Professional mice in focus

Not one of the gaming rat pack? Josh Collins tests five high-performance mice without the bling.

Acomputing mouse is just a mouse, right? Most certainly not! In today’s technological world of niches, target demographics, market segmentations, usage scenarios and however else you wish to try to categorise, organise and arrange, things are no longer simple. The application of what was once a simple device that amused computer scientists with its similar form to that of a small rodent, has evolved considerably and, at times, without outwardly showing it.

The humble computer mouse has come a long way in many respects. Featuring an ever-growing number of buttons, adjustable features — both hardware and software based — and overall cumulative updates since the conception of a hand-held X-Y graph tracking human input device (HID), this unassuming device has changed considerably. Most modern mice have evolved to lose tails due to external factors too — Charles Darwin would be proud.

Then, in other respects, the timeless conceptual design of the computer mouse sees in many segments a close similarity to mice decades older. However, this simplistic view dismisses the many changes made ‘under the hood’. These changes can vary, covering aspects such as tracking methodology — trackball, optical or laser — or perhaps the type of switches used for the click-input, right through to the connectivity approach, be it wired or a form of wireless.

In this roundup of desktop scurrying techno-beasts, we’ll be looking at a range of computer mice that transverse a broad scope of prices, varying technical specification, design implementation and, to a degree, niche applications too.