I de­cid­ed to write this re­view to share my own ex­pe­ri­ence of buy­ing a track­ball mouse: I had been com­par­ing be­tween what are ba­si­cal­ly the two most full-fea­tured track­balls on the mar­ket to­day, the Log­itech Cord­less Op­ti­cal Track­Man and the Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse 7.0. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, track­balls are not very pop­u­lar among com­put­er users to­day, and so I had a very hard time find­ing an Ex­pert Mouse to try out for my own. In the end, one of my friends owned the Log­itech track­ball and a dif­fer­ent (non-op­ti­cal) Kens­ing­ton track­ball pro­duct, and I end­ed up buy­ing the Ex­pert Mouse. To sum up this en­tire re­view, **[I am ex­treme­ly hap­py with my pur­chase][con­cl]**; read on for my rea­sons.

[con­cl]: #con­cl

Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse 7.0

I’ve been us­ing a track­ball (first my friend’s Kens­ing­ton, and now my own) for over a year now, and I’ve found two very good rea­sons to use a track­ball over a nor­mal mouse:

1. First, it is pos­si­ble us­ing a track­ball, un­like with nor­mal mice, to click with­out any chance of mov­ing the cur­sor. This is ex­treme­ly use­ful for pre­ci­sion work.
2. Sec­ond­ly, track­balls do not take up very much desk room, and elim­i­nate the pick­ing-up and re-cen­ter­ing that is very com­mon with nor­mal mice.

It may be ar­gued that track­balls re­duce wrist stress com­pared to nor­mal mice, and my sub­jec­tive eval­u­a­tion con­firms that, although YM­MV of course. It may al­so be ar­gued that track­balls of­fer in­creased pre­ci­sion over nor­mal mice; I’ve al­so found this to be gen­er­al­ly true, as the ball is gen­er­al­ly quite heavy and can be nudged pre­cise­ly with lit­tle ef­fort.

### Track­ing and Fea­tures ### {#track­ing}

The non-Ex­pert Mouse Kens­ing­ton I used for a while was based on a me­chan­i­cal track­ing mech­a­nism, in a man­ner sim­i­lar to that of a nor­mal ball mouse (who us­es a ball mouse the­se days?). The track­ing on that Kens­ing­ton was ex­cel­lent: it was pre­cise, fast, and ac­cu­rate, and nev­er re­al­ly gave me any trou­bles. Of course, be­ing me­chan­i­cal, it re­quired fre­quent clean­ing. Mouse man­u­fac­tur­ers saw this prob­lem in ball mice, and op­ti­cal mice be­came quick­ly pop­u­lar. Track­ball mak­ers have been slow­er to catch on though, and so while mice have moved on even to laser track­ing mech­a­nisms, many track­balls sold are still me­chan­i­cal.

Both the Log­itech Op­ti­cal Track­Man and the Ex­pert Mouse have op­ti­cal track­ing mech­a­nisms, but their im­ple­men­ta­tion is quite dif­fer­ent. The Log­itech has an in­frared sen­sor of some sort: it emits no vis­i­ble light, and so ar­guably is less vis­i­ble in dark rooms (say, col­lege dorm rooms at night). The Ex­pert Mouse func­tions just like an up­side-down op­ti­cal mouse, us­ing a red LED. One may ar­gue the var­i­ous fine points of the two im­ple­men­ta­tions (like vis­i­bil­i­ty at night), but by my per­son­al sub­jec­tive judg­ment, the Ex­pert Mouse track­ing is far su­pe­ri­or. When I move the ball in a “straight line” us­ing the Log­itech mouse, the cur­sor doesn’t fol­low that mo­tion: it *tries* to move in a straight line, but some­times trav­els di­ag­o­nal­ly and is gen­er­al­ly quite inac­cu­rate. There is al­so a slight but no­tice­able amount of lag pre­sent us­ing the Log­itech track­ball. Ob­vi­ous­ly this is a dis­ap­point­ment from a $50 track­ball from a pe­riph­er­al com­pa­ny that makes some of the world’s best in­put de­vices.

Some other re­views indi­cate that the Ex­pert Mouse is not en­tire­ly ac­cu­rate in track­ing; how­ev­er, I have found that the Ex­pert Mouse tracks ex­treme­ly well: just as well as the old­er me­chan­i­cal Kens­ing­ton.

There are some who mea­sure the ef­fec­tive­ness of a mouse by the num­ber of but­tons it has… I sup­pose it’s some­what im­por­tant in some cas­es, but in my opin­ion not here. I want­ed to up­grade from my friend’s old­er Kens­ing­ton be­cause it lacked a mid­dle but­ton, and a scroll wheel, there­fore mak­ing my com­put­ing life very dif­fi­cult. Both the Ex­pert Mouse and the Op­ti­cal Track­Man have both the­se fea­tures, although the Ex­pert Mouse’s but­ton lay­out is sim­i­lar to that of other Kens­ing­ton track­balls (and the Log­itech Mar­ble), while the Op­ti­cal Track­Man’s is quite unusu­al. Per­son­al­ly, I find the Ex­pert Mouse’s to be more nat­u­ral (the low­er-left and low­er-right but­tons are the left- and right-click), but you may prefer the Log­itech’s. I on­ly use three of the four but­tons pro­vid­ed with my Ex­pert Mouse.

The Ex­pert Mouse’s scroll wheel (or scroll ring, as they call it) is an iPod-like phys­i­cal ring around the track­ball, and the Track­Man’s is just like the scroll wheel on a nor­mal mouse. The Track­Man is cord­less, but since the track­ball doesn’t move on your desk, I can think of no le­git­i­mate rea­son why one would need a cord­less track­ball. It’s ob­vi­ous­ly just a mar­ket­ing gim­mick.

### Gam­ing ### {#gam­ing}

So we’ve estab­lished that the Ex­pert Mouse is a won­der­ful tool for ev­ery­day mous­ing. Let us then ex­plore the other side of mous­ing, then: gam­ing. I’m ad­mit­ted­ly still a fan of us­ing a tra­di­tion­al mouse for gam­ing, but that doesn’t mean it’s im­pos­si­ble to play games with a track­ball. Strat­e­gy or point-and-click RPGs work espe­cial­ly well with my track­ball, and FPSes are man­age­able. It could cer­tain­ly be used as a de­vice for hand­i­cap­ping good play­ers…

The Kens­ing­ton soft­ware that comes bun­dled with the track­ball does not sup­port dif­fer­ent pro­files for dif­fer­ent games (as far as I know), how­ev­er there are four but­tons on the mouse that you can map to one of many dif­fer­ent in­put events. The scroll wheel is al­so a handy ad­di­tion in games that re­quire one.

### Con­clu­sion ### {#con­cl}

The on­ly dis­ad­van­tage to this track­ball mouse is its price: cur­rent­ly selling for $80 on Ama­zon. This is pret­ty ex­pen­sive for any point­ing de­vice, and it will be up to the user to de­ter­mine whether this de­vice is worth that amount of money. For me, it cer­tain­ly was. Per­haps it’s not en­tire­ly op­ti­mal for FPS gam­ing, but the Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse’s su­pe­ri­or track­ing, ex­cel­lent us­abil­i­ty and the small touch­es such as the scroll ring make it in my opin­ion a must-buy for track­ball users.