Hey, what's up Nerdgasm Fans.
Gerry Here AKA Barnacules
This is a mouse
You use it to play your games
You use it to search for porn
Fil..ter..ing... Programs
You even use the damn thing to send your email
But unfortunately after using these little guys
for hours and hours and hours
It tends to put an ache on your wrist
So how can you think we can solve that?
I figured we'd give one of these old timers a try
Here I present a trackball
If you don't know what a trackball is that means that you're probably under forty years old
These suckers used to compete with mice back in the day
then they all but disappeared
But never mind that now because they're back
Alright, so my friends over at Massdrop.com
sent one of these over because they wanted my opinion on it
No I haven't heard of a trackball in ages
Last time I used a trackball was probably five years ago
I had one of those Microsoft trackballs
But then it became so valuable because Microsoft wasn't making it anymore
that I sold it on Ebay for like two hundred bucks
Yeah used. It was like heavily used and I still got two hundred dollars for it
So I was a little surprised when they said they actually had one of these and that they wanted to send it over for my review
Alright, so this trackball is made by Clearly Superior Tecnologies
No I've never heard of the company before
but it's cool because it's a made in USA product.
KUDOS
Nothing against China, it's just nice to see that every once in a while
Alright, lets crack her open
It's a really heavy duty box
It reminds me of like an old school electronics box
It's like when you'd actually get something back in the eighties
and here you have a little instruction thing here
It says where they're located in California
their phone number
Talks about how to install the software
And they even cite compatibility back to Windows 98 SE and later
So, uh, which I would expect- I mean it's kind of an old looking piece of hardware
but it's not- it's like new, old hardware.
now open up the box here you can see all you have is the trackball just sitting in there
and it feels super heavy duty- it's a heavy unit
HEAVY UNIT
And it even has that whole 90's technology look going on
And we have a cd in here from Clearly Superior Technologies
that tells you how to install the software for it.
And since this thing is black like my keyboard, I'm going to go ahead and ditch the mat
There we go, now we can see a little better
Reminds me of the Golden Tee arcade machine remember
Alright now at first glance the trackball looks very very plain looking
I mean, it's not a really crazy looking ergonomic shape
The ball isn't some crazy disco ball looking thing
like the old Microsoft and Logitech trackballs were
It does have a very very smooth movement
and it's got two buttons, one on either side
You can push them either at the bottom or at the top
that's actually really nice
has a scroll wheel up here at the top and the scroll wheel is super, super smooth
and you have the middle mouse button right there
and that's all there is to it- there's no side buttons like on a regular mouse
But for what it is, that's all you need
I should also note that on the front here, you have two audio looking jacks here
and what these are for is if you are a disabled person and you don't have the dexterity to actually push the buttons
you can actually rig up your own buttons with contact switches to connect in here
so you can operate the left and right click from say your other hand
I think that's pretty cool.
Now, we're going to go ahead and hook it up through USB so I'm going to go ahead and hook it up into my keyboard
Now, you don't actually need any drivers to operate this thing right out of the box, it just plugs in
and it works just like a mouse as you can see right here
I'm just opening up a little right click menu here on the screen
but they did include some software, so lets go ahead and install it and see what it does.
Well apparently the disc only contained manual files
so it is just the inbox driver
You don't need any additional drivers to run this.
Ok, so just to let you guys know, I did use this device for about a week
before finishing the review
and I actually really like it
I especially love the scroll wheel up here at the top
you can literally just move it up and down- right here I'm on my instagram page
You can see it's just very very nice and precise
and it moves liquid smooth
You just move your fingers up and down onto the scroll
and you also have the middle mouse button
so you can click that and you can actually just scroll
using the ball itself
So for scrolling it's awesome
I found that moving the ball around it is incredibly precise
How the mouse cursor works
But it does take some getting used to
You can actually do very very precise movements with just like a couple of fingers
on here or you can just move very very quickly
just by whipping the ball around
It does take some getting used to
But once you do it's really comfortable
because you don't have to do anything, you can just rest your arm on it
I also like how large the buttons are on the side
Like first if I want to go up here and look at one of my pictures
let me turn off my middle scroll button there
and click on it, I can click it down low with my thumb
or I can click it on my finger either side
because you can click the full length of the button right here
Makes it really easy to flip through all my stuff
It's "Kitty-Purr-Ito"
I like how it has the nice rubberised feet on it so it doesn't move around easily
so just the weight of your hand laying on it you can really whip this thing around
you don't have to worry about it going anywhere
Now, obviously it's no good for gaming
there are some people who say that they can game with these things
I'm not one of them
I could not game with this thing to save my life
and I wouldn't use it for photoshop work either
because it's just a little too monotonous to move around
But as far as sending emails and surfing the web?
I prefer it to a mouse as it's much more comfortable to actually sit here and not have to move
my hand around like this and scrape on the edge of the desk.
So I do find it to be comfortable.
But the cool thing is guys
You can actually attach your mouse and the trackball at the same time
and have the best of both worlds
So you can see I still have my mouse here
and I can go click through everything
Or I can just switch right over to my trackball.
and when I don't want to use the trackball I can just set it out of the way
and use my mouse and vice versa
So I don't have to worry about plugging and plugging to use both devices
I can get the best of both worlds- if I'm playing a game
I've got my mouse over here which I can just maneuver around really really fastly
If I want to go look at my twitter feed
Or I can come over here and use the trackball to do it
I can come over here and look at my facebook for instance
I can scroll through my facebook feed
So it really is the best of both worlds
Well guys this is one of those devices which it either works well or it doesn't
I have to say it does work well.
If you're somebody who gets a lot of discomfort in their wrist
Or in your forearm using a mouse
this is a fantastic alternative
and for me when I'm doing email and stuff like that and I'm surfing the web
this is going to be my primary device
because like I said- I found a mouse just fatigues my hand
after I use it for long periods of time
And this thing is made in the United States
which is cool. It;s actually the build quality on it is phenomenal
the plastic which is used is incredibly heavy duty
the base is really heavy. Everything about it is just really really well built
and the ball is very very heavy
and move very very very smoothly
The only thing I can really ding this device on is the styling
I mean it literally looks like something which was made in the eighties
like, I would see this shipping with a two eighty six
and it even has like the old metallic things and the weight to it
I mean it really, if I showed this to somebody,
out of the box they would immediately be like "that is a retro controller"
but no, this is actually a brand new peice of technology
so my hat's off to Clearly Superior Technologies- you guys built
a really really hardcore product
and I think people out there are going to enjoy it
I like the fact you can use it with both hands
your left or the right. You can actually compliment it with the mouse
so you don't have ot use one or the other, you can use both as I displayed earlier
Alright so I just want to give a special thanks to Massdrop.com for sending this to me for review
this is a really really unexpected product and it's one those things
that I thought went the way of the dinosaur, but it's definitely making a comeback
and I like it enough that I'm going to still use it on my daily activities here on the mancave beast
If you guys have any questions leave them in the comments
Comment over and Tweet me at Twitter
right down here @Barnacules
and I'm much more responsive on social networks than I am on Youtube because the comments system is really weird
but if you have a google plus account and leave a comment, chances are I will respond to you
if you don't have a Google Plus comment the made it ridiculously hard for me to respond to you guys so I can't
Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed my review
I know this was a brief one, but it's a trackball
it serves a very very specific purpose
it does a good job and that's all we need to know
alright guys, 'till next time
I really hope you enjoyed this video- if you did, please like favourite and subscribe it, it helps me a bunch
Also come follow me on Facebook and Twitter. I love interacting with you guys