Steelseries XAI laser gaming mouse

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The Pitch: The recently announced SteelSeries Xai Laser Mouse is raising the bar in precision and functionality for gaming peripherals. This “precision tool” for gamers, packs a punch “under the hood”-you won’t see crazy lights or designs on SteelSeries gear-rather it’s the shape and functionality where its products stand out from the crowd. The Xai is an ambidextrous mouse, equipped with a 10.8 megapixel laser that processes 12,000 frames per second of movement speeds for up to 150 inches per second (which is almost unheard of). Ideal for gamers who travel to tournaments or LAN parties, the Xai can be fully configured via a LCD menu system on the back of the mouse. Settings are saved on the mouse and do not need to be configured on your computer. Expert users will appreciate the SteelSeries FreeMove, SteelSeries ExactSens, SteelSeries ExactAim, SteelSeries ExactRate, the automatic lift distance calibration and other sensor innovations that can be adjusted to a gamers preference of correction and sensitivity.

Pro: The killer app here is the fact that the settings are stored on the actual mouse itself, rather than on the PC. This means you can take your mouse with you and use it on other computers, and also keep your settings when you reinstall your computer (and trust me, gamers reinstall their computers more often than most…) I’m also intrigued by the lift distance calibration and other sensor refinements.

Con: At $90 the price is a lot for a mouse, even a tournament-grade gaming mouse. SteelSeries’ competitors make very high precision gaming mice as well — some for half the price. At this price range, they’re not going to get casual new users who want to see what the fuss is about.

Recommendation: The best guy I ever played a tournament FPS against had different settings for his horizontal and vertical: Left to right was high sensitivity and up/down was low sensitivity. This gave him the ability to “twitch” left and right but keep on a relatively even Y axis-which probably goes far towards explaining his insane headshot ratio and ultimate grand prize-winning performance. Gaming mice can seriously improve your game, but people don’t really know about them, or wonder what makes them so much different. I’ll recommend that this makes it to the next round.