WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.520 It is so rare that I get to unbox a product that checks all of my boxes across the board, 00:00:05.520 --> 00:00:09.120 and that's why I'm so excited to be unboxing the Keychron M5. 00:00:09.120 --> 00:00:14.400 Their entry into the vertical mouse space, and having just looked at my first gaming vertical 00:00:14.400 --> 00:00:19.840 mouse, I can't believe how good of a package this sounds like it's going to be, especially because 00:00:19.840 --> 00:00:25.440 they don't advertise it as a gaming mouse, despite all of its gaming features. In the box, 00:00:25.440 --> 00:00:32.720 we have a little general user manual, a cabler, our dongle, as well as a C to A adapter, 00:00:32.720 --> 00:00:40.080 and then we have our mouse. Anything else? No. I gotta say, this box is not particularly 00:00:40.080 --> 00:00:43.920 premium looking. If I didn't know Keychron from their good reputation, I would assume that this 00:00:43.920 --> 00:00:48.560 is a very cheap crappy product, but it doesn't seem like that's going to be the case. How long 00:00:48.560 --> 00:00:56.880 is our cable? Just about six feet. We have our USB-A dongle that does not have a place to go 00:00:56.880 --> 00:01:02.720 in the mouse. That's a bit of a bummer, but not a deal breaker, which brings us to our mouse. 00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:07.600 We have the white version, although there is a black version. I am a big fan of black mice, 00:01:07.600 --> 00:01:14.640 just because I have disgusting hands. Get over here. Oh, if I didn't say it already, which I did. 00:01:14.720 --> 00:01:18.960 This is a vertical gaming mouse, which is designed for ergonomics, because that's 00:01:18.960 --> 00:01:24.240 the way your ARM wants to sit so the bones don't cross over. And so this is supposed to be a better 00:01:24.240 --> 00:01:30.960 long-term shape for the health of your wrist, ARM, and hands. And that's great. I love long-term health. 00:01:30.960 --> 00:01:36.960 You know what I'm saying? I would never forget to take these off. On the right side of the mouse, 00:01:36.960 --> 00:01:41.840 we have our two buttons, our scroll wheel, which is not... These clicks are okay. The feeling is 00:01:41.840 --> 00:01:45.520 nice when you have your fingers in the right spot, but as you go up the button, there's like kind of 00:01:45.520 --> 00:01:50.320 like a point where it becomes impossible to click without a lot of pressure. So I don't love that 00:01:50.320 --> 00:01:55.920 uneven feeling it is versus the sweet spot, both on the sides and the back of the buttons. The scroll 00:01:55.920 --> 00:02:01.200 wheel is not in a way that's tactile enough. It's nothing special. It has no tilt, which is not ideal 00:02:01.200 --> 00:02:04.720 for a vertical mouse, but this one has another scroll wheel, which brings us to the left side 00:02:04.720 --> 00:02:09.520 of the mouse. We got our forward and back button. I like this configuration of forward and back button 00:02:09.520 --> 00:02:14.240 being side by side, as opposed to top and bottom that we've seen on other vertical gaming mice, 00:02:14.240 --> 00:02:18.480 and having access to a second scroll wheel that you could have be your horizontal scroll or 00:02:18.480 --> 00:02:23.200 assigned to another feature. It's pretty nice. On the front, we have our recess type C, but it's a 00:02:23.200 --> 00:02:27.280 barely even a recess. Pretty much every cable is going to fit in there, although I say that and 00:02:27.280 --> 00:02:31.520 you, Tom, are going to try your cable and it's not going to work. I'm sorry. On the bottom, we have 00:02:31.520 --> 00:02:37.360 our PTFE skates. Decent size. It's always weird when you look at these vertical gaming mice that 00:02:37.360 --> 00:02:43.440 have such big platforms, how small the skates are. The glide experience is adequate. Nothing special. 00:02:43.440 --> 00:02:48.560 Pretty fine. We also have more buttons than I'm used to seeing on the bottom of mouse. We have 00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:53.520 our DPI switch. We have our report rate, which is, I guess, the polling rate. It's interesting. 