Another fun thing about trackball mice? You can customize the trackball!
That’s right, I didn’t just get one trackball mouse to test, I got two. After experiencing issues with my Kensington mouse, I bounced back and forth with the idea of replacing it with a new one or just a different mouse. Eventually, I tried both (and you can see how that worked out in my review). My second mouse was the Elecom EX-G Pro. It has more buttons, even if they are in questionable locations, and it has gesture support. I figured it could potentially replace my feature-rich Swiftpoint Tracer mouse while also giving me the comfort of a trackball mouse. I, surprisingly, may not have been wrong. This actually does do quite a few things really well. Unfortunately, the software and build itself is a bit of a letdown. Despite that, it might be one of my favorite mice.
In This Article:
Comfort
A large reason I decided to get a trackball mouse came from wrist pain. I spend a lot of time at a computer, and I’ve had issues with my wrists before. Sports injuries and strains, working at a computer, it’s tough on your wrists. I’ve made measures to help them, like using mechanical keyboards, switching to an ergo mechanical keyboard I built when they’re hurting more, and swapping out the trackpad for a gaming mouse. But I eventually would find that my need for mouse-based macros only available on gaming mice was at odds with my desire for something ergonomic. For some reason, gaming mice just don’t have ergonomic designs. I had heard trackballs could help, and tried the Kensington Ergo trackball mouse. It was anything but comfortable. Then I tried the Elecom EX-G Pro trackball and found that despite it’s “flat” design, it was far more comfortable. It’s not perfect out of the box, but with a rather simple mod, I have it just about perfect.
Out of the Box
For a “flat” mouse, it’s surprisingly comfortable. I was expecting that I would need a tilted mouse, but, straight from the factory, it conforms to my hand quite well. It’s large, and lets you put the full weight of your hand on it, dispersing the pressure so there’s no pain points on your pinky, hand, or wrist. I can kind of forget my hand is on a mouse, it almost feels like I’ve just put my arm down to relax. I found it was a bit easy to push the last, rightmost button, which I have set up for gesture-based macros. However, I got used to this over time, and found that a little mod I made to the mouse made it not only even more comfortable, but also made me less likely to click the wrong button.
What the Box Needs
Elecom sells these tiny rubber feet, specifically for angling their mice. I found that, the smallest size brought the mouse to the perfect level for a relaxed wrist position. It even lead to me putting less weight on the mouse, and less accidental clicks of the last mouse button too. The angle on the small feet is so perfect for me, I can’t imagine using the larger ones. Elecom really should have either made this the default angle, or put their mice on an adjustable base. It’s truly just right. However, the little feet came far from solving everything.
The package for these rubber feet contains two stick-on feet at each size. It should have contained three. The Elecom Ex-G (not Pro) is smaller, and has less of a large thumb area. It can handle just two feet. However, this is larger, and needs one at the top, one near the thumb area, and one at the bottom. Fortunately, for me, I had some stick-on foam, which I added to the bottom area. This fills it out nicely, and makes the entire mouse feel solid, like it’s built on a platform, not being held up by pegs. It even makes the bottom ever so slightly cushioned. This is how it should have been out of the box. This is perfect.
Since switching from the Kensington and my former Tracer Z mouse, I haven’t had any wrist problems. It really did solve an ergonomic issue I wasn’t expecting. With the tilt, it’s been utterly perfect. I didn’t realize poor ergonomics was more than just an occasional annoyance until I made the switch.
Customization
The app itself is a mess. It installs a Preference Pane, which you use to launch the Elecom app. What is this, 2005? From there, important items for setup are hidden. You can’t easily modify things like mouse sensitivity, or mouse acceleration. You can use the DPI switch on the mouse itself, but no more refined tweaking in software.
The button customizations aren’t very good either. I found that I couldn’t set it up to have both forward and back working, but actually had to do a keyboard shortcut for forward. There’s a “presentation mode” that’s never explained, and a “presentation mode button” that must be something you have to set up yourself? There’s not even a guide on switching between the USB and Bluetooth. Also, switching makes your mouse act like two different devices. The DPI changes! Ensuring your house feels the same regardless of Bluetooth or USB is a pain.
