An amazing mouse with an awful battery

There’s really nothing worse than an otherwise wonderful product with one fatal flaw that brings its whole score down. The Razer Mamba is a wonderful wireless gaming mouse, with an absolutely devastating power problem.

For the Mamba, Razer tweaked the kick-ass shape of the now-classic DeathAdder design—perfect for palm-grip mousers—to sneak in a pair of sensitivity adjustment buttons. The changes paid off: The Mamba is eminently comfortable for long-term gaming sessions, and the sensitivity buttons fix our only complaint with the DeathAdder, which offered imprecise on-the-fly sensitivity adjustments using the mouse wheel.

 

The Mamba would make one helluva wired mouse, but battery-life problems make us wary of its $130 price tag.

The Mamba’s 1,000MHz laser sensor is wonderful as well. After side-by-side testing, we couldn’t differentiate between the Mamba’s 5,600dpi sensor and the 5,000dpi sensor on the Logitech G9x, but that’s a good thing. With five different sensitivity levels, which are tweakable using the mouse’s software, there’s absolutely nothing about this mouse’s sensor that will prevent you from fragging with wild abandon.

What will prevent you from reaching your maximum gaming potential is the Mamba’s quick-death battery. Because the battery only lasted through about 12 hours of gaming before behaving sporadically, it’s a damn good thing that the Mamba also offers the option of plugging directly into the provided USB cable so you can continue playing after your battery inevitably dies. The bad news is that the USB cable is pretty chunky, and making the mouse/cord connection is fiddly at best. Worse, it’s hard to unplug. It required two hands and took us several minutes of fighting to remove every time we wanted to return to untethered fragging. On top of those problems, we absolutely detest that the only sure-fire way to get a full charge on the mouse is to turn off the physical power switch on its underbelly every single time you charge it. That’s just lame.

At the end of the day, we simply stopped using the Mamba as a wireless mouse, instead preferring to leave the cord permanently plugged in. We’d much rather have an awesome wired mouse (at a wired mouse price) than have the battery conk out during a heated TF2 match, when there’s nary a moment to connect the cord. As it is, the Mamba is a great wired mouse at a price that’s high, even for a wireless mouse.

Razer Mamba

Snakes

Amazing sensor, great shape, wired option.

Planes

Fiddy USB connector, anemic battery, super-chunky USB cable.

Razer