SteelSeries Xai Laser Mouse Review

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[COLOR=#000000]Comfort

Although quite differently shaped to other mice on the market currently, this is a very comfortable mouse to use. Being that bit longer gives a bit more support to the wrist and puts your hand in a nicer and stronger position. The rubberised plastic on top of the mouse is smooth but grippy allowing you to have really good control.

Features and Functionality

This is one of the most feature-full mice you can buy; it has a huge CPI range which allows you to customise it to what you want. On the highest CPI setting you will probably struggle to be able to control the mouse unless playing games in a very high resolution. I found that 4500 CPI was the highest I could go to without compromising control.

This mouse comes with many other features like the hardware acceleration which is one of the most useful features we’ve seen. If you’re using a low CPI setting but need to transverse a large distance then the acceleration kicks in. Effectively this feels like the CPI settings are scaling depending on the acceleration of the mouse. I found this very useful when using Photoshop especially.

The LCD display is useful, but as you can only use pre-set profiles and you can’t tweak them on the mouse its not quite that essential. After a few days of using it, you will probably not look at the LCD display much. You may find it useful to set up 2/3 profiles and switch between them via the mouse but it’s quicker to do it on the computer.

The extra buttons on the right hand side (copying the left) can hardly be used as a right-handed person, due to the positioning. But then, if they moved these buttons it wouldn’t be an ambidextrous mouse. I was expecting to be able to use them during a game as useful shortcuts but it is just too fiddly to select.

The software is brilliant with this mouse, giving you fine tuning on nearly everything you could possibly want to change. It is however a bit slow to upload to the mouse and it usually results in you having to switching the CPI setting a few times before it updates. While on this topic, I found it quite annoying that every time the mouse loaded/reset it reset to the lower CPI setting (with the LED off), and would prefer it if it resumed from where you left off as so to speak.

Photoshop

As Photoshop is one of my most commonly used programs it’s a good way to compare a mouse. This is by far the best mouse I have used in Photoshop. The ability to set-up ‘Freemove’ and ‘ExactAim’ to tailor the mouse controls precisely to your hand are very useful and help produce much better results. The extremely low CPI setting (100) is also a big bonus during Photoshop as it gives you very precise control. If you use the low CPI setting and then have hardware acceleration turned on, you can do fine adjustments and then easily get to the Photoshop menus very quickly. This gives you the best of both worlds. I feel that however, once set-up and tailored you would probably not bother to adjust it very often and would just learn to cope with it.

Gaming

This mouse performed as you’d expect from SteelSeries, very impressively during games. I found it was very comfortable even after long periods of use. Once the software was tailored to the game I was playing, my accuracy and control increased (I’d go as far as saying my Kill rate in Black Ops dramatically increased).

Using the hardware acceleration during gaming is also very useful, especially in Starcraft where you want to be able to traverse a large map quickly and then select a single comparatively tiny unit. This is perfect for that. This mouse performs extremely well during any game and is highly recommended.[/COLOR]