sharp edges everywhere, multiple textures, the works. It’s not too offensive, and once it’s in your hand you won’t mind too much either. My relatively large hands fit it pretty well, with my thumb landing on this sniper button – in fact it has a crosshair on it, so keep that in mind. The two side buttons are pretty well placed, and actually this has a really nice touch I’d like to see on more mice. The rear button has little bumps on it so it’s really clear which button you are pressing. If it feels smooth, it’s the front one, if it’s bumpy, it’s the rear one. That’s actually really good. What’s also pretty good is the textured grip surfaces on the sides. A lot of mice I’ve checked out recently just have plain, flat, no-so-grippy sides. This textured side makes it a lot easier to hold on to. This does feel like a palm grip mouse, although the rear end is low and short enough that you could hybrid or claw grip it if you want. 

On top you’ll find the two DPI buttons, a pretty chintzy scroll wheel, and of course your left and right click buttons. One thing that’s absent from the whole mouse is a port. While this is a wireless mouse, it’s pretty common to find a USB port on the front for charging or wired usage, this TECKNET mouse is devoid of that option. It makes sense I guess, why spend money on a port, PCB space, a charging circuit and a cable in the box when you’re selling it for this cheap? It is a bit of a shame though. Oh, and one other thing you’ve skimped on is the lighting. They went to the effort of making a three position power switch on the bottom, left for on, or right for on WITH LIGHTS! In fact the Amazon listing shows this having full lighting down the side with what maybe looks like a battery meter. This is true expectations vs reality, because what you get is a single blue LED somewhere near the scroll wheel. That sort of shines through the wheel and through maybe two of the slats on the OTHER SIDE of the mouse. You don’t get anything through the side facing you, and certainly no battery monitor. You’ll just have to know when the batteries die. Amazing. 

Something that you might find is a limiting factor here is the weight. My scales put it at 137 grams with two AA batteries. That makes it fairly heavy – it’s functionally the same weight as a fully loaded G502, but without any customisation. It’s 137g whether you like it or not. That’s going to make flicking this like a true esports pro difficult, although I’m expecting some other issues in doing that anyway so maybe that won’t be so much of a problem. It will mean you’ll get fatigue faster than a lighter mouse, and especially if you’re like 13 and buying this because it’s the cheapest and best rated option on Amazon for your first gaming setup, you’re gonna struggle a fair bit with this. 

One big limitation of this black-box wireless solution is that this only runs a 500Hz polling rate. That means you’ll get less smooth tracking, it’ll take a minimum of 2 milliseconds to report a click – and more likely 4 milliseconds (although we’ll come to latency in a minute), so that’s less than ideal. Some people much more talented than me do prefer playing at 500Hz so it’s clearly not the end of the world, but pretty much every mouse from a mainstream brand for the last ten years has done at least 1000Hz, with some of the newest ones running at 4000Hz or even 8000Hz. Again, you get what you pay for here.

Before we dive too far into using this thing, I want to show you inside it. There’s only three screws on the bottom, one under this tiny PTFE skate and two in the battery compartment, then the shell pops in half. You’ll need to disconnect this feisty ribbon cable to fully separate them, but when you do you’ll realise this is using HUANO blue shell switches, which is actually pretty good. It’s far from today’s modern optical switches I like a lot, but for a mechanical switch it really isn’t a bad choice. There’s HUANO switches all over here, although these blue shell ones are rated for an impressive 20 million clicks, so I doubt these will be what fails first. What might is this tiny potted microcontroller. It’s both the processor and wireless communication controller, which while not uncommon isn’t exactly high end. The fact it’s potted is generally a bad sign too – and of course since it can only run at 500Hz that says all you need to know. This isn’t a high end chip under there, it’s the cheapest they could find that will do.

When it comes to latency, this is pretty interesting. Testing with my new Open Source Latency Testing Tool, the TECKNET came in at 22ms of latency. That’s.. Ok, I guess. It’s about as fast, actually a bit slower than, my Logitech MX Master 3, and that’s not exactly a gaming mouse. A Logitech G703 ran at less than half that at 8.7ms, so it’s safe to say you aren’t going to be getting the first shot off in any competitive environments. It isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, and if I’m honest I was expecting it to be much, much worse, so I guess it beat my expectations. That doesn’t make it any good though. Ok, it’s time to game with this thing. Let’s give it a go!

Watch the video to see more on the gaming experience front!

So yeah, this isn’t what I’d call great. On the surface it feels fine, tracks mostly fine and the latency isn’t horrific, but as soon as you start pushing it you’ll find it’s problems pretty quickly. The hitching is by far the biggest problem I have with this. That’s where you move the mouse but the sensor doesn’t react to the movement, then suddenly kicks back in. It’s really off putting and will ruin your game. The latency isn’t great either, nor is the weird acceleration making it really hard to actually aim with. While I understand that a wireless gaming mouse from a “proper” brand is literally twice the price – the Steelseries Rival 3 Wireless is your best bet there – that will actually track well, has customisable DPI settings, is rated for 60 million clicks, and even supports bluetooth too for a bit of extra usefulness. Personally, if I only had £20 or so for a mouse, I’d get the wired version of the Rival 3, a mouse I like quite a lot and used the previous model for a fair while. That way you get all the benefits of a “proper” brand – a good sensor, good microcontroller, and a reliable connection – and don’t break the bank. Of course those are my thoughts but I’d love to hear yours in the comments down below!