SteelSeries Rival 650 Wireless Mouse Said to Charge In 15 Minutes, Last 10 Hours
Is this supposed to be a "feature", that you need to plug the mouse in to charge for 15 minutes every day? That seems like a lot of bother compared to a wired mouse. The "wireless" functionality certainly isn't offering any convenience benefits here. I suppose one might consider the lack of a wire to help avoid the slight amount of drag a cable might create, but going wireless tends to add weight to the mouse itself, which is generally undesirable for fast-paced games. And even without the weights installed, 121 grams is a little on the heavy side, and I can't imagine adding additional weights to push it up to 153 grams to be beneficial. Configurable weights in mice seem like more of a gimmick than anything, since you normally find them in mice that are relatively heavy to begin with.
And on the topic of weight, the Rival 700/710 is even heavier. Those playing competitive FPS games will tend to ideally want a mouse around 100 grams or less, not counting the cable, while the 710 is 135 grams without its cord. And this is all to add features that are arguably gimmicks, like an OLED display and a rumble motor to provide tactile feedback. The tiny, low-res screen on the side is obviously a mostly-useless gimmick that adds little aside from cost and weight to the product.
The tactile feedback sounds like something that
could actually be useful, except that it's apparently still only supported by the same 3 games that supported the feature when the Rival 700 was released nearly 3 years ago. Game developers need to explicitly support GameSense for the feature to be particularly useful, and that seems to still only apply to CS:GO, DOTA2 and Minecraft. Support for GameSense has not been getting added to games, making a potentially cool feature of limited use to anyone who doesn't play a lot of DOTA2 or CS:GO. It's supposed to be possible to rig together cooldown timers that rumble a certain number of seconds after pressing a button in other games, but it requires swapping profiles when changing between characters with different abilities, and keeping track of changes to the games and updating the timers accordingly, making it a rather janky solution. For something like GameSense to be really useful, it would likely need to be an open standard supported by multiple hardware manufacturers, to increase the number of people who can make use of the feature.
I have a Rival 300, and its a decent-enough mouse, but these models seems to be adding features of questionable usefulness just to push their prices into the $100+ range with little actual benefit.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram