Thermaltake is a name synonymous with hardware for the modding enthusiast. Their cooling products are made for high performance and good looks; and their cases are designed with the same thing in mind. Lately Thermaltake has branched out, designing other peripherals such as keyboards and mice. Their collection is growing rapidly, and eventually I can see them taking over the world!!!!!!!!

Ok no, but you get the idea, heh. Today we are going to take a look at just one of their latest offerings, the Xwing mouse. The Xwing is an ultra small, Bluetooth enabled, optical mouse which is perfect for laptops. Bluetooth is starting to become more popular of late, and we are able to find more and more Bluetooth enabled devices on the market.

So let’s get down to it. Here are the goods on the Xwing as stated on Thermaltake’s site.

 

The Xwing is an 800dpi optical two button mouse with a scroll wheel and is available in three color schemes, silver/red, black/red, and blue/silver. It features Class II Bluetooth wireless technology with a working distance of up to 10 meters (line of sight), and has a data rate of up to 723 Kbps. The mouse has to be the smallest I have ever seen, measuring a mere 85.2 x 50 x 32.6mm and weighing in at a whopping 64g, most of which is the two included AAA batteries that power it.

The Bluetooth USB adaptor is about the size of a USB flash drive and features a 1Mbps data rate as well as a working frequency of 2.4 – 2.483GHz. The adaptor can be used with any Bluetooth enabled device - none of which I have handy to play with unfortunately – such as cell phones and PDA’s. It supports for example HID, Dial up Networking, Network Access, File Transfer, and will work with Bluetooth enabled headsets as well.

       
Click for larger view.

 

The Xwing arrived packed in a red and black box with a see-through front so the mouse and USB Dongle are readily visible. The rear of the box lists the specs of the mouse and dongle in several languages, most of which I cannot read. The rest of the box is adorned with the Thermaltake logo as well and snippets of the more notable features.

Cracking open the box, we find that Thermaltake has packed everything needed to get the mouse up and running quickly. These include the mouse itself, the Bluetooth USB Dongle, Bluetooth USB Dongle CD, Mouse CD, quick start guide, and 2xAAA batteries.

I pulled everything out of the box to take a closer look. The mouse itself is as I stated earlier, extremely small and very light. The top is smooth plastic and contains two buttons and a scroll wheel as well as a small Thermaltake logo. The buttons deliver a noticeable click when pressed and the scroll wheel I found to be a tad mushy. That is, the detent for each position when you move it is not firm and solid. There is a noticeable amount of slop at each detent point. The battery compartment it located on top also. The entire lower portion of the top can be removed to access the compartment. The Xwing is powered by two AAA batteries that come included with the kit.

           
Click for larger view.
 

Flipping the mouse over; we can see that the underside is rubberized and has four small feet for the sliding surface. It also contains the BT500 designation, which is identical to the Bluetake version of this mouse. The small power switch is also located on the underside as well as the optical LED and pairing button (more on that later).

           
Click for larger view.  

 

NEXT -->