Razer Pro v1.6 review

We're not exactly sure where the fashion for neon blue lights on Mac peripherals has come from, although we have a sneaking suspicion that it could be overspill from custom car design.

In that world, placing neon strips under floor panels is the done thing. The blue strip on the Razer Pro v1.6 is purely decorative, running around nearly the whole mouse and shinning blue through the clear scrollwheel, too.

The mouse is flat and low, but comfortable to use. It's mediumsized and ambidextrous. We have standard tests for mice, which involved tracking the Razer across six different surfaces.

It tracked well on the veneer desktop, plastic sheeting, trousers, various textures of paper and a second desktop surface, this time hard plastic, but failed to track on a magazine cover. This baffled us, and after much chin scratching and tests on other magazines, we deduced that the Razer's blue light source was having trouble sending back a signal from a blue magazine cover.

We tried it on more blue surfaces - the mouse had similar trouble. We should add that it glided very smoothly on its Teflon-coated feet during the tracking test.

Programming

The Razer Pro is wired and USB-powered. There are seven programmable buttons, including the two main left and right clicks and the scroll. Actually programming them required a bit of hoop jumping. The Mac driver wasn't on the disc as stated, and had to be downloaded from Razerpro.com.

Then it appeared that the driver failed to install on the first attempt, until we found an icon for the driver already loaded in System Preferences.

The programming software is easy to use once open. All seven buttons can be assigned one of eight commands: menu, double-click, assign a key, macro, button off, on-the-flysensitivity, advanced and pass through.

This is clearly a gaming mouse. In the control panel of the programming app you can adjust the acceleration of the onscreen tracking and the sensitivity. It would have been nice to have a programming option for straight to Mail or volume control, but these are not options. Warp speed tracking is. The mouse has 1,600dpi, making it about the fastest mouse we've seen.

The two main buttons have a rubbery coating and a wave curve running from side to side. You get a great sideways grip which, combined with accurate tracking, programmability, Teflon feet and manoeuvrability, all make for a quality gaming mouse.

Whether those features would come in handy for an office worker, or publisher, is debatable. Generally though, there are very few things to complain about with this mouse, especially for £30. James Ellerbeck