It is so rare that I get to unbox a product that checks all of my boxes across the board,
and that's why I'm so excited to be unboxing the Keychron M5.
Their entry into the vertical mouse space, and having just looked at my first gaming vertical
mouse, I can't believe how good of a package this sounds like it's going to be, especially because
they don't advertise it as a gaming mouse, despite all of its gaming features. In the box,
we have a little general user manual, a cabler, our dongle, as well as a C to A adapter,
and then we have our mouse. Anything else? No. I gotta say, this box is not particularly
premium looking. If I didn't know Keychron from their good reputation, I would assume that this
is a very cheap crappy product, but it doesn't seem like that's going to be the case. How long
is our cable? Just about six feet. We have our USB-A dongle that does not have a place to go
in the mouse. That's a bit of a bummer, but not a deal breaker, which brings us to our mouse.
We have the white version, although there is a black version. I am a big fan of black mice,
just because I have disgusting hands. Get over here. Oh, if I didn't say it already, which I did.
This is a vertical gaming mouse, which is designed for ergonomics, because that's
the way your ARM wants to sit so the bones don't cross over. And so this is supposed to be a better
long-term shape for the health of your wrist, ARM, and hands. And that's great. I love long-term health.
You know what I'm saying? I would never forget to take these off. On the right side of the mouse,
we have our two buttons, our scroll wheel, which is not... These clicks are okay. The feeling is
nice when you have your fingers in the right spot, but as you go up the button, there's like kind of
like a point where it becomes impossible to click without a lot of pressure. So I don't love that
uneven feeling it is versus the sweet spot, both on the sides and the back of the buttons. The scroll
wheel is not in a way that's tactile enough. It's nothing special. It has no tilt, which is not ideal
for a vertical mouse, but this one has another scroll wheel, which brings us to the left side
of the mouse. We got our forward and back button. I like this configuration of forward and back button
being side by side, as opposed to top and bottom that we've seen on other vertical gaming mice,
and having access to a second scroll wheel that you could have be your horizontal scroll or
assigned to another feature. It's pretty nice. On the front, we have our recess type C, but it's a
barely even a recess. Pretty much every cable is going to fit in there, although I say that and
you, Tom, are going to try your cable and it's not going to work. I'm sorry. On the bottom, we have
our PTFE skates. Decent size. It's always weird when you look at these vertical gaming mice that
have such big platforms, how small the skates are. The glide experience is adequate. Nothing special.
Pretty fine. We also have more buttons than I'm used to seeing on the bottom of mouse. We have
our DPI switch. We have our report rate, which is, I guess, the polling rate. It's interesting.
They call it report rate. We have our Bluetooth connections that we can change, as well as our
mode toggle. This almost looks like a little battery compartment latch, but I don't think that's what
it is. I think it's just to be able to get a spudger underneath these skates so you can open
up the mouse. And then we have our PTFE skates around the sensor, which is the PAW3950, which
is a fantastic sensor. It's a flawless sensor, one of the highest spec ones you can get. And it's
pretty overkill for a mouse period, but it's especially overkill for a mouse that's not
necessarily advertised as a gaming mouse, which is very, very interesting because
that is the strength of this thing. There's lots of vertical mice, but there is no vertical mice
that has these specs. The 8,000 Hertz polling rate, the 30K sensor underneath with 750 IPS,
the 0.7 liftoff distance. This thing sounds like it's like a top-end gaming mouse, but what's
exciting is that it's not priced like a top-end gaming mouse. It's 70 US dollars, which is a
very fair price for this kind of product. And I think that's its ultimate killer feature,
as long as everything works as we intend, which we'll find out when we plug in the mouse,
which we'll do after I tell you about our sponsor. I went to plug in the mouse dongle and I realized
that it is kind of a weird assortment of accessories that you need to plug in if you want to plug
into a type A. You have your type A to C so that it can go to your C to C cable, which will then
plug into this adapter that'll go into your A dongle. Don't hate it because ultimately I could
plug this directly into my computer, and this gives me a lot of versatility, but that is a lot
of points of failure, so it is something to note, not necessarily a positive or negative.
Plug-in device, it immediately works, and one of the really cool things about keycom devices is
there's a web app, so you actually don't have to download something to your computer. You can
control it through your browser and then close it and it's saved to your mouse, although I hope you
know there's no profile switching on the mouse. You can change your DPI or your report rate,
but you can't switch between five saved profiles, which I think is a little bit of an oversight.
I would actually rather have a profile switch than just being able to switch my report rate
on the fly personally. What about you? In the software, we can switch between our profiles,
so we can customize it as we like. We can change what all of our buttons do on a per button basis,
pretty nifty, and then we can go to our pointer settings, which we can change our DPI. I generally
game with 800 DPI, but on vertical mice, I've been told to have it be a little bit more sensitive
just because the types of movements you're doing are a little bit different, so I'm going to leave
it at 16. Then we can adjust our polling rate. The whole point of this thing is 8,000 Hz, although
you will reduce the battery life of your mouse by going to 8,000 Hz, but Keychron advertises up to
140 hours, although that's in Bluetooth mode, and 120 hours and 1,000 Hz. You should get something
pretty good in 8,000 at the end of the day. Your charging cable is also your dongle cable. It's
not that hard to plug it in. Macros. When the Labs was debriefing me on their testing of this mouse,
they were very impressed by the macros. It looks like you can assign keyboard inputs,
all kinds of stuff to the different buttons, which is pretty cool. I'm not a macro guy,
but if that's something you're into, this is a very robust set of controls. I think that's pretty
cool. That brings us to the advanced toggle. We can adjust our lift-off distance. I'm going to
leave it at default. We have our sensor performance settings, so we have ripple control, angle snap,
and motion sync. I'm surprised angle snaps not on by default. Is that such a gamer-y setting? I
guess that's probably why. It's not a gaming mouse, although it could be. Scrolling direction,
forward or reverse. Hey, Apple. It's that easy, mother f***er. Left-click lock. Interesting.
