Introduction
With the advent of optical mouse technology, a new breed of ultra-sensitive mice have been developed that are mainly tailored towards gamers and users requiring high precision in their daily work.  While major peripheral manufactures such as Logitech and Microsoft have been actively developing and marketing these devices to computer enthusiasts for quite some time, other less well-known companies have entered this field as well.  One such company is KMEX, and today I’m going to be taking a closer look at their 800 CPI MO-I033 USB Optical Mouse which has been supplied to us from the great guys at the The Card Cooler, who market this product as the BlueIce optical mouse on their website.

Without further ado, here are some of the features of this mouse as claimed on the packaging:

• Super High Sensitive With 400/800 CPI


• Ergonomic Shape


• Easy to Install, Plug & Play


• Super Auto Scroll Without Scrollbar / On Line Zoom / Connect to Internet (Driver Required)


• Windows 95,98,2000,ME,NT,XP Compatible

Most of you are probably wondering by this point what CPI is and why is a higher CPI better?  The acronym CPI stands for Counts Per Inch and determines the optical resolution of the mouse.  As this resolution (CPI) increases, the minimum distance the mouse needs to be moved to be seen as a mouse movement decreases, which ultimately results in greater accuracy.  Enough with the technicalities though, let’s see how this mouse performs.

Installation & Configuration
The BlueIce mouse installs like any other USB Plug & Play device under Windows XP, but KMEX does provide a link on the packaging for a driver/software download that will allow for additional configuration of the mouse.  After installation of these drivers, you are greeted with a little mouse icon down in the system tray.  Doubleclicking on this icon brings up the window that reveals a few more features and extra options for the mouse:

The first tab let’s one assign the functionality of the mouse’s scroll wheel which also acts a third button.  By default it acts as a third button, but can also be used as a function key, to copy, paste, delete, or even to launch a specific webpage.

On the next tab one can adjust the wheel mode and speed.  By increasing the scroll speed, on click of the wheel will scroll the page down farther.  Conversely, by decreasing this setting less of a page will be scrolled.  This feature could come in handy for long documents where only a quick glance is needed.  By chance I noticed that (at least) this feature of the drivers is not specific to the KMEX mouse.  It also works for the MX700 mouse I usually use, which is kind of cool.

Gaming Performance
Since the KMEX mouse claimed to have such a high CPI (Counts Per Inch), I was curious as to how it would behave in a gaming environment where accuracy is essential.  Without my further ado I fired up the popular Battlefield 1942 MOD, Dessert Combat to play a few rounds.  I must say that I was pretty satisfied with the performance of the KMEX during the game.  Performance was snappy and accurate and I felt the KMEX performed just as well in the game as the Logitech MX700 mouse I usually use for gaming.

Everyday Performance & Handling
As can be seen by the above pictures, this mouse is not very ergonomically friendly like many of Logitech’s and Microsoft’s models,even though KMEX claims it is.  As the matter of fact, it feels a lot like the one button mice used on Apple computers and could easily be mistaken as such.  The mouse does include an internal blue LED that lights up the scroll wheel and KMEX logo  in a pretty blue color.  A good idea for case-modders and those concerned with the looks of their whole computer system.

Performance in windows was snappy and precise for the most part.  Due to the 800 CPI technology utilized by the mouse, a little jerk of the mouse to either side moved the pointer almost all the way across the screen set at 1280×1024 resolution.

Final Notes & Conclusion

Pros:

• Fast


• Easy to Install


• Looks Pretty (Blue LED’s)


• Price

Cons:

• Not ergonomically designed

All in all, the KMEX is a great mouse and the only problem that I really have with it is that is not ergonomically designed.  That doesn’t make it quite as attractive to me, but if ergonomics and hand positioning are of no great concern to you, the KMEX is definitely worth a look.