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Shape and design

The first thing to note about the mouse is the ergonomic design and the "back bumper" sticking out. The cable also comes in through one side instead of the middle like many other conventional mice – this tends to make the cable tug at the mouse as you are moving it along. This design of the mouse fits my hand comfortably but given anyone with smaller hands, the mouse seems to be rather high off the table. Even if you have big hands, the design will have a portion of the palm stick out behind the mouse. In my old Logitech mouse, I think the problem for both small hands and large ones seemed to be solved by its sloping back – which the n30 does not have.

A surprising thing to note about the mouse is its trackball design. Being a new "top of the line" mouse, I was expecting it to come with an optical sensor (Like the iFeel Mouseman). Anyway, my disregards soon faded when I discovered how responsive the mouse was – it was surprisingly responsive and easy to move around even with its trackball design. I would say the trackball technology is being used at its finest. The weight of the mouse could also be a factor in its stability. For some strange reason, I prefer mice to have some weight and solid feel to it and the n30 achieves in that sense as it have both the weight, sturdy feel and look to it.

The n50 Speedpad

The n50, in my opinion, looks more ergonomic than the n30 GameMouse. The Speedpad fits my hand perfectly and as I have mentioned about the sloping back design earlier, the design of the n50 has a sloping back – which means that it could fit a variety of hand sizes comfortably. There is also the "adjustable" hand rest as mentioned in its features. I tried to adjust it and found out that "detaching" the hand rest was the only thing I could do. I obviously found no use for the hand rest whatsoever and even when detached, it feels the same – only lower. Maybe for people with smaller hands, this detachment would work perfectly to fit the n50 in your hand perfectly. All the 10 keys are within easy reach of all my fingers and even the D-pad and the throttle wheel can easily be accessed.

The real deal

Now that I have a general sense of how both the n50 and n30 feel, I got the software installed and decided to get the "feel" of my computer.

The first instance of the Touchsense technology in action was, I must admit, not very impressive. It was a small pop I felt softly in the mouse. After the installation of the Immersion Desktop, I began to realize that my desktop actually has a texture and the mouse would vibrate and shake as the mouse pointer ran over icons and windows. When windows are dragged around, there is actually a feeling of dragging something over some rough surface. From the immersion desktop that resides in your toolbar, you can select different textures you want your desktop to be - crisp, metallic, spongy, rubbery, a steel drum and even sonic vibrations. Trying out all the textures was a unique experience and all the textures "feel" different and the effects can be felt pretty clearly. One drawback to the Touchsense technology was that it was not meant to be moved around very quickly – move around faster than usual and the vibrations become eccentric pops and cracks.

The n50 was much more impressive. It comes with two programs – a Load out manager and the Profile editor. The Profile editor lets you assign any key you want to the keypad and for the first time, you can put the ESC key and the ENTER key side by side. The directional pad in the middle can be configured and be used even in your Windows environment. The Profile editor does much more than assign keys, it also lets you record key combinations to do combo moves on games such as "Die by the Sword" and "Heavy Metal F.A.K.K 2" – in other words, attempting to pull combo on your keyboard really fast can become a thing of a past. If you are switching from your regular keyboard to the Speedpad, there is a learning curve involved in playing some games. It is usually easy to master the learning curve and once you have gotten past the learning curve, I was quite amazed at how the n50 performs well on most games. Also, in my long hours of playing senselessly violent First Person Shooters (FPS), I tend to have lesser pains in my hand – I have the n50 to thank for that. But in playing games, you can use the Pad to enhance your enjoyment; you can never replace the keyboard with the n50 – as you will see later.