Some of the stuff that Log­itech has been putting out re­cent­ly is cer­ti­fi­ably gim­micky. For ex­am­ple, the wire­less track­ball mice (Cord­less Track­man Op­ti­cal) that Log­itech makes. The whole point of a track­ball is that it stays put on your desk: on­ly the ball moves! Why, then, is it made wire­less? Wire­less mice are cool be­cause the cord doesn’t get in the way when it moves along with the mouse, but the track­ball base doesn’t move! Log­itech’s site even calls the wire­less fea­ture “con­ve­nient” - I per­son­al­ly don’t think that need­ing to change bat­ter­ies for a fea­ture that the de­vice doesn’t re­quire is con­ve­nient.

One more seem­ing­ly-use­less Log­itech fea­ture: the G15 key­board’s LCD. Gamers that would buy the G15 key­board - most like­ly MMO play­ers and, to a lesser ex­tent, FPS play­ers. The G15’s most out­stand­ing fea­ture is its pletho­ra of assignable macro keys, which makes it won­der­ful for, say, WoW. Why, though, would you look down from the game on your mon­i­tor to check some dim­ly-lit stats on your key­board LCD? Seems point­less to me.

Don’t get me wrong: Log­itech is a won­der­ful pe­riph­er­al com­pa­ny. They make what I con­sid­er to be the world’s best gen­er­al-pur­pose mice (Dell’s ba­sic USB mouse in­clud­ed with their desk­tops, my per­son­al fa­vorite, was¹ made by Log­itech). They make rel­a­tive­ly good, us­able key­boards, some­times with a touch of my pre­ferred min­i­mal­is­tic style (Di­Novo Edge). And, de­spite ar­gu­ments be­tween Log­itech, Raz­er, and now Mi­crosoft users about which gam­ing mouse is the best, there’s no doubt that Log­itech’s, espe­cial­ly the G5, are among the top gam­ing mice avail­able. It’s just that no­body re­al­ly wants to spend ex­tra money buy­ing fea­tures that are com­plete­ly un­nec­es­sary.