00:02:53.520 --> 00:02:58.240 They call it report rate. We have our Bluetooth connections that we can change, as well as our 00:02:58.240 --> 00:03:02.960 mode toggle. This almost looks like a little battery compartment latch, but I don't think that's what 00:03:02.960 --> 00:03:06.480 it is. I think it's just to be able to get a spudger underneath these skates so you can open 00:03:06.480 --> 00:03:13.680 up the mouse. And then we have our PTFE skates around the sensor, which is the PAW3950, which 00:03:13.680 --> 00:03:18.720 is a fantastic sensor. It's a flawless sensor, one of the highest spec ones you can get. And it's 00:03:18.720 --> 00:03:25.840 pretty overkill for a mouse period, but it's especially overkill for a mouse that's not 00:03:25.840 --> 00:03:30.480 necessarily advertised as a gaming mouse, which is very, very interesting because 00:03:30.480 --> 00:03:34.640 that is the strength of this thing. There's lots of vertical mice, but there is no vertical mice 00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:42.160 that has these specs. The 8,000 Hertz polling rate, the 30K sensor underneath with 750 IPS, 00:03:42.160 --> 00:03:47.600 the 0.7 liftoff distance. This thing sounds like it's like a top-end gaming mouse, but what's 00:03:47.600 --> 00:03:52.800 exciting is that it's not priced like a top-end gaming mouse. It's 70 US dollars, which is a 00:03:52.800 --> 00:03:58.560 very fair price for this kind of product. And I think that's its ultimate killer feature, 00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:03.280 as long as everything works as we intend, which we'll find out when we plug in the mouse, 00:04:03.280 --> 00:04:07.520 which we'll do after I tell you about our sponsor. I went to plug in the mouse dongle and I realized 00:04:07.520 --> 00:04:13.760 that it is kind of a weird assortment of accessories that you need to plug in if you want to plug 00:04:13.760 --> 00:04:19.360 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 00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:25.040 plug into this adapter that'll go into your A dongle. Don't hate it because ultimately I could 00:04:25.040 --> 00:04:28.880 plug this directly into my computer, and this gives me a lot of versatility, but that is a lot 00:04:28.960 --> 00:04:33.440 of points of failure, so it is something to note, not necessarily a positive or negative. 00:04:33.440 --> 00:04:37.440 Plug-in device, it immediately works, and one of the really cool things about keycom devices is 00:04:37.440 --> 00:04:41.440 there's a web app, so you actually don't have to download something to your computer. You can 00:04:41.440 --> 00:04:47.920 control it through your browser and then close it and it's saved to your mouse, although I hope you 00:04:47.920 --> 00:04:52.800 know there's no profile switching on the mouse. You can change your DPI or your report rate, 00:04:52.800 --> 00:04:57.600 but you can't switch between five saved profiles, which I think is a little bit of an oversight. 00:04:57.600 --> 00:05:02.160 I would actually rather have a profile switch than just being able to switch my report rate 00:05:02.160 --> 00:05:06.640 on the fly personally. What about you? In the software, we can switch between our profiles, 00:05:06.640 --> 00:05:11.120 so we can customize it as we like. We can change what all of our buttons do on a per button basis, 00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:16.880 pretty nifty, and then we can go to our pointer settings, which we can change our DPI. I generally 00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:21.920 game with 800 DPI, but on vertical mice, I've been told to have it be a little bit more sensitive 00:05:21.920 --> 00:05:25.360 just because the types of movements you're doing are a little bit different, so I'm going to leave 00:05:25.440 --> 00:05:30.560 it at 16. Then we can adjust our polling rate. The whole point of this thing is 8,000 Hz, although 00:05:30.560 --> 00:05:34.800 you will reduce the battery life of your mouse by going to 8,000 Hz, but Keychron advertises up to 00:05:34.800 --> 00:05:40.240 140 hours, although that's in Bluetooth mode, and 120 hours and 1,000 Hz. You should get something 00:05:40.240 --> 00:05:44.400 pretty good in 8,000 at the end of the day. Your charging cable is also your dongle cable. It's 00:05:44.400 --> 00:05:51.040 not that hard to plug it in. Macros. When the Labs was debriefing me on their testing of this mouse, 00:05:51.120 --> 00:05:56.320 they were very impressed by the macros. It looks like you can assign keyboard inputs, 00:05:56.320 --> 00:06:00.000 all kinds of stuff to the different buttons, which is pretty cool. I'm not a macro guy, 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:04.720 but if that's something you're into, this is a very robust set of controls. I think that's pretty 00:06:04.720 --> 00:06:10.640 cool. That brings us to the advanced toggle. We can adjust our lift-off distance. I'm going to 00:06:10.640 --> 00:06:14.640 leave it at default. We have our sensor performance settings, so we have ripple control, angle snap, 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:18.800 and motion sync. I'm surprised angle snaps not on by default. Is that such a gamer-y setting? I 00:06:18.800 --> 00:06:23.840 guess that's probably why. It's not a gaming mouse, although it could be. Scrolling direction, 00:06:23.840 --> 00:06:29.440 forward or reverse. Hey, Apple. It's that easy, mother f***er. Left-click lock. Interesting. 00:06:29.440 --> 00:06:34.800 We have our debounce sound to reduce the amount of double clicks we have. It's on a per-key 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:38.640 basis. You can definitely tell it's a keyboard company because it's not button five. It's 00:06:38.640 --> 00:06:44.640 key five. No big deal. And then we have our pairing combination key, which seems like a 00:06:44.640 --> 00:06:48.400 little bit of a mystery to me. If you know what that is, comment down below. Don't use AI over 00:06:48.400 --> 00:06:53.200 you. I will cry. Last but not least, we can update our current receiver, but ours is up-to-date, 00:06:53.200 --> 00:06:58.480 which is fantastic. And what's our settings? This is just like language. Jason! All right. That's 00:06:59.600 --> 00:07:03.520 our software. Let's play some games. We're about to game, and I haven't really commented on the 00:07:03.520 --> 00:07:10.560 shape of this mouse. Now, I'm not a vertical mouse aficionado, but I have tried a couple now, 00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:16.880 and I got to say, I really like this shape. This is a very natural grip for me. My hand kind of 00:07:16.880 --> 00:07:21.280 knows where to go very comfortably. There's no pinky scoop that you have to use. My pinky sort of 00:07:21.280 --> 00:07:26.720 rests naturally on the thing, but there is a little bit of a rest if you want that. But I think I 00:07:26.720 --> 00:07:31.760 want my pinky there. This angle, which is a little bit less than the razor mouse I looked at a couple 00:07:31.760 --> 00:07:38.480 weeks ago, I think feels a little bit more natural, although these are all preference things. Ideally, 00:07:39.200 --> 00:07:44.320 you're able to get your hands on this mouse before you really pay money for it. That's not always 00:07:44.320 --> 00:07:49.440 possible. What I will comment on that is less ideal. The finish is good, but it's not premium. 00:07:49.440 --> 00:07:55.120 This is like quality bang for the buck sort of plastic. The seams aren't perfectly aligned, 00:07:55.120 --> 00:08:00.560 although that's a super nitpicky sort of thing, because the overall weight is one thing I think 00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:05.920 this really excels at. It's about 98 grams versus other vertical mice like the razor vertical 00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:12.000 click pro 2, which is 150 grams. And this feels noticeably lighter in a way that I think would 00:08:12.080 --> 00:08:16.560 significantly impact gaming performance. However, I know there's some of you out there. There's 00:08:16.560 --> 00:08:23.600 dozens of us that love their heavy mice. So preference. Using this mouse for an FPS is definitely 00:08:23.600 --> 00:08:30.160 not what its primary use case is, but I think it's a really good way to test how good a mouse is at 00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:34.240 gaming. Although the more vertical mice that I try, the more I think they should make MMO style 00:08:34.240 --> 00:08:37.840 mice where you have a bunch of buttons on them because there's so much room for your thumb. 