Price Tag: $44.95
Official URL: roadmice.com
Rating:

This mouse is an awesome gift for car enthusiasts. It combines a surprisingly detailed and well-made replica of a car with a surprisingly functional and accurate RF wireless optical  mouse. 

AESTHETIC 

These mice are smooth, shiny and well-detailed replicas of a variety of cars from GM, Dodge, Plymouth, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Ford, