Most people are familiar with Saitek. This company is well known for making popular peripherals ranging from keyboards to joysticks (as well as some audio and novelty products). The Obsidian is a rechargeable wireless mouse that you can buy for about fifty bucks. Without any more discussion, let's take a look at some of these features.

The mouse comes packaged in a fairly nice retail box. There is a cutaway on the front that displays the product, and a flip-up cover with product information printed on the inside. As usual, I wish that companies would dial back a bit on this retail-style presentation, considering the fact that the majority of these purchases are going to be made via an internet retailer. It doesn't matter what it looks like sitting on the shelf if that shelf is in the middle of a warehouse. Anyway, let's open up the overdone box and look inside.

There are two main items contained in the package, and I'll cover them each in turn. The first is the mouse, which is a very glossy black with a bit of sparkle to it. There are two parallel matte silver plastic regions flanking each side, and then on the outer edges are the side buttons. These are covered by a black rubbery sort of material. Overall the mouse has a low profile, and is fairly wide. When I use it, my hand is much flatter than with most mice, mainly because the width of the Obsidian means that your thumb and little finger are spaced farther apart.

The most striking feature of the Saitek Obsidian is in the middle, where most mice have the scroll wheel. This wonderful invention was popularized about a decade ago, and has made web browsing and navigating other "tall" applications much more convenient. The Obsidian, however, doesn't have a scroll wheel. What it has is a shallow depression, about an inch long, which is covered by a slightly textured plastic. This area is touch-sensitive, and acts in place of the standard scroll wheel. If you've ever used the click wheel on on iPod, you have an idea of what the experience of scrolling with the Obsidian is like. The scroll area is surrounded by a bit of acrylic which is lit by a yellow LED when the unit is "on".

The second item in the box, at first looked to me like a very large shoehorn with a USB cable sticking out of it. Of course, this is the recharging cradle. This little device was just full of nice surprises. First of all, you don't recharge the Obsidian by placing it in the cradle. Instead, the mouse ships with two disk-shaped batteries. Most of the time, one of these will be in the mouse of course, while the second one sits on a little circular spot on the cradle to recharge. This means that presumably there is no downtime when you run out of battery besides the amount of time it takes to swap them out. This goes pretty quickly, since there is a simple release catch on the bottom of the Obsidian to pop out the old battery. You simply insert the new battery and get on with your work. The shoehorn shape of the cradle is matched to the mouse itself, so if you want to place the mouse there when it's not in use you can. I don't really see the point, but then again if you like having a very clean and orderly desk you might like this. Another interesting feature is the removable USB fob. Inserted into the recharging station is a small (flash drive-sized) USB stick, which you can take with you if you want to use the Obsidian away from the recharge station. It's a nice addition, especially if you have a laptop. You don't have to drag along the entire recharging station in order to take your mouse with you. As somone who hates using trackpads, this is much appreciated.

Ok, enough about the build and aesthetics; let's move on and see how it performs.

Testing Setup
I used the Saitek Obsidian mouse with 3 of my PCs. First, I hooked it up to my Asus z63a notebook running Ubuntu Linux, and used it as my daily workhorse around the office. This was where I did the most extensive testing, since I think this is likely the prime niche for this product. I also tested the Obsidian with my main PC which runs Windows XP, both as a general use and gaming mouse. Finally, I connected the mouse to my HTPC, an old athlon rig running MythTV on top of Ubuntu. I'll cover each of these below.

Office Use
By far the majority of my time spent testing the Saitek Obsidian was at the office. I found the ergonomics of the unit to be fairly decent. The lower and wider profile meant that my hand didn't have to be quite as "clawlike" as with other mice. Just resting your hand on top of the mouse puts most of the buttons at your fingertips. One problem I had relating to the profile, however, was accuracy with lateral (side to side) movement. Since you don't really "grip" the Obsidian (unless your hands are much larger than mine), you don't have quite the same control when moving the pointer left or right. For office use, this isn't a deal breaker, since you don't really need pinpoint accuracy anyway. Also, this is something that would go away after a month or two of acclimating to the mouse. The real issue for me is with the touch sensitive scrolling. It just doesn't work well. A scroll wheel is amenable to a couple of different types of interaction. You can give it a quick flick to scroll down a bit, you can click around slowly to proceed one line at a time, or you can steadily spin it to move at a constant rate. There are also the click and drag features, etc. Conceptually, all of these can be reproduced in the scroll area of the Obsidian. In practice, it's just too finicky. Long-distance scrolling, like to the top or bottom of a document, isn't that bad. The problem I have is if I want to scroll down just one page for instance. Without any real tactical feedback, it's hard to do this. Also, the touch sensitivity is so sensitive that even if you try to repeat the exact same motion, it will scroll different amounts. The same sort of thing goes for the middle-click functionality. Lots of times I have to hit it two or three times to get it to respond. At first I thought that this was just because I needed time to get used to it, but after a week of 8 hour per day usage, it's still not working right for me. I suppose this could be a personal issue (I've never been able to control the iPod wheel either), but it's a bit annoying.

Also, under Ubuntu Linux the side buttons weren't mapped properly for web browsing. Getting this set up properly would take some configuration, but this isn't unusual for mice in general.

Gaming Use
I wasn't sure if some of the quirks I saw when using the Obsidian under a Linux environment were specific to the mouse or to the OS, so I also plugged it into my Windows box and did just a bit of gaming and general use sort of things. The lateral accuracy issue was a real problem in gaming. As I'm sure you know, being able to place your cursor accurately is extremely important when gaming, and anything that interferes with that can be irritating. Once again, this is something that might disappear after some acclimation time, but it's pretty prevalent even after a week or so for me. One thing that I would place as a positive for this mouse is its low weight (for a wireless mouse). I used to use a Logitech cordless mouse for my gaming, and I had to give it up because the weight was giving me some RSI problems. The Lithium-Ion battery in the Saitek mouse is very light, so the overall mouse weight is actually pretty comparable to some standard wired mice. I also didn't notice any mouse lag, which can sometimes be a problem when using cordless mice for gaming. I still don't really see a lot of people using this as a gaming mouse, just because the accuracy issue is so critical.

The switch to Windows didn't seem to fix the quirky response of the scroll pad, so I think that this is OS independent.

HTPC Use
Finally, I'll briefly mention using the Saitek Obsidian to interact with the Myth HTPC. The range was acceptable (out to about 15 ft in my living room) with no connection problems. Besides this, the mouse worked just as it did for the linux notebook.

General Notes

• The battery life seems to be a bit on the short side. The box lists the life at 10 hours, and that's probably about right. After about 5 days of use, the LED on the mouse started blinking, indicating it was time to switch the battery out. It's a pretty quick process, but it might become tedious after a while. It's worth noting that the mouse is goes on standby just a couple of seconds after you stop moving it. I'm guessing that this has a lot to do with keeping the battery life as extended as possible. Even still, I'd say that it's a bit too short for my taste.

Conclusions
The Saitek Obsidian wireless mouse just didn't live up to it's own billing. When I saw the feature set and attractive design, I immediately had high hopes for the performance. To be sure, there are some really nice features (like the two batteries and portable USB dongle), but these don't make up for the problems with the scroll area. I like the idea of going to this sort of touch-sensitive sytem, since it cuts down on moving parts, but it definitely needs some refinement. In other words, if you are simply in love with Saitek or want this mouse just for its looks, then go for it. Most people, I think, could find a better product for the money.

The Good

• Two quickly swappable batteries
• Looks and build quality
• Portable USB dongle

The Bad

• The scroll area. Nice idea, bad implementation
• Accuracy problems due to ergonomics
• Short battery life

In conclusion, I award the Saitek Obsidian Wireless mouse a HardwareHell rating of 5.0/10, and the designation "Tested".

Thanks to Saitek for providing the unit for review.