Mionix Naos 3200 Review

Intro

For some time now Mionix has been providing the gaming market with some innovative and quite impressive gaming products. Time ago we gave you the review of the big brother of the Naos family, the Naos 5000. The Naos 3200, provides a similar look and feel altough stripped of the many features that made the Naos 5000 in our opinion one of the top mice of 2010. Let us check out the Naos 3200 and see what this produc it made of!

Packaging

As it is their usual, Mionix provide a minimalisic design with their black backgroud and green trimmings that make their products stand out from the competition with their simple clean design. The box is sturdy and ideal to carry around. So if you are a LAN goer you might want to keep the box. As with all other Mionix products, no drivers are included in the box. Only a small note providing a website with links to resources from where you can download the drivers is present in the package. In my opinion this is a good strategy, since it reduces cost, pollution and saves trees, not to mention that it gives more funds to Mionix to invest in the product, rather than in manuals and driver cd's which you don't use, since you end up going on the site anyway.

Specs and Setup

Installation and setup

Installation of the Naos 3200 is straightforward, and with plug-and-play you can be up and running with the mouse in a matter of seconds. The Naos does not come bundled with any software as said in the intro - it is available only by downloading it from the Mionix website. If you want to further customize the mouse you need to download and install the software, but it is not necessary. While some people might not like this, I rather like the fact that the majority of features are available without needing to install any software. I see this is a plus point because if you use the mouse on multiple computers you won't need to go through the whole software installation process with each machine.

If you want to unlock the full potential of the mouse then you need to download and install the software. I did install the software and briefly went through the various menus but we will cover this in the software section.

The Mouse

Usual stuff here. A mouse wheel and the right/left click buttons. Changing the DPI of the mouse will change the LED colour of the mouse wheel, either red blue or green.

The two buttons below the mouse wheel are by default set as the DPI switch.

On the left side of the mouse are two programmable buttons. This side is also moulded so your thumb has somewhere to sit.

On the right side you can see the two bulges to support both your ring and pinky finger.

The mouse also has teflon feet on the underside of the mouse ensure it glides easily and smoothly over almost any surface.

The colour of the LEDs on the mouse change depending on what DPI settings you're using. ( Colours and DPI settings can be fully customised via the drivers yet if you don't install the drivers they will be set automatically to defaults settings.)

Software

The software (downloadable from the Mionix website) is where most of the customisable options for the mouse come from.

The first page you see when you open the mouse software is a screen allowing you to change what the various buttons on the mouse do, even allowing you to set macros or assign single keyboard keys to them.

Under custom settings you'll find the DPI controls for the mouse, settings for polling rate, mouse speed and a button to turn the LEDs on the mouse on or off.

On the macro settings page you'll find the options to record your own macro.

Testing it out

Gaming Rig

I needed to know how good this mouse is and there is nothing better to test a mice for responsivness than to test it out on some FPS games. I also changed gaming surface by swapping some mouse mats in the process to see if the mouse kept performing.

To start with I gave a shot at Call of Duty Modern Warfare:

This game is to date one of my favorite games of all time and even though other newer installments of the Call of Duty franchise are available, I still find it a good testing platform. Starting off on a public server team deathmatch made me appriciate how comfortable this mouse is. The teflon glides on this mouse reduced friction with the surface to the bare minimum on different surfaces I tried it on. I found the mouse provided me with good response times. What was really impressive though, was the material it is coated with. It provides an excellent grip not to mention that if you have sweathy hands the material counters for it and grip is not hindered. This material coupled with the fact that the mouse is extremely confortable provided a great performance when it comes to FPS games.

Quake Live:

I wanted to be sure that the mouse performed so I loaded Quake live in order see if the mouse was as good on a faster game than COD MW. Well same results, great performance.

World of Warcraft:

I decided to really test the comfort of this mouse so I delved into an 8 hour long, WOW marathon. As I commented before I could tell that the mouse comfort levels where in my opinion great. The Naos 3200 performed as I had predicted. No negative effects on my hands, this was impressive since other mice had often caused me aches and pains following prolonged hours of WOW.

Gimp:

I also wanted to test this mouse on other software other than games, so I decided that to test the accuracy of this product I had to test it on an image editing application. Since Gimp was the first icon to come along on my desktop I decided to try the accuracy levels of the mouse by editing some pictures that had been lying in my to do list for ages. Naos 3200 gave me the possibility to take them out of such list. The accuracy was up to my requirements.

Conclusion

The Cost:

Selling at approx Euro 45.00 the price in my opinion is amazing. The ergonomics, on the fly resolution change, non slip material, braided cable and the fact that the mouse can change LED colour in three different colours makes the mouse a good value for money.

Conclusion

The mouse met my expectations and went beyond in all my tests. Providing excellent quality, it's managed to improve my gaming experience and helped to improve my ability in-game. Going over everything, the only few drawbacks I can think of are, the weight since the mouse does not provide a weight tuning system, therefore some might find this mouse a little light for their taste and also the fact that the mouse is a definite right hand mouse, a left hand option would be nice. Overall I believe this is a superb mice that provides looks, functionality and perfomance at a very reasonable price.

Pros and Cons

Excellent Price	Right hand only design
Rubber like surface reduces slipping and improves performance	No weight tuning system
Excellent Ergonomic design.
Braided and very long cable.