We have our debounce sound to reduce the amount of double clicks we have. It's on a per-key
basis. You can definitely tell it's a keyboard company because it's not button five. It's
key five. No big deal. And then we have our pairing combination key, which seems like a
little bit of a mystery to me. If you know what that is, comment down below. Don't use AI over
you. I will cry. Last but not least, we can update our current receiver, but ours is up-to-date,
which is fantastic. And what's our settings? This is just like language. Jason! All right. That's
our software. Let's play some games. We're about to game, and I haven't really commented on the
shape of this mouse. Now, I'm not a vertical mouse aficionado, but I have tried a couple now,
and I got to say, I really like this shape. This is a very natural grip for me. My hand kind of
knows where to go very comfortably. There's no pinky scoop that you have to use. My pinky sort of
rests naturally on the thing, but there is a little bit of a rest if you want that. But I think I
want my pinky there. This angle, which is a little bit less than the razor mouse I looked at a couple
weeks ago, I think feels a little bit more natural, although these are all preference things. Ideally,
you're able to get your hands on this mouse before you really pay money for it. That's not always
possible. What I will comment on that is less ideal. The finish is good, but it's not premium.
This is like quality bang for the buck sort of plastic. The seams aren't perfectly aligned,
although that's a super nitpicky sort of thing, because the overall weight is one thing I think
this really excels at. It's about 98 grams versus other vertical mice like the razor vertical
click pro 2, which is 150 grams. And this feels noticeably lighter in a way that I think would
significantly impact gaming performance. However, I know there's some of you out there. There's
dozens of us that love their heavy mice. So preference. Using this mouse for an FPS is definitely
not what its primary use case is, but I think it's a really good way to test how good a mouse is at
gaming. Although the more vertical mice that I try, the more I think they should make MMO style
mice where you have a bunch of buttons on them because there's so much room for your thumb.
Just have like a little spot that your thumb can pinch and then a bunch of buttons around
your mouse. I think that'd be really practical. There's so much space for activities on this
thing. You know what I'm saying? This is your daily reminder that an 8,000 Hertz polling rate is cool,
and it's a nice little feature on your box, but it's not going to significantly impact your
gaming performance. There's other things that are more important that your mouse must do,
but thankfully this mouse does it all, baby. This mouse rocks. I'm not not even playing it up.
This thing's freaking sweet. It's super responsive, which makes sense. We tested the latency as
exceptionally low, less than a millisecond both over wire and via 2.4 gigahertz dongle. Even
the Bluetooth is pretty good. Just around 8 milliseconds, which is a lot higher than the
other two modes, but for Bluetooth, that's pretty dang good. I think we might have a freaking
strong recommend on our hands, everybody. Let's give it up for Keychron. I said,
do that for Keychron. You know what? Before starting this, I was unconvinced that there
would be a vertical gaming mouse that I'd really want to game with. Having used the Razer one,
which is a more premium product, and I think the fit and finish on it might be a little bit nicer,
but I had a hard time imagining being good at an FPS with it. Whereas this one, immediately,
I'm in the game. I'm more comfortable. This is a good grip. Grip is going to be a personal choice,
but I am getting one of these. Well, I'm going to take this one to my desk.
For a flow plan exclusive where I use it for a year, I didn't think they could make a vertical
mouse this freaking good. I was a doubter, and I was coming in knowing this was a good gaming
mouse in the vertical stance, but it's just a good mouse that happens to be vertical. This is
friggin great. The question is, are these buttons an acceptable sponsor? Screwwell's fine. It's
going to be a bit of a reach. I don't think I'd actually assign anything to it that I really need
access to really quick. It's also not a click, which is fine. These are fine. My thumb lands right
on the seam, so I think I've got the ideal thumb shape for this. Easy to press forward, easy to
press back. I wish there was a bit more separation between the two side buttons, just so that it
would be harder to accidentally press the one I'm not meaning to. I could see in the wrong moment
pressing forward when I mean to be back, but other than that, this thing friggin rocks.
I think it feels immediately more comfortable than other vertical mice I felt. The gliding
experience is smooth. The tech inside is top-notch. There really is no major compromises.
They had to save costs a little bit on the shell plastic, on the packaging if that matters, but
I think where it counts, the Keychron M5 is a friggin absolute must-watch, gold star, platinum
diamond. This thing fucking rocks. I haven't been this excited about a product that I wasn't
planning on using after, and God knows how long. This thing is friggin sweet. Man, thank you so
much for telling us to unbox this mouse in the last vertical mouse video we did. Your comments
are red, and I would love for you to share the next mouse that we should unbox, because
you nailed it last time. Just like you're gonna nail it if you keep watching ShortCircuit. Why
don't you go and watch the time that I recently unboxed Sony's mouse and keyboard for gamers.
It's pretty good, except...