write faster. If we don't get 10 scripts written by the time Lionus gets back,
he's going to make us go to the lucky room.
I'm so scared.
Not the lucky room. Sir. Sir, they're moving as fast as they
can, but having to move their hands from the mouse to the keyboard is taking up
valuable time. Not to mention the repetitive motion is straining their
hands. I do mo
Yeah. Not today, Lucky. NOT TODAY. YEAH.
YEAH. Uh that's that's not what it's
like to use this thing. It's kind of janky, but it's actually
not as janky as it looks.
The roller mouse red wireless belongs to that kooky corner of the tech industry
that doesn't try to give us the coolest looking, most gamerific products to help
us get more head shot. No, the tribe that this gadget belongs to is the one
trying to delay the slow death by sitting that all heavy PC users
inevitably fall victim to. And if they have to make a weird rolly wrist rest
mouse thing to do that, by golly, so be it. They're saving your life for Pete's
sake. Now, the idea according to
Contour, who makes the roller mouse, is that the motion of moving your hand over
to your mouse and back to your keyboard is one of the major culprits that can
cause repetitive strain injury or RSI.
Moving your hand down a few inches instead of a foot or so to the side is
definitely an improvement in that regard, but how effective is it? Whereas
other ergonomic mouse designs like vertical mice allow your hand to rest in
a neutral handshake like position, the roller mouse still requires you to
pronate your wrist. That means your wrist is rotated inward causing the
radius and ulna bones in your ARM to crisscross. So while it eliminates that
repetitive side motion, it's still not perfectly ergonomic.
But are any of us? Now, I called this thing weird earlier, but as far as
ergonomic peripherals go, the roller mouse doesn't look that bad. I mean,
yeah, the concept of using a big roller as your mouse is unusual, but the whole
device itself looks kind of classy. Its
structure is metal with a silver, black, and red aesthetic and these nice
leatherrett coverings on the wrist rest. Hm. It does not look or feel like a
cheap device that will break after a couple weeks, which is good because it's
not cheap. It's 265 bucks. Like, really?
But the price might be worth it if it saves you some trips to the chiropractor
to fix your screwed up shoulder. Do you
go to the chiropractor for that? Is that physiootherapist?
Yeah. Acupuncture. So, here's how the roller mouse works.
Rolling the bar up or down translates to vertical mouse movement and sliding the
bar translates to horizontal mouse movement. It ends up feeling a lot like
using a trackpad on a laptop from an alien planet where everyone has wheels
for hands and this was the best solution they could come up with. Now you can
either click by pushing down on the roller bar itself or by using the
surprisingly high quality leftclick button on the module below the roller
bar. There you'll also find buttons for the right click, double click, copy,
paste, cursor speed, and a scroll wheel, which also serves as a middle click. On
the left side is a micro USB port for charging. Contour claims it can last 3
months on a single charge. And on the bottom, there's the power switch and a
little cavity to hold the USB dongle.
Using the roller mouse is, as I mentioned, a lot like using the trackpad
on your laptop. And because of that, I was able to adapt to it pretty quickly.
Initially, I found it necessary to move both hands down to use my uh right hand
for the roller bar and click with my left hand. But after a few hours,
one-handed use was no problem. I found the best style for me is to manipulate
the roller bar with one finger, the scroll wheel with another, and use my
thumb to left click since you can remap the double click button to also serve as
a left, right, or middle click. There are a few other minor customization
options here as well, like changing the force required to activate the click on
the roller bar or disabling the click altogether. Now, this being an ergonomic
device, there are also some things you can do to make the whole setup more
ergonomic. It comes with these risers that can raise or lower your keyboard's
height and angle to be flat with the roller mouse. And there's also two other
types of wrist rest attachments available. The red plus palm support for
20 bucks and the ARM support red for another 150 bucks. What? No.
Wait, is this product
dumb? It might be. See, while the
touchpad like nature of the roller mouse makes it easy to learn, it also makes
the benefits a real touchpad has over the roller mouse much more obvious.
Pinch to zoom and two-finger scrolling are the obvious examples, but a number
of people in the office also remarked that the roller bar design seems less
responsive and precise than their laptop trackpad. Moving the bar all the way to
the right or left will make the cursor snap to that side of the screen. So, at
times you can't just drag the mouse directly to where you want it. The
cursor will often go past your intended destination and then you have to bring
it back. Now, to be fair, I used this on my Ultraoid monitor at my desk, and it
was more of a problem there than it would be on a regular 16x9 display. But
still, with all these buttons, I wish they'd have programmed one of them to
pause mouse movement like on the key mouse that James reviewed, so I can, you
know, recenter the bar. That might have helped with the feeling that I was
fighting the cursor sometimes.
And like I mentioned earlier, while you are skipping the lateral motion of
reaching for your mouse, which could be the solution for your particular elbow
RSI, for example, it doesn't solve everything. Your wrist is still
pronated, and you're still dealing with er deviation while using the roller bar
that is laterally bending your wrist like this. So, while the roller mouse
might be better ergonomically for people with certain RSIs, I don't think I'd
recommend it for the general public. Now, that said, I do find this whole
idea of integrating a wrist rest with a
mouse to be pretty interesting. And while reviewing the roller mouse, there
were times where I liked having the mouse control right there already under
my fingertips. What I think would be really cool though is something like
this but with a touchpad so I could also use gestures like pinch to zoom and
two-finger scrolling. Sadly, while there are a number of other wrist rest devices
with a similar roller bar type of design, I couldn't find any wrist rest
touch pads. Now, you can buy good desktop touch pads for less than half
the price of this thing if you want to try it out. It's really too bad the
roller mouse is so expensive.
I really wanted to believe. All right, thanks for watching, guys. If this video
sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the
like button, or check out the link below to where to buy the stuff we featured.
Uh, probably won't be this. Uh, maybe some touchpads or something. Also linked
in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one.
It's a processor. And our community forum, which you
should totally join. You should get in there, dude.