Logitech G500 Review (9/10)

I've had a host of Logitech mice (and Logitech products in general) over the last long time. My recent history of fulltime mice has been: Logitech Elite Mouse, MX1000, MX510, MX518, G5 v1, G5 v2 and currently the G500. While I'm very satisfied with this mouse (for now), I can look back on my history of mice and tell you the Logitech design team needs a solid smack on the rear-end... what?




I've been very happy with each of my mice there's always been some compromise. The Elite mouse chewed through batteries, the MX1000 didnt have swappable batteries, the MX510 wasnt sensitive enough, the MX518 didn't have enough buttons, the G5 v1 didnt have enough buttons, the G5 v2 wasn't sensitive enough and didnt have enough buttons and the G500 lacks DarkField technology. I admit - the MX518 was essentially perfect (although not as competative as it could have been against some of Razer's offerings at the time) but relatively speaking it was an awesome value.

Sure I might be pushing the bounds of reasonable featureset with my complaint about DarkField (almost serious gamers and power users eventually move to a high performance mousepad xor dont complain about glass) but what I'm getting at is, these mice are intended to be (and certainly priced as) a flagship product - and flagship products are supposed to have the best of everything.

And that's where Logitech's mice have failed over the last few generations -- there's always something left out - sure it works and it keeps me coming back for more but it'd be nice to for once have a definitive "go to" mouse. Realistically the G1000 was pretty damn perfect they just need to jack the sensor and add a plug-in option to charge via USB cable and it'd be set! It's still the best grip/layout of a mouse I've used ever.

I was mostly happy with the Logitech G5 v2 (that additional button is ridiculously useful) - the extra button the G500 gives me I dont really use in non-gaming scenarios (the others are bound to maximizing and tossing application windows between my monitors etc). But simply put, I was getting tired of the low-sensitivity of the G5s -- when you have almost six-thousand pixels to navigate, 2000dpi doesnt really cut it! Thankfully the G500 gives me a whopping 5700 dpi. I've had the mouse for a few months and I've not acclimatized to the full sensitivity yet (sitting at around 4200 dpi - so I've got a bit of life in this mouse left).

So the egronomics and technical merit of the mouse score Logitech lots of points but their failing lies in the driver team. The drivers are very poorly planned out and buggy.

• They have a branded product 'SetPoint' which represents their mouse/keyboard drivers -- and up to the launch of the G500/G9/G9x mice, SetPoint (which was v4) worked with all their mice. With these mice, their marketing team talked someone into making the v5 drivers exclusive to certain mice. I think they've reversed this stupidity with the current v6 drivers but that was one of the dumbest decisions to make it to the final product
• One of the big features of SetPoint was the ability to assign actions (whether they be macros, actions in the traditional sense of the word or keystroks etc) to the various extra buttons on the mouse. This would tie in with application detection and so you could have specific button profiles activate when certain games fired up -- unfortunately the drivers were unable to detect the game firing up and even when you manually set the profile -- you had to restart the game to  get the profiles to work. This was ridiculously aggravating.

But yeah, just in general, the hardware is solid; it's just the crazy bloated drivers that needed work.

Oh and on a separate rant, does anyone ever, really use the hyperscrolling wheel? Ever? I cant every think of a scenario where I could ever really make use of that -- in order to know when you need to stop scrolling you'd have to get some idea of where you are -- and that requires two things [1] your eyes need to be able to scan fast enough and [b] the computer needs to be able to render fast enough. Depending on what I'm scrolling through, I can scan fast enough -- but I've never seen a 500 page PDF render fast enough at 20 pages/sec scroll rate. Such a gimmicky feature. I'm glad it's toggleable but really, I'd much rather have the [irrelevant but possibly more practical] DarkField on my mouse.

But if they keep the feature-set reasonably updated and just fix the damn drivers so they're not so buggy and bloated, I'd settle for that! Final verdict 9/10