00:08:37.840 --> 00:08:41.360 Just have like a little spot that your thumb can pinch and then a bunch of buttons around 00:08:41.360 --> 00:08:45.600 your mouse. I think that'd be really practical. There's so much space for activities on this 00:08:45.600 --> 00:08:50.160 thing. You know what I'm saying? This is your daily reminder that an 8,000 Hertz polling rate is cool, 00:08:50.720 --> 00:08:54.400 and it's a nice little feature on your box, but it's not going to significantly impact your 00:08:54.400 --> 00:08:59.040 gaming performance. There's other things that are more important that your mouse must do, 00:08:59.760 --> 00:09:07.520 but thankfully this mouse does it all, baby. This mouse rocks. I'm not not even playing it up. 00:09:07.520 --> 00:09:12.080 This thing's freaking sweet. It's super responsive, which makes sense. We tested the latency as 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:18.080 exceptionally low, less than a millisecond both over wire and via 2.4 gigahertz dongle. Even 00:09:18.080 --> 00:09:21.520 the Bluetooth is pretty good. Just around 8 milliseconds, which is a lot higher than the 00:09:21.520 --> 00:09:27.040 other two modes, but for Bluetooth, that's pretty dang good. I think we might have a freaking 00:09:27.760 --> 00:09:32.800 strong recommend on our hands, everybody. Let's give it up for Keychron. I said, 00:09:33.520 --> 00:09:37.760 do that for Keychron. You know what? Before starting this, I was unconvinced that there 00:09:37.760 --> 00:09:41.760 would be a vertical gaming mouse that I'd really want to game with. Having used the Razer one, 00:09:41.760 --> 00:09:46.160 which is a more premium product, and I think the fit and finish on it might be a little bit nicer, 00:09:46.160 --> 00:09:53.440 but I had a hard time imagining being good at an FPS with it. Whereas this one, immediately, 00:09:53.440 --> 00:09:58.480 I'm in the game. I'm more comfortable. This is a good grip. Grip is going to be a personal choice, 00:09:58.560 --> 00:10:03.440 but I am getting one of these. Well, I'm going to take this one to my desk. 00:10:04.240 --> 00:10:09.600 For a flow plan exclusive where I use it for a year, I didn't think they could make a vertical 00:10:09.600 --> 00:10:15.680 mouse this freaking good. I was a doubter, and I was coming in knowing this was a good gaming 00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:20.320 mouse in the vertical stance, but it's just a good mouse that happens to be vertical. This is 00:10:20.320 --> 00:10:25.200 friggin great. The question is, are these buttons an acceptable sponsor? Screwwell's fine. It's 00:10:25.200 --> 00:10:28.720 going to be a bit of a reach. I don't think I'd actually assign anything to it that I really need 00:10:28.720 --> 00:10:32.720 access to really quick. It's also not a click, which is fine. These are fine. My thumb lands right 00:10:32.720 --> 00:10:37.120 on the seam, so I think I've got the ideal thumb shape for this. Easy to press forward, easy to 00:10:37.120 --> 00:10:42.000 press back. I wish there was a bit more separation between the two side buttons, just so that it 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:45.840 would be harder to accidentally press the one I'm not meaning to. I could see in the wrong moment 00:10:46.480 --> 00:10:50.160 pressing forward when I mean to be back, but other than that, this thing friggin rocks. 00:10:50.160 --> 00:10:53.600 I think it feels immediately more comfortable than other vertical mice I felt. The gliding 00:10:53.600 --> 00:10:59.040 experience is smooth. The tech inside is top-notch. There really is no major compromises. 00:10:59.600 --> 00:11:04.240 They had to save costs a little bit on the shell plastic, on the packaging if that matters, but 00:11:04.240 --> 00:11:10.960 I think where it counts, the Keychron M5 is a friggin absolute must-watch, gold star, platinum 00:11:10.960 --> 00:11:16.400 diamond. This thing fucking rocks. I haven't been this excited about a product that I wasn't 00:11:16.400 --> 00:11:22.320 planning on using after, and God knows how long. This thing is friggin sweet. Man, thank you so 00:11:22.320 --> 00:11:27.440 much for telling us to unbox this mouse in the last vertical mouse video we did. Your comments 00:11:27.440 --> 00:11:31.120 are red, and I would love for you to share the next mouse that we should unbox, because 00:11:31.920 --> 00:11:35.600 you nailed it last time. Just like you're gonna nail it if you keep watching ShortCircuit. Why 00:11:35.600 --> 00:11:42.080 don't you go and watch the time that I recently unboxed Sony's mouse and keyboard for gamers. 00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:47.200 It's pretty good, except...