Gamers have avoided wireless mice like girls with cooties, fearing the grim fate of death and teabagging induced by milliseconds of lag. Razer’s Mamba and Microsoft SideWinder X8 promise total wireless freedom, sans teabagging.

Razer Mamba

Mamba is clearly Razer’s most carefully designed product yet. Even the packaging was clearly agonized over: The mouse is held aloft on a pedestal inside an acrylic cube, which has a shelf system built into it holding parts like the battery, power cable and charging stand.

But the design is only part of why you’re paying $130—it’s to make you feel good about dropping that kind of cash. You’re paying that much because Razer says it’s the first wireless mouse that’s actually gaming grade, with a latency of just 1ms—twice as fast as other wireless mice, and the same 1000Hz polling rate as their own wired mice. In other words, they’re promising zero lag while taking the gaming mouse DPI wars to the unwanted and ridiculous new level of 5,600 DPI.

It uses 2.4GHz for wireless, just like Microsoft’s SideWinder X8 and Logitech’s now old-school G7 (and every other wireless device) but supposedly Mamba detects and avoids noisy channels to skirt by interference. In this respect, does live up to the hype—at least when you’ve got sufficient juice. After using it in a couple weekends of Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, I really didn’t notice any response difference between it and my wired mouse. It’s perfectly lag-free and twitchily responsive. Wakeup is also surprisingly quick, or at least it was with the 1.02 firmware—it seems a bit slower with the 1.03 update, which is designed to improve battery life. I also never noticed any interference, despite running in close proximity to my dual-band router and the X8, actually.

Where the polish rubs off and shows some rough patches are on the battery and software front. Razer claims 72 hours of “normal gaming usage” and 14 hours of continuous gaming. I didn’t quite have the balls to game for 14 hours straight, but with Razer’s 1.02 firmware, I never got more than 48 hours of what I’d call normal usage battery life, and when it drops to that last bar of battery, it does not play well at all. They’ve since released firmware 1.03, which is supposed to improve battery life. Installing the update on Vista 64-bit is something of an arcane science (Update: Razer wanted me to note that the process is a just a simple installer with XP and Vista 32, and that new mice will have 1.03 already on it). You have to boot into a mode where it accepts drivers that aren’t digitally signed, and then the update process itself requires a second mouse. The configurator software, while it provides a full-featured set of options, is not as responsive as I’d like—it takes a bit to read the mouse’s settings (which are stored onboard) and longer still to change them.

When your battery does get low, you can plug the USB cable into the mouse to play and charge, turning it into a standard wired mouse with the same 1ms latency. It pops easily out of the charging cube/wireless receiver, but for some reason it tends to fight you to avoid plugging into the mouse, which is my biggest problem with the otherwise smart modular design.

Ergonomically, it’s one of the best mice around. It’s essentially a lighter version of Razer’s DeathAdder, though with the addition of a new groove for your pinkie, which took me a little bit to get used to. My only problem with the button placement is that the DPI selection buttons are not distinct enough, so if you’re trying to quickly drop the DPI down to precisely snipe someone’s head off, you might crank it up instead and shoot the guy in the foot. The texture is a nice use of rubber—it’s not super sticky and rubbery, so your hand doesn’t feel weird and gross if it gets sweaty, but it does give you a solid grip.

Shape and texture feel fantastic

Smart design touches throughout

Response time is perfect

Battery life not so great

Firmware updating process is a pain on Vista 64. for now anyway

$130 is pricey!

SideWinder X8

The design apparently still outsourced to the Empire’s mice and keyboard division, Microsoft’s third SideWinder mouse cuts the cable and improves on the series in a lot of little ways that add up to making it the best SideWinder yet.

As I suspected when I eyeballed it, ergonomically it’s finally designed for humans. The sharp spine has been softened into a far more pleasant hump, though it retains the same overall shame as the past two. (It’s huge.) So, it’s not as sleek as the Mamba, but they have finally nailed the way it should feel in your hand. The unorthodox vertical thumb buttons have been reshaped into ergonomic slopes that form a groove for your thumb, so after the initial adjustment period, this touch finally works. The metal scroll wheel isn’t super fantastico to use a lot, but the on-the-fly DPI buttons have a good placement in the middle, but need to be larger—it’s too easy to hit the wrong one. The textured plastic feels a little cheap, too.

