Review on Evoluent VerticalMouse Ergonomic Wireless Connection by Darin Marshall

Edit: Downgraded to two stars, the accuracy of this thing is pathetic. It's convenient to use, but for the price, the accuracy is disappointing. This really should be a high-resolution mouse at this price point. And as others have pointed out, it also seems pretty cheap for its price. If I had never heard of them and happened to stumble upon one of them on someone's desk, I would expect it to be something in the $29.95 price range. I also think the speed controller built into the device is useless. It's excruciatingly slow on everything but the highest settings. It's nice to be able to remap buttons. There is a feature where key 6 (under the thumb) acts as a sort of "shift" key, which allows you to create additional mappings for the keys on the other side. Unfortunately, other keys cannot be set to this "shift key” mode. I would prefer to use button 5 (above the thumb) for this. Over a decade of muscle memory pretty much dictates that button 6 should be the back button for me. Update after using it for a while: I won't downgrade my rating but I'm even less impressed. Purely for ergonomics/comfort reasons, we bought two wired versions, one for my wife's car and one for her office, and I can buy two more wireless versions, both for my office laptop at home and at the office. So, even if I like the mouse even less, that says a lot about the ergonomic factor. Because of the slow pointer response and low DPI, I lift and move this mouse a lot more often than my old, cheap, high DPI MS 4000 wireless mice (I literally can't count how many of these I've bought over the years). If you pick it up, there's a good chance you'll accidentally press the 3 key (big bottom) unless you remember it clearly. I had enough misfires that I had to disable that button. When I wrote earlier that low DPI is frustrating, that was an understatement. My old MS4000 mouse worked fine on almost any surface. On the same desk, this mouse struggles to track or even detect movement in a few spots. I mostly have small "dead zones" on my desk surface with this mouse. This is quite distracting and frustrating. Even in places where it works reasonably well, I have to increase the pointer speed so much that routine tasks like clicking the edge of a window to resize it become jerky and tiresome. The RF receiver turned out to be very sensitive to the USB port I was using - on two different machines. I don't know what to do about it, but it's very annoying. Also, after a lot of trial and error, I think it works better with a USB 2.0 port. Either the hardware or the driver is preventing Windows from going to sleep most of the time (as reported by the powercfg command line tool). Even if I don't touch the mouse, hibernation from the keyboard doesn't work, the machine wakes up immediately, and the USB port on the mouse is again to blame. Nevertheless I would buy it again. I've tried other ergonomic designs and this is the only one that works for me. It's just extremely disappointing that they made the gear cheaper.