 the Logitech MX Master mouse. That's what we're talking about today. Possibly the best mouse in the world, in my opinion. And if you're not familiar with it, I'm gonna be talking about the mouse. And even if you are using one, I'm gonna be talking through the software because there are maybe a couple of features that you may not be aware of. And I'm also gonna be telling you about a little accessory that you might want to protect your precious mouse. So, this video's for you. If any of the above apply. Hello and welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And yes, the Logitech MX Master series. I've been using the MX series of mice, mouses, whatever you call them, for years now. Over 10 years, starting with the original performance MX mouse that they released. There were several iterations of that. And then they changed the name to MX Master. And now we're on the MX Master 3. And it's just, in my mind, the best mouse. And I've tried a few others along the way, but always kept this one as my sort of go-to. And I've often had multiple versions of them. One in the office, one at home, one in my bag to carry around. So, I am certainly a fan of them. You can say that much. So, why do I like them so much? Well, it is the build quality, first of all, is really good, really solid. But then it's the functionality of them as well. There are a lot of things that they can do that you couldn't do with other mice. There are some other competitors, but I won't mention their names here. So, let me just show you, first of all, where you can find them. Obviously, I'll leave a link to these in the description. Now, the version that I've got is this one, the MX Master 3 wireless mouse. It's currently reduced in price from $99 to $92 on Amazon. $93 actually, $92.96. But there is another version, which as far as I know is actually almost identical and it's currently discounted to $79. And that is this version, which is only five left though. So, better hurry to get these bargains. But yeah, the only difference is, is this color here? What they say is, it is for Mac. But my one works perfectly well with Mac. There is no limitations on it. And it's just that this color here is, they call it space gray. So, wireless MX Master for Mac, color is space gray. Whereas this one, they call it black. Well, it's actually dark gray. So, there's nothing black on this mouse, except perhaps for the little pads that you get underneath it. But we'll have a look at that after. So, it's really just this detailing here is more of a sort of silvery gray color on the Mac version. But apart from that, it's $79. So, all of the other functionality, as far as I know, is exactly the same. So, let's come and have a look at the mouse for a moment. And I'll show you why I like it so much. So, first of all, this is the mouse. It's got left and right button, obviously. It's got a scroll wheel that we'll come to because it's got some really nice little functionality on that. This little button as well relates to the scroll wheel, but I'll come to that as well. Then it's got a side scroll wheel over here. It's got some forward and backward buttons. And there's also a thumb button on this part here where you would normally rest your thumb, but you can just press down here and this is a button as well. It charges over USB-C. So, there's a USB-C cable that goes in there. The battery lasts for months, to be honest with you. I, it's very rare that I get the little blinking thing that comes up and it will pop up on screen saying the battery needs to be recharged. It's literally months. But once you do need to charge it, you just plug the USB cable in and then it leave it on overnight or whatever and it will be fully charged again and then you won't have to worry about it again for another month, another few months. Also underneath, you've got a on-off switch as well. Not that I particularly use that unless I'm traveling and then I can switch it off. Then it's got the light sensor underneath here. And then also here it's got a little button that you can switch between up to three devices because you can have this paired with three devices and you can switch between them here. But there is another even better way to switch between devices, but I'll show you that when we have a look at the software. But yeah, it's really nice and comfortable. The sort of texture of it is a nice sort of rubbery texture. So it's got just enough grip without being, I was gonna say without too much grip. I don't know if that is even possible. It's got a nice feel to it. Let's just say that the buttons themselves are sort of textured plastic. So the texture feels pretty similar really, but overall it's just got a really, really nice sort of solid weight to it as well and a texture and it fits nicely in the hand. I don't like those small mouse is where you feel like you're just sort of holding them over the top, something like this. I like something where you can sort of rest your hand on it and it just feels a part of the hand almost when you're using it and that's what this feels like to me. So the mouse itself, the hardware, just really solid. They've always been well built these myself and I've had to really hammer them to cause any sort of damage to them. Although I have dropped a couple off a table before now and yeah, depending on how it lands, it's that can have some bad effects sometimes. But I'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Let's come and have a look at the software though because that is really how much can I say about the mouse itself. The power of it is in the software. So I'll come back to my screen sharing and I'll show you the software that comes with it. So once again, as I often mention with software applications, there is usually in the installation process, you're gonna have to go through that process where it asks for permission to access some of the security and privacy sections of your max system preferences. So it will prompt you to do that and you just need to go through and grant it access because you are gonna be giving it access to control your system at various different levels. But that's nothing to worry about if you see that. So when you open up the software, the Lodgy Options software, this is used to control various different Lodgy Tech devices but I've only got the mouse that I'm using with this at the moment. But other ones would show up there if you had other things. The first page of it, there's three different sections that we'll have a look at. And the first section is the first page. In fact, let me just pull up my, I haven't launched my ProMouse. That is a very schoolboy era, isn't it? Not to have started my ProMouse, there we go. So hopefully you can see that and I can zoom on it. So here you can see the different buttons. You've got this thumb button here. You've got the top wheel that I talked about, the scroll wheel and that button. And then you've also got these buttons on the side. So we've got the side scroll wheel and then these, they call them the forward and backward buttons because often you use them for forwards and backwards, like when browsing the internet or things like that. But the thing that's great about it is that these buttons are all programmable and also they are not just programmable but they're programmable by application. So you can give custom commands or features to some of these buttons for different applications, which is what I do as well. So let's have a look at how you can program these. So first of all, if you hover over a button you'll see that it's sort of highlighted in a little green color, the Logitech green. And so if I hover over this thumb button you can either have a gesture. So with the mouse you can have gestures where if you hold down a button and then swipe, you know, left, right or up and down, it can give it a gesture like that. Or you can have a keystroke or you can do things like change the pointer, split, speed, minimize a window, mute, or have the max mission control be activated. So in fact, if I come down and click more there's also expose where it shows all of your apps on the screen, show your desktop, desktop, right or left. So that is if you are using max spaces with multiple desktops, you can flick between them as well and or you can have a keystroke. Now I actually have a keystroke. When I'm not in any particular application I have a keystroke set to command N which is new which seems a bit of a weird thing. Why would you want a button on your mouse just for a new document? But the reason is when I'm in applications I've got specific things programmed for this one but when I'm sort of out of any of my normal apps then if I click on the desktop and just press this button it actually opens a new finder window. So because I seem to be always in and out of the finder all the time I've just mapped this particular thumb button on my thumb wheel here, not thumb wheel but my thumb pad. I've mapped that to be basically open a new finder window. So wherever I'm I can always just pop open a new finder window. So that is what I've done. I'll come into the gesture button option because I've got one of those mapped a little bit later on. So that was this button. Now if I come onto the thumb wheel this is where I've got a gesture control. So here I've got it set to gesture control and what that means is if I press the button in the middle then it brings up mission control which opens up all of those, all the different apps that are open. But then if I hold down that button and then swipe left or right it switches between my desktops and then if I swipe up or down so holding down the button and move the mouse or down I mean then it's either mission control or app expose. So that is the way that you use the gestures. So you're actually holding down the button and moving the mouse at the same time. So in the same way as I've done that you can also then program these other buttons. So this horizontal scroll I have for scrolling. This is good for, so in Premiere Pro for example then this one is set to scroll the timeline left and right and zoom in and out for the scroll wheel. So there's lots of good things that you can do in different applications for it. The forward and backwards. I've got that assigned to different move spaces or if I'm in a web browser then it's forward and backwards on the pages and so on. Now the scroll wheel is interesting because it's got something, in fact let me come to the point and scroll menu. It's got something called smart shift. Now the wheel itself has sort of got like clicks. So when I'm moving the mouse wheel I can feel that there's a distinct click to it as it's moving. And that means that if you want to scroll sort of incrementally slowly up through a document or something like that or through the file manager, the finder rather then having that scroll wheel with those little clicks really helps. But if you press this button on the top it actually makes it go freewheeling. So there's no clicks to it and it will spin quite freely and because it's got quite a weight to the wheel you can really sort of whiz through documents that way as well and then if you stop it it's put the sort of break on then it will stop again. But this isn't actually a sort of mechanical thing. I mean it is a mechanical thing but this button is not a mechanical button. It's actually done sort of electronically to sort of toggle this on and off. And they've got what's called smart shift and this when it's enabled you can change the sensitivity of that. And that means that it will you don't need to have it activated on the button but it will as you flick it more it will automatically release the sort of ratchet if you like and then flick to being the the sort of more freewheeling flywheel thing. So that's great when you want to have that fine adjustment going through webpages for example but then if you just set it spinning then it will whiz down to the bottom or whatever. So that is a really neat little feature that it's got there and so that is currently enabled. And then you can also change to manually change it between the free spin and the ratchet and you'll notice if I press the button then that will also change