AKKO Pulse 1 Review – A Kinda Weird Gaming Mouse…

This is the AKKO Pulse 1, a kinda weird gaming mouse. On paper this seems great – 8KHz polling rate, ‘lightning fast’ switches, a PAW3950 sensor, dual microcontrollers for true 8KHz both wireless and wired, and just 69 grams of total weight – but in practice… It’s… well… weird. Let me explain. Physically anyway the Pulse 1 is a pretty normal gaming mouse. It’s definitely on the larger side as my fairly large hands don’t spill over the edge like they do on smaller mice. It isn’t insanely high arch, nor is it particularly flat, so I found myself palm or claw gripping it, although you can just about fingertip grip it if you have large enough hands. I found it mostly comfortable and it definitely has enough space on the sides to hold on well. The surface coating is sort of soft-touch which weirdly makes it feel a touch more slippery than I’d like, but it’s not a big deal for sure. You’ve got two nicely accented side buttons that are well supported and well positioned to make them easy to hit, but out the way enough that you won’t hit them by mistake. You’ve also got a DPI button at the top, along with of course the scroll wheel and left and right clicks. 

The left and right clicks have a surprising amount of pre-travel, at least depending on where on the button you press. That isn’t a massive deal, and the Kailh GM X White Sword switches in here have a nice click to them, although it’s worth noting these are mechanical switches, not optical. While they do claim very low latency, it is important to note the difference, especially at this sort of price tag. One thing I should mention about the physicality is that this feels remarkably heavy – certainly heavier than the 69 grams they claim. I was so confused that I cracked out the scales, and… um.. That’s 79 grams, not 69… With the USB C cable attached it’s 82 grams, and even with the hidden USB dongle removed it’s still only 77 grams. That isn’t the 69 grams they promised – hell it’s not even within their own plus or minus 5 grams figure! That’s not promising, and explains why this feels noticeably heavier than the genuinely lightweight mice I’ve checked out recently, like the Glorious Series 2 Pro Wireless I use for testing up here that sits at 55 grams. 

I should also mention that dongle. See, when you first look in the box you’ll find this, a large USB dongle with the cheapest A to C adapter you could imagine (I’ll come back to that in a sec), then when you start looking around the mouse you’ll find that purple flap on the bottom and you’ll find the SECOND USB DONGLE! I was thoroughly confused here, until I checked the bottom of their product page to find out that yes, this is intended. The small dongle that fits in the mouse is a basic 1KHz dongle, and the larger one that comes separately (and very much doesn’t fit in the mouse) is the 8KHz dongle. The most confusing part of this though is that the mouse comes from the factory paired to the 8KHz dongle, and to use the 1KHz one you need to download and install their software and put the dongle into pairing mode through the settings, then put the mouse in pairing mode by holding the bluetooth pairing button down in the 2.4GHz mode. So the dongle that comes included INSIDE THE MOUSE is completely unusable without: a) a mouse, and b) their software to put it in pairing mode. What a weird choice… 

Now I mentioned latency there, so let’s make use of the two mice testing modes I’ve built into my open source latency testing tool – available at OSRTT.com, linked in the description – starting with mouse click latency. This is where you tap the left click with a probe, where the left click has conductive tape applied so the tool knows when you’ve started pressing the button and starts counting. I’m happy to report that pretty much no matter the mode, this Pulse 1 is as fast as the fastest mice I’ve tested with this mode. The leading mode is surprisingly wireless with the 8KHz dongle, with just 2.5 milliseconds of average latency. Considering that includes pre-travel, that’s really pretty good. Wired is only 0.1ms slower in my testing – so functionally identical – with only the slower 1KHz polling rate wireless dongle coming in a touch slower at 3.1 milliseconds, but that’s still a very respectable result.

Interestingly, in the customisation software there is a setting for “Debounce Time”, which by default is set to 8 milliseconds. All the testing you’ve just seen was actually with that set to 0 milliseconds, because if we look at the isolated results with that 8 millisecond debounce time, you can see exactly why. It raises all results considerably to around 10 milliseconds on average, which doesn’t seem like a great option when at least in my experience there wasn’t much issue with the debounce time being set to 0. It doesn’t look like AKKO are copying Corsair’s debounce-after-triggering method here which basically just takes the very first leading edge pulse and ignores everything else for a handful of milliseconds, which seems like the best choice for mechanical switches, but at least you have the option to set it to 0 here. It is a shame you NEED the software to do that though, as the default being 8 milliseconds is less than ideal for sure. 

Sensor-wise, this has a PixArt PAW3950 sensor. That is an upgrade on the PAW3395 basically every mouse on earth has been using for the last couple years – this one features up to 30,000 DPI and a slightly faster 750 inches per second tracking speed, although the key difference is the ability to select a 0.7mm lift-of-distance, as well as the usual 1 and 2 mm options. That’s really the only new thing you should even potentially care about here. As you’d expect it tracks perfectly well, although here is where we find another weird thing. Actually two weird things. First, I’m finally coming back to that stupid A to C adapter. The point of these sorts of things two-fold. First, it means the dongle can be on your desk, as close to the mouse as possible so the signal strength is as good as it can be. Second, it means the USB C cable is handy for when you want to charge the mouse, or even just use it wired. This adapter is so light and flimsy that it lets you achieve neither of those goals. Glorious’ dongles are a great example of how to do this right. This has a bit of weight to it and a huge rubber pad on the bottom so this stays planted on your desk no problem. This 2 gram bit of metal and plastic? No chance. Anyway, that’s my rant about that, next is the other weird thing. While I was testing out the mouse and doing a bit of filming I came across a really weird issue where the mouse would basically drop out entirely, somewhat randomly, while gaming. To say this was frustrating would be an understatement. At first I thought it was the sensor being picky about a scratch on my mouse pad, but then I realised it was the wireless connection. The dongle was less than 30 centimetres from the mouse, and yet it was dropping out. Amazing. So I plugged it in directly and it worked fine. Weirdly when I then switched back to the dongle it didn’t have the same issue. I’m not entirely sure what caused the issue, but that was far too big a problem to not mention, and the fact I caught it on camera reliably doing it (while it was broken anyway) helps. Just to preempt some comments, the mouse was fully charged and had been connected that exact way for an hour before that happened. Maybe it was the antenna positioning, but that could have been solved by having a proper adapter now couldn’t it? See, full circle. 

Anyway, with that annoyance out the way the mouse was pretty great to use. Despite being on the heavier side, at least for a supposed light-weight mouse, it tracked well, felt properly low latency, and was pretty comfortable at least for my hands. I think I still prefer the Glorious Series 2 Pro Wireless in terms of fit and feel, but this was more than adequate. When it comes to the price tag, you’re looking at £70 plus shipping, which at first blush I thought was a little high, but a cursory search of my other favourites and… yikes. That Series 2 Pro Wireless is £120, and even the Endgame Gear XM2we is around £100. The OP1we is about this price, but that has a smaller 335mAh battery compared to this thing’s 500mAh cell, and doesn’t support 8KHz either – although it does weigh just 58.5 grams, a figure I’m more inclined to actually believe – so there’s that. All in all then this seems like a weird, but overall decent mouse. It isn’t record-breaking, but it is pretty decent, and assuming you don’t have the same connectivity bug I had it’s pretty fast, smooth and a great gaming experience.