It uses 2.4GHz wireless at a 500Hz polling rate (half of Mamba’s) and can crank the DPI up to 4000. Playing the same games as I did with Mamba—TF2 and L4D—again, I never noticed any real difference in response versus my usual wired mouse. In other words, it seemed lag-free to me. On the DPI front, you can only pick between three steps at a time—not five, like on the Mamba or on-the-fly. One superior touch over the Mamba is the built-in LCD that displays your DPI setting—on Mamba you have to decode what the combination of green and red bars on the side mean. On the other hand, try to find where it displays battery life. (I couldn’t.) Speaking of, the battery life is vastly superior to Mamba—I got over five solid days with four intense three-hour gaming sessions on a single charge.

If you had to pick a headlining technical feature (since Mamba also eclipsed its 4000DPI crown), it’d probably be that it uses Microsoft’s BlueTrack technology which can track on anything. Indeed, it worked perfectly on multiple surfaces, including a a glossy plastic SteelSeries SP pad that Mamba wouldn’t touch at all. (My standard surface is the cloth SteelSeries QcK+, in case you’re wondering.) So if you game on crazy surfaces, BlueTrack is a definite check in the X8’s column.

The charging dock/receiver is more functional and less “ooooh” than Razer’s—it’s a hockey puck with a groove for wrapping the cable. But what’s neato is that the play-and-charge cable attaches to the mouse magnetically so there’s no trying to cram it into a stubborn hole like on the Mamba.

Improved ergonomics over last-gen

Long battery life

Good response time

Shape and vertical buttons an acquired taste

Positioning of the hump for your hand makes it feel ginormous

There Can Be Only One?

Can you cut the cord and achieve sweet, wireless freedom while feeling safe that your fragging powers are undiminished? Yep. Response time felt the same for every mouse I used: X8, Mamba and my wired mice. Which means two things: Gaming-grade wireless is here (just in case you doubted it), and performance isn’t the reason you should pick the Mamba over the X8.

Mamba has better design, feels better (especially if you have smaller hands) and more functional software. The SideWinder X8 has longer battery life, less finicky software and it’s much cheaper. You can get the X8 for about $75, while Mamba is very much $130. As always, whether or not the frills of gaming gear is worth the extra scratch is up to you, and this is more true here than usual, given the price gap. [Razer, Microsoft]

Nah, Eye-Fi’s latest Secure Digital cards still aren’t nearly as capacious (nor as cheap) as other alternatives on the market, but good luck getting that free-after-rebate 8GB SDHC card from IAWANNA Corp. to upload images via a wireless hotspot. We pinged the company today to see if the company’s 4GB Explore Video and Share Video SDHC models were shipping out, and we were informed that orders placed over the web were indeed leaving the docks. If you’re not kosher with handing $99.99 or $79.99 (respectively) over through the intertubes, both devices will splash down in stores starting on April 19th.

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Wireless, Storage

Eye-Fi’s 4GB WiFi SDHC cards start to ship out originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Beginning today in Atlanta, AT&T announced that it will offer a variety of ultra-portable netbooks with
built-in AT&T 3G wireless capabilities starting at $49.99 with the purchase of AT&T “Internet at Home and
On the Go” broadband services.

The company said in a statement that it is also offering similar mini laptop promotional
rates with the purchase of AT&T DataConnect plans in eight AT&T
retail locations in the Philadelphia area.

For some inexplicable reason, AT&T is calling the machines “mini laptops.” But the lineup, which consists of the Acer Aspire One, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Mini 12, and LG Xenia, should put to rest any ideas that they’re somehow different than netbooks. Here’s a rundown of the pricing, as per the company statement: 

Today Clearwire yanked the cloth off of its rumored Clear Spot portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot, a shiny little battery-powered device that lets you bestow real 4G bandwidth upon anyone in Wi-Fi range.

The $140 thing fits in your pocket, runs for four hours on a lithium-ion battery, connects up to 8 laptops via Wi-Fi, and works like a charm when you’re in a decent WiMax coverage area. (You still need to connect a WiMax modem, which costs $50 and requires a data plan.)

I tested it on the outskirts of Portland, at a Burgerville right off of I-5 in Vancouver, WA, essentially becoming a totally unwired, totally portable wireless hotspot for anybody with a computer or smartphone in the vicinity. Anyone can see the hotspot itself, as it has a standard Wi-Fi SSID, but once on, you have to enter a password, like you do in hotels or airports where the Wi-Fi network itself is technically public.