that as well on the mouse. So you can just do it directly on the mouse here as well. So then you've also got this fix mode is inactive. So that will only change when you've disabled that smart shift but you can do it as I say manually by pressing on this little button. The scroll direction. Now at some point Mac changed the way that you scroll. I forget how many years ago it was it was maybe six, seven years ago and they went from I can't even think the way that you normally do it so normally you sort of move up like that and the page scrolls down and then you roll it backwards like that and the page will scroll up but at some point they flipped it because it seemed more in line with the way you do it on touch or something like that. I forget but anyway, I just stuck with the original way. It's one of those things that if you come to a Mac that has got it the opposite way it just seems weird but it might be more logical the way they're doing it now I'm not sure but anyway they call it natural scrolling is the way that it was always used to be done just so that you know, smooth scrolling as well. So that is again sort of scrolling the controlling the speed of the scroll I believe but I have that disabled and then you've got the same as you can change the pointer speed so just as you can do with any mouse changes the speed that the mouse will move around on the screen that's a little bit too sensitive for me so in fact I couldn't barely even get back to it so I changed that there and then you've also got the scrolling speed as well so that's just the default scrolling speed you don't need that too high because you've got that flywheel effect if you want to just spin down to the bottom and then also the same for the thumbwheel speed so moving left and right and the thumbwheel direction as well so that's much the same as the scrolling direction so that is some things that you can do with the point and scroll but there's another one which another feature which is really good which I haven't actually been using I have to say but it is what basically Apple are introducing in their next OS so if your computer can't do what they're offering which I forget what they're calling it now is it continuity or something like that where you can move your mouse from one computer to the other well this has been able to do that for quite a while now and you just set it up on both computers and then you just move your mouse to the edge of the screen and it moves over onto the other screen and you can have this for up to three computers I think and just as with the Mac thing you can the Mac OS release you can also copy things from one and move them to the other and if you've got the Logitech MX keys I think it's called keyboard which is probably what I'll get when I next upgrade my keyboard although this old one's been fine for me to be honest then that would also transfer the keyboard over to that so it's basically replicating what you're going to be able to do with the Mac OS when they eventually release the software but as I say that only works with certain Macs I believe whereas this will just work with anyone where you can actually install this software so that is the MX mouse software and as I say it is my highly recommended mouse and I can't imagine using anything else there was an occasion where I had to use another mouse for a very brief period of time where I left this one at home and had to use another little more normal sized mouse and yeah it was very frustrating but there is one more thing that I want to tell you about because as I say I have at some point broken some of these by knocking them flying off a table I don't mean just dropping them a short distance I mean accidentally swiping them off with a bag and it went flying across the room and smashed against the floor so there's nothing really that can protect about that protect against that in all eventualities but one thing I do do now as well is when I'm traveling is I have got a little case for it because I do want to protect my mouse you know if you're buying a $90 mouse then it's worth giving it a little bit of protection when you're on the road and so fortunately they make these really nice hard shell cases which I'll leave a link to and it's got a lot of sort of foam protection in it and it is literally made to measure for this so this fits perfectly you can see it's sort of matching the shape of the base in there and this just fits in very nice and snug and keeps it nice and tight and just sips close there is a little sort of handle attachment on there I don't think I'm ever gonna walk down the street with this hanging off my wrist so I just detached that but the case itself is as I say it's really really sturdy it's a strong case anyway so it's not gonna get much deflection it's pretty pretty hard but then yeah it's just nice and sort of foam padded inside so if you are gonna spend the money on the mouse then and you travel a lot which perhaps you haven't been doing of late I don't know but as the world is opening up again perhaps you will be in the future then this is a great way to protect it when you're on the road and that's what I've been doing anyway so there we go that was just my little overview of the Logitech MX Master Mouse because somebody asked me about it the other day and so I thought I'd make a little video to share with you what I was using because I seem to have covered most of the other bits of tech that I've got in my office so there we go that's all for now but I shall leave a link to some of the other videos that I've done at the end but in the meantime before I go I know you know what's coming if you like what you've seen today then do go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button and share it with anyone else you know who might find this sort of stuff interesting and as always I'll leave a link to anything I've mentioned in the description below but now it's time for some more great videos and those are coming up on the right hand side and I'll leave a link to all of my tech reviews over on the bottom right there have a great day everyone.