AKKO NEST Review – Lightweight High Performance Gaming Mouse

This is the AKKO Nest, a pretty lightweight, yet rather high performing, and impressively good value, gaming mouse. There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s dive straight in with a tour. In the box we of course have the mouse, the nice lightweight USB C cable, and the wireless dongle that allows for 8KHz polling (both wired and wireless), but also a spare set of PTFE feet, and stick on rubber grips, which you might want considering just how smooth this thing is. We’ll come back to comfort in a second, for now, the tour. The mouse itself has the standard buttons – including two on the side – and a PixArt PAW3950 sensor inside, and OMRON 100 million click rated switches. The PTFE feet are on the front, back, and around the sensor. 

When it comes to the shape, this is supposedly an ergonomic shape made for all grip styles, although despite me having pretty large hands, I kind of struggled with most styles. Palm felt the most natural with this shape, and while fingertip is possible, it was a bit of a push. The thumb side with the buttons is fine – the buttons, especially the back one, is a little undersupported for my liking but is otherwise fine – but the right side where your ring and pinkie fingers go was weirdly uncomfortable for me. I couldn’t quite work out how to hold it comfortably. I did eventually find a comfortable posture, but I think this is the first time I’ve had a learning curve just trying to work out how to hold a regular looking mouse! Once I did get to grips with it, it’s pretty nice. The distinct lack of weight helps for sure.

Just so you know, I stuck it on my super accurate scales, and we get almost exactly the quoted 49 grams – 49.6 grams I think is what mine came out to. Pretty light, huh? That means it’s easier to be accurate, and play for longer too. I do love a good lightweight mouse – and for this to be wireless with a 250mAh battery inside, well that’s pretty decent! This is also using PixArt’s latest and greatest sensor, the PAW3950, which if we are being totally honest is functionally identical to the PAW3395 in real-terms. Still, it’s a great sensor, it tracks well, has a controllable lift-off distance and this mouse in particular has 8 DPI levels built in. Why? I don’t know either. I pick one and stick with it. 

In terms of connectivity, you’ve got the USB dongle which is a direct 2.4GHz connection, or wired via the USB C cable, or if you really want, you can do Bluetooth too. That one is capped at 250Hz though, while both wired and wireless can do 8,000 hertz. You do need AKKO’s software to enable that though – it runs at 1,000 hertz by default. You can of course tweak the DPI settings here too, or the lift-off distance. In my case I used it to change the polling rate to be able to test the click latency with my very own open source latency testing tool (available at OSRTT.com by the way, link in the description below), and at 1KHz and wireless we are looking at around 2.9 milliseconds of latency. Not bad, not the best. At 8KHz – still wireless – we get just 2.7 milliseconds. Again, not bad, not the best. And wired we get 2.4 milliseconds. So yeah, all in there really isn’t much difference between wired and wireless, nor 1K vs 8K hertz. These results aren’t the absolute best as you’ve seen, but there are in no way a problem. 

For actually gaming with it, well that ended up being a really good time. The balance of the weight – or lack thereof – and the exceptional sensor makes for a rather good time. I was snapping to heads faster than I usually would with a new mouse, and that’s a really good sign. I got over the comfort hurdle pretty quickly, and for the most part found it enjoyable to use. It glides really well – super smooth – and is nice and easy on your wrist, so yeah all in all this is great!

As for price, well it seems to depend on where you look. AKKO’s european website lists it for £57 right now (and they’ve told me to tell you to put “GB” in the promo codes box for another 10 percent off, which would bring it to almost £50 flat), although their US site lists it at £45 – potentially before import fees and the likes. As I understand it, the EU and US sites are competitors and don’t seem to like each other, at least I think? It’s weird, but there you go. Regardless, this is still a pretty decent value. Razer’s DeathAdder V4 Pro is a whopping £150 right now, and most other comparable options from the likes of Glorious are at least £80, if not into the hundreds, so yeah, this is a great value. Great job AKKO.