Review: It's flat, it's plastic, it's... not much more than that. But we attempt to review it anyway.
Reviewing a mousepad is a fraught experience.
On the one hand, you’ve got a device which is as tied to personal preference as a mouse or keyboard. This individual bias can often render the most authoritative of reviews moot, since any number factors can, and do, change drastically between users.
On the other hand – so to speak – you’re also essentially writing about a gaming peripheral that can pretty easily be replaced by the desktop surface alone, a magazine, or an offcut from cardboard box.
And so we come to our second piece of Mionix kit this issue, the Propus 380. It seems like it should be something special, but really – in our opinion at least – you really would be better off with that cardboard!
The Propus sounds good on paper. It’s a goodly sized pad that can accommodate even the most expansive of mousing gestures, with a shallow cut-out at the front to make sure your wrist doesn’t catch on the leading edge. The upper surface is a gritty texture, while the underside is backed by a heavily textured rubber surface. It’s black, too, so it’ll look good with pretty much any gaming rig you could care to point a mouse at.
In practice, though, we find it’s a touch too wide for out taste, taking up an inordinate amount of space next to our gaming rig. Admittedly, our desk is a little cluttered, but we feel we’re not alone in that. The textured surface is perhaps too sharp in its definition, too; it is most definitely ultra-fine, as Mionix promises, but it’s a texture that harkens more to ultra-fine sandpaper. It’s exceedingly grippy with any mouse that is even a touch worn down, and even brand new mice don’t feel nearly as smooth in their action as they should.
The rubber underside, however, does just what it promises, holding the mousepad tightly onto a range of desktop materials for dear life. But grip is only half the battle, and the Propus definitely looses the balance of the equation.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012