James Donkey 007 Mouse

Greenfinger

PRICE $ 80 www.jamesdonkey.com

We love Gearbest. It’s a shop chock full of wonderful, terrible products. Some are genuinely good. Others are so bad that you can’t believe anyone ever thought of making them, let alone tried to find a market. In one of our most recent trawls through the bowels of Gearbest we came upon something we couldn’t pass up, the James Donkey 007 gaming mouse. For the name alone we had to have one, no matter how terrible. We were also curious to see the mouse because it sells for a damn sight more money than most of the other Chinese gaming mice in the store. To our surprise, we dig it, with one major caveat.

The 007 is a modular mouse. There are two bases, three options for each side and three different palm rests, making for 54 possible permutations. As such it’s quite easy to make the mouse quite comfortable. Under the hood is a decent if unspectacular Avago 9800 laser sensor that offers up to 8200DPI, the left and right buttons use Omron switches. When you change DPI settings a small speaker in the palm rest plays a tinny rendition of a F1 car revving its engine and taking off. What’s not to love about that? For the most part the James Donkey 007 performs quite well and is good and comfortable, but unfortunately there is one major problem with it. The chassis is made of plastic so slick that it feels like it is covered in oil. That’s not a good thing. DANIEL WILKS