I can’t make enough of the experience, and how much it could change businesses, sales forces or mobile bloggin’ teams like Gizmodo. You don’t even have to be plugged in, you can just all hop on and work as usual for up to four hours, more if you can find an electric socket. And with WiMax, you’re not nearly as limited as you are with 3G—though there are some constraints, you at least have access to a network that, in certain coverage areas, bestows blistering broadband speeds similar those from today’s wired cable modems.

One big constraint, of course, is that WiMax from Sprint/Clearwire is currently limited to Baltimore and Portland, OR, but is growing this year and next to many cities.

There is also an internal limit to how much WiMax bandwidth you can harness. Since the Clear Spot uses the same Motorola WiMax USB modem that Clearwire sells for its standard WiMax service, I could test how well the bandwidth was passed through.

• What I got when connecting an HP Pavilion dv4 Windows laptop to WiMax: Around 7Mbps
• What I got when connecting the same modem to the Clear Spot, then connected MacBook Pro via Wi-Fi: 3-4Mbps

That does certainly represent a bottleneck, and there’s a reason for it: The wireless hotspot itself—which you might have seen under the brand Cradlepoint for a year or more—was designed for 3G, for whom 3Mbps downstream is a frickin’ miracle. It has a gimped USB port that throttles bandwidth over 5Mbps.

Though that’s a flaw, it’s not a big deal when you consider most Clearwire WiMax plans will be sold with a 4Mbps cap.

Beyond the hardware bottleneck, my other complaints are relatively minor:
• There’s no Ethernet port, so this can’t fundamentally replace home broadband.
• In areas of low coverage, you get an error message saying the modem was not found, which is inaccurate.
• There’s no good way to read WiMax signal strength on the device itself.

The good news for patient people is that, according to Scott Richardson, Clearwire’s chief strategy officer, the company is exploring selling an unfettered WiMax account, so you’d get an experience closer to the one I got in my uncapped testing. Also, Scott tells me there will be another portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot device available—probably in the fall—that’s even smaller, and that wouldn’t be restricted by the USB bottleneck.

This is one of those products that’s totally niche but totally cool. Like, even if there are many people who are interested in getting WiMax, or better yet, a combo EVDO/WiMax modem from Sprint, I am not anybody would, at that point, also feel the need to share it with others. Maybe it’s good for bringing your work-supplied modem home, or maybe it’s a good way to split the cost of wireless modem service between a team of people who are always working together, on separate devices.

Regardless of all these scenarios, the fact is, it’s a truly new experience, and hopefully something we see more of in the future. I would say this is one of hell of a reason for Big Cable to be shaking in its boots—that is, if only Comcast wasn’t already part owner in Clearwire. [Clearwire Clear Spot release]

We’ve covered the original and wireless FyreTV boxes already, but the porn-on-your-TV streamer has finally gotten to a point where it’s stable and usable. And it really is great.

The newest wireless box, combined with the latest firmware updates, make this box a porn streaming solution that’s practical in that you can hook it to any TV in your house and deliver porn to it.

Here’s the gist of the device. The FyreTV box connects, via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, to the FyreTV servers. For $9.95 a month (plus more if you go over your 100 allotted credits), you get access to a 10,000+ title library of porn. There’s HDMI as well as component and composite connections, as well as a (as of right now, pretty crappy) remote to control what you see.

What you need to know, as a gadget person who also enjoys the occasional pornographic video, is that this is probably the easiest way to get legal porn onto your TV. Where the previous version required you to drag an Ethernet cable for a connection—something not every person has in their bedrooms—the Wi-Fi on this version allows you quite a bit of freedom.

As for the quality, it’s essentially DVD-level video parsed through a streaming filter. FyreTV will have HD content soon, but the DVD quality is good enough for most people. The menus are navigated easily enough, and with the latest software updates, you won’t see too many slowdowns. Suffice it to say, you’ll be able to get the job done without waiting for stuff to load and menus to pop up, provided you have a decent enough internet connection.

Is it easy to use? Definitely. Is it free? No. You can rig up a PC to your TV and download free internet porn if you have an extra machine lying around and know what you’re doing. But it is the easiest, quickest and most legal way to get streaming pornography onto your bedroom or living room TV. [FyreTV (NSFW)]