I am back from the dead almost and this month there should be hopefully more activity from my end. But first we start off with the Kinzu review. Arriving at my place nicely bubble wrapped and properly packed. The Kinzu was the same size I assumed it to be, a smaller mouse capable of helping me own...
I am back from the dead almost and this month there should be hopefully more activity from my end. But first we start off with the Kinzu review. Arriving at my place nicely bubble wrapped and properly packed. The Kinzu was the same size I assumed it to be, a smaller mouse capable of helping me own people.
Like my last review (on the Slappa bag) I’ll be grading the Kinzu on the following points and on 10.
Prior to this I have used 2 “pro-miceâ€, the Razer Diamondback (non-3G and during Fnatic and Razer days) and the SteelSeries Ikari Laser. I have played mostly RTS games and to be precise – Warcraft 3 & StarCraft. The Diamondback was the first pro mouse I had used and it fitted me perfectly, I never ever had a problem in RTS with it. When I switched to the Ikari Laser, I didn’t like it at all. It’s size was such a turn off but add the fact that I wasn’t used to using a mouse like it and it was extremely hard. Eventually I got semi used to it and for some reason due to the size of the mouse, my palms used to sweat a lot (I don’t have sweaty palms). I think it’s because of the strain that was on my hand since I wasn’t used to a mouse like that.
When SteelSeries announced the Kinzu, I lapped up the opportunity to try it out. The experience has been extra-ordinary. Its size is perfect for me (fitting more than perfectly). I haven’t added any glidez, also I have only used the QCK+ Fnatic Mousepad for this review. I tested it across Unreal Tournament, Warcraft 3 (Extensively) & StarCraft (to the least extent).
To gain complete control, mastery and optimization you WILL need to download the drivers from the SteelSeries website, it takes about 5minutes to set up. Unless you want to work on it a little more and tweak it in depth (I suspect a RTS user might prefer a high sense and not much in depth tweaking). You get 3 customizable profiles.
Now that the introduction is done, let’s move on to the review.
I don’t think I can completely answer this since I’ve been using it for the last month or so and while overall it’s perfect, there have been a few times when the mouse somehow managed to skip a right click and that didn’t impress me at all, I suspect in a spam that wouldn’t matter but when I was moving items in WC3 I found some items wouldn’t carry due to the right click. It happened a few times but not so much lately. Overall aside from that the mouse is pretty decent.
Ah, this is where the mouse was almost a perfect fit for me. I could easily tell that the moment I started using it, the mouse would fit me like a glove. The click took me a while to get used to, since it’s not like the Razer Diamondback. But boy, I could say it managed to get me what I now call “specific clicksâ€. The mouse doesn’t encourage you to spam like a devil, but encourages you to be very specific in your tasks and the high quality on this mouse lets you perform that.
The mouse doesn’t look as impressive as those Razer mice or the mice with 300 lights on them (i.e. if you find mice like those impressive). But it has a very gentle feel about it, it’s almost like a very under-rated mouse. I would say in terms of design and style the mouse was meant to be made comfortable and easily adaptable to. Which is good, because the glow in the dark mice are annoying after a while.
- 4. Adaptability and ergonomics – 9/10
The mouse definitely outperforms even the Diamondback for me in this case. It’s very easy to get used to if you like smaller mice. The design fits my hand perfectly and as a result it scores high here as well.
The pricing is very apt on this and is affordable and while it’s a little steep by some 3rd world country standards, I think the Kinzu is very reasonable at the price it's placed at, there's very few mice that can compete with it at that level.
I hope coming from a non-professional gamer but avid gaming enthusiast that my review is at least informative. These are all based on my personal preferences and you’re free to disagree. I think I made a good call switching to this mouse. If you’re happy using your current mouse then I wouldn’t advise switching to this mouse for just the sake of it. If you are however looking to change and want a mouse you’d like immediately then you should definitely go for the Kinzu. I know f0rest uses this...
Overall Rating – 8/10
Technical Specifications from SteelSeries.com:
- Frames per second: 9.375
- Inches per second: 50
- Megapixels per second: 3.75
- Counts Per Inch (CPI): 400 - 3200
- Acceleration: 20 G
- Buttons: 3
- Cord: 2 m / 7,9 ft (braided to improve durability)
- Polling: up to 1000 Hz
- Lift distance: ~2.0mm
- CPI high/low indicator
- Large pressure points that reduce friction for optimized glide
- Driverless, plug-and-play feature for LAN gamers
- Built-in memory for 3 profiles
- Measurements: 117 x 64 x 36 mm / 4,6 x 2,5 x 1,43 in
- Operating systems: Win XP / Vista / Win 2000 / Mac OS
*Configuration software only available for Windows operating systems
- Kinzu software download + Manual
Pictures courtesy: Elton Pinto (my brother)
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