The app is atrocious, one of the worst I’ve used. I’ve actually considered using somewhat sketchy third party drivers and tools to supplement it. The app itself gets a 2/10. The only saving grace for it is that it does seem to work well enough to customize options. Sure, it took an hour or so to get things just right, but I can export those settings over to a different device. Of course, since I use the USB for my work computer and Bluetooth for my personal one, I did have to change the mouse sensitivity on each device to make the mouse not feel wildly different.
The gesture feature is pretty cool, and works about 95% of the time. I got a macro pad that I still use on occasion for the same gestures I have on my mouse. I find that it’s just easier sometimes. Also, in some apps, the gesture control is disabled. For example, in Affinity Photo, I can’t use gestures at all. That’s when the macro pad comes in handy. I do wish I didn’t have a reason to lift my hands off the keyboard and mouse, but some solutions just aren’t perfect for everything.
Reliability
The app is a mess, and sometimes I have to force quit the support tools and re-launch them. It’s clear that Elecom thought a lot about their hardware designs, and assumed they could just slap some software together and call it a day. It’s truly a huge drawback of this mouse that, along with not having tools to angle it out of the box, kept this from being the perfect pointing device.
However, outside of that, the mouse has been reliable. It’s easy to clean, breaks in quickly, has no issues with scrolling, buttons give firm feedback, and it doesn’t even use much electricity. I found that the batteries last months at a time, and use a single AA battery. I have some rechargeable ones and they work perfectly. The software is a massive drawback here, but the rest of the design is well thought out and will keep this on your desk for years. Hopefully they update the software one day, but judging by how old it is, I doubt it. It’s a serious drawback to the reliability and longevity of this device, I don’t know why Elecom wouldn’t put more effort into it.
Overall 7/10
This mouse made me pack up my beloved Tracer Z mouse. I love the fact that I can do so much mouse movement with just my thumb and, once I got used to it, I found it was accurate as my mouse too, sometimes even more accurate. The size, shape, comfort, and buttons on this mouse make it my new favorite, and I can’t see going back to normal mice anytime soon. I’m a convert, I’m one of those people now: a trackball user.
Elecom desperately has to spend more time working on their software. The software that comes with this is unacceptable. It frequently has issues like forgetting the button mappings or gestures, requiring I use admin privileges on my computers to restart the apps that it runs to perform those mappings and gesture recognition. It’s confusing as well, not set up in a way you’d expect. Furthermore, the translation from Japanese to English isn’t very good, with the user forced to question the functionality of everything, every message, instruction, and button. I may actually see if any third party software can fill in the gaps. I’d love to see multiple function layers for the buttons, just like I can do with a keyboard.
Regardless of the issues with the software, and the fact that I wanted to tilt it ever so slightly for my wrists, it’s an excellent mouse. With a bit of customization, you can mostly forget setup and just use it as your everyday mouse. It feels like a lot of attention went into the designing of the hardware to make it just right for trackball mouse users. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like the rest follows through.
If you’re looking for a thumb ball trackball mouse, this is one I’d recommend. If you’re looking for a trackball mouse, you likely already know to expect some difficulties around software and customization. It is a niche market, after all. Still, within that niche, Elecom is one of the best. After my failures with Kensington’s trackball mouse, this made me realize that I made the right choice by switching to a trackball, just the wrong first choice for mouse. The Kensington showed me that hardware is more important than software, but I do wish the Elecom software was as good as Kensington’s. Still, if I were to have only one (and I do now), I’d go with the Elecom any day.
Update:
I ended up going with Steermouse, a third-party software that greatly improves this mouse. With it, it’s a solid 9/10. It enables better customization and even chords, allowing me to use mouse buttons almost like modifier keys for shortcuts on a keyboard. It’s a great little piece of software that makes this mouse finally feel complete. It’s a shame Elecom couldn’t make anything this good. This mouse feels like a project. Really great concept, just needs some tweaks in the execution.