Swimming through the market for gaming mouse can be a daunting task to the average consumer or even a seasoned gamer like myself. Finding the right mouse is something that can be likened to a very personal experience as you will no doubt be spending more time using it than anything else you own. Do you go for a palm grip or a claw grip, how much of DPI should you look for and will Lift Off Distance come into play with your work. Swedish company MIONIX looks to answer all of these questions with their NAOS 700 Optical Sensor Mouse.
The NAOS 7000 is a right hand only gaming mouse developed with a comfortable full palm grip to allow for you entire hand rest on the mouse. My previous daily use/gaming mouse was a Cobra Junior which is considerably smaller than the NAOS 7000 so some small adjustment period was had. I tend to find myself liking smaller mice as my hands aren’t that large, but the NOAS 7000 was very easy to get comfortable with.
With the larger full grip of the NOAS 7000 the button placements were in the optimal place. So many times while browsing with my current mouse I would accidentally trigger one of the side buttons, being so near my thumb, and send me back and forth between web pages. The NAOS 7000 remedies my issues due to its larger size and better button placement, for the most part. You get the request two button on the side of the unit near your thumb that can be programmed, but come as standard page back and page forward buttons during normal web browsing. You also have a rubberized, grooved click wheel the is highly responsive and has a little give to it so you will almost never accidentally scroll down when using the mouse. Just under the click wheel you also get two small buttons that allow you to change the sensitivity of the NAOS 7000 on the fly. This is a really great feature is you jump between a number of different games and programs throughout the day. I can easily tap a button to set it extremely low when doing any sort of intricate work in one of my image editors or crank it up when mouse speed is key in one of the many games I play. If you play a lot of games like we do here, you will know that each has a different way of dealing with mouse sensitivity and the MIONIX 7000 makes it easy to make adjustments without fiddling around with any in-game settings. The only problem, and it’s a small one, is when trying to switch sensitivity my index finger often has a difficult time distinguishing which button is which as the both are the same size and have nearly the same shape.
The NOAS 7000 uses a ADNS-3310 gaming grade optical sensor that has no positive or negative hardware acceleration that allows for a great deal of accuracy while in-game. The sensor allows for a maximum speed of more than 5.45m/sec (215 IPS) all the way up to a whooping 7000 DPI. Sure, a lot of that is some marketing mumbo jumbo, even if it is correct, but if you go out and ask any big time professional gamer they will say that DPI isn’t the be all end all as some of them even use a setting as low as 450 to great effect.
LOD, better know as Lift Off Distance if something that can come into play with a user, especially when doing a great deal of image editing. The NAOS 7000 comes with a LOD calibration feature so you can adjust the distance that the optical sensor stops the mouse pointer. This really comes into play with design tools such as Illustrator and Photoshop and is a welcome tool to have built into the mouse. The LOD also works in conjunction with the Surface Quality Analyzer better known by the lovely name S.Q.A.T. This feature has the laser scan the surface you are using, myself having it right on my fine wood desk, and making adjustments for better precision.
The Mionix NAOS 7000 has a fair amount of features for the price. It has a built-in 32bit ARM processor that helps run the MACRO tool, user profiles, customizable buttons, all the sensor settings and the 16.8 million LED color options. I have the mouse set to cycle through colors so I feel like I’m working in a psychedelic rave warehouse. Sure. it’s a silly feature, but it’s nice to be able to customize it to your liking. Set the LED to color shift mode, set it to a solid light of color, pulsating heartbeat style or just let it blink away.
The Mionix NAOS 7000 retails at $79.99 and for that price, coupled with the amount of features packed in makes for a really great deal. Since the time of this writing the Mionix NAOS 7000 has easily replaced my current longstanding Cobra Junior, which for me who hates change is saying something.
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