Logitech MX Revolution VS Performance Mouse MX

I’ve been using the Revolution for over 3 years now at home, and the Performance for a year at the office. An both have their pro’s and con’s. Although the Performance is supposed to be the Revolutions successor (and Logitech does now only sell the Performance instead of the Revolution) they do have some serious differences.

I also have some experience with the Apple Mighty mouse and the new Magic mouse and might write a review about those to, but both MX mice are my main clickers and are, in my opinion both superior.

The first thing I must say is that I use both mice on different OS’es. I use the Revolution on my Mac in OSX and the Performance in Windows 7. So software differences may be because of that.

The MX Revolution.

I got this mouse for two simple reasons. First was it’s ergonomics. Up until this mouse I always used cheap ones, and got the pain in my hands to pay for it. I am a computer (and of course, mouse) power user, I use computers for my studies, my work and my hobbies, and I was really tired of the pain of using bad mice. So I land down 99$ (yes, back then it still cost 99$) and got myself a comfy mouse. It really paid of, it feels so natural in my hand, no pains, not even after some 8 hour power- Photoshop session and a all-nighter of WOW.

The second reason I got this mouse was for it’s customizability.
It has 8 buttons, including left and right mouse button. So that makes 6 other buttons. And BTW, the buttons are really well placed, easy usage and again, no pains. You can program these buttons any way you like, and you can program them differently per application.

So left and right (which can also be changed up any way you’d like) then a small silver bar in-between, this one is marketed as a “one-click search” button. You can select text in any program, click the button and the selected text will be searched for in Google. That’s pretty cool... But I changed it up in most programs. In Firefox and Safari I have it set to Command+Left Click, that makes opening links in tabs really easy.

Then at your thumb you have 3 buttons. 2 on the most upper part of the mouse, which I have set to back and forth in browsers (default).

The final button on your thumb has 3 sides you can push it , so that makes 3 buttons in one. It’s basically a scroll wheel that does not scroll. You can push it forward, backward and inward. I have set mine respectfully to CMD+X, CMD+C and CMD+V (cut, copy and paste).

But those are just the reasons I got it for in the first place. The feature I was most surprised of and can not live without anymore is the scroll wheel. Logitech’s scroll wheels have two modes. One normal one, like any mouse, and frictionless scrolling. And that does exactly what you think it does, it makes you scroll lightning fast without any resistance. It makes scrolling just painless, natural, even fun at times. I have this mode on all the time, you can switch modes by clicking the scroll wheel, this mean you can not program the click with mouse wheel function. Ow and by the way, it has left and right scrolling too.

Battery life on this thing is amazing, I usually have it alive and kicking for one to even two weeks before I start noticing the red light, and even then it still goes for 1 to two days. It’s a real trooper when dying to, it does not hiccup or mess-up at all, it just keeps performing until it dies.

Clicking and aiming the pointer are a breeze, it just works, just like you would expect a mouse to perform. pin-point precision all the time.

Now there are con’s on this mouse. Well two actually. And those might just be my fault. The first one is the way to charge it. It came with a cradle for charging, the cradle makes the mouse look really cool on your desk, but after 3 years, it has some serious corrosion on the connection point ( the points that need to connect in order to charge). So I have to try a couple of times before it starts charging.

The other “bad” thing is the fact that you can’t open this thing up. You can not clean the inside without breaking it. Again, after 3 years, I know for a fact that dust is piling up on the axel of the scroll wheel. It doesn’t scroll as freely as it did in the beginning. I use some high pressure air and blow true the little gaps in the housing, but thats not enough.

But thats it, nothing but praise about this little rodent, I didn’t say anything about the dongle it came with. Obviously its not a Bluetooth mouse, its infrared and it needs an infrared dongle. The dongle does what it needs to, never any connection issues or bad performance.

The Performance Mouse MX

I got this mouse at the office. I asked for a Revolution but Logitech stopped selling them and they got me this one. At first glance, it’s the same mouse, and at a lot of points, it is. But it has some pretty big differences to.

The content of the box is one big difference. The Revolution had some nice packaging, showing of the mouse in all its mighty glory. The Performance comes in a more standard box, but has some nice extra’s inside that the Revolution did not. The Performance has a smaller dongle, I mean really small and just as good as the big one from the Revolution. Their is an (optional) extension cable for the dongle, a USB charging cable, a Power Plug and a cool little black bag to keep it all nice and tight together.

The ergonomics on this one are just as awesome as from the Revolution, it is a breeze to use. It has 7 buttons, so one less then the Revolution. Well, actually, i’m lying, it has 8, but button number 8 is a switch, and you can’t change it’s function. I have some serious mixed feelings about this “switch”. The switch is the black button on top of the mouse. You can not program this switch, it”s the on and off switch for the scroll wheel. Yes, this baby also has the 2 modes friction/frictionless scroll wheel. I think it’s a good move to move the function of the mode change to another button. But I miss the silver bar on top for clicking. Plus, the black button feels really cheap and is much to high, it”s a pain to push it. Luckily, I never need to push it cause I like my mouse to be in frictionless mode all the time.

The upper button for back and forth are still there and are now accompanied by a zoom button. By default, this button has zooming mapped to it, but you can change it up to almost anything you want, BUT, and this is a big but for me, on Windows, I can’t map any buttons to a click+modifier key, like CTRL+Left click, and i really miss that, but then again, this might be a Windows VS OSX thing.

The final button is a hidden one. It’s a pretty cool concept, its the thumb rest, you can press it down and it works great if your hand is big enough (mine is). The default function for this button is well... , a nice try. Default it acts like expose does on a Mac, it shows all open windows in a nice ordered grid. I say nice try because it is very, very choppy, the animation look horrible and it consumes all of your computers RAM, it is unusable, even on a high end computer. I guess this is definitely a Windows issue.

Aiming, clicking, battery life, scrolling, are all just as good as on the Revolution. Maybe the scrolling is even a bit better, because after a full year of power using, it still has no problems and scrolls just as fat as the first day.

What I really love about the Performance is wired charging. Instead of the cradle, it has a front sided mini USB port where you can plug in the charging cable. This means no faulty charging dock, and you can continue working even when charging. Another thing about the wired charging, and i don’t know if this is a feature (maybe in Winter) or a bug (in Summer), but the mouse gets really hot while charging, not boiling hot, but annoying hot.

The real big difference in these mice is the way they feel and look in comparison to each other. Both mice look really good and feel natural in your hand. But when you see them next to each other, the Performance looks like the prototype (cheap plastic) for the Revolution. And it should be the other way around, knowing the Performance is the Revolutions successor. The Performance does cost less, it was 70$ when i got it, so maybe thats fair.