Logitech MX Revolution

Logitech's new rodent takes on the office with a strange scroll wheel and welcome extras that don't really belong on a mouse.

Logitech’s rodents have always been well received. The latest one to escape the treadmills of the lab is the MX Revolution, an update to the old MX1000.

It does feel incredibly natural to the hand, but of course it’s for righties only – as most of the ergonomically designed mouses are.

Although it does admirably the ride is not as snap accurate as the older G5 – we wouldn’t use it for gaming. Interestingly the laser had issues tracking on our mousepad surface (the Thermaltake Tai Chi M2) that the G5 never exhibited.

The biggest change in the Revolution is in the scroll wheel, which can either have detents or scroll smoothly, depending on how fast you want to scroll – something that can either be set manually by clicking the scroll wheel down, to auto-switch depending on how fast you scroll, or can simply be set permanently in the software, allowing the middle button to be used for standard purposes again. That is, in most applications – for some reason Internet Explorer 7 refused to open a new tab from a link by using the middle mouse button, whereas Firefox had no problems.

Also new is the ‘document flip’ wheel – mind you it only goes back and forwards to a certain extent and then snaps back to its original position – so it’s not as much a wheel as it is a rocker.

So what does it do? Simply acts as a quick access Alt + Tab, which to be honest isn’t that exciting. Even worse is the fact that it can only be bound to one other function through Logitech’s Setpoint software ‘Zoom’ – not especially useful and a huge oversight.

Another oversight is the ability to only bind the middle button function to the middle button – something that didn’t plague the G5 (which was handy, considering how poor the middle mouse button was). We assume this will be fixed in later revisions.

Finally there is a new ‘Search’ button which can open your default browser at a specified search engine – and it’s oddly useful, being nice to have such quick access to a utility that most of us use every day.

The MX Revolution is certainly not what its name suggests, but it is still a good mouse that will suit home and office users alike. Now let’s just hope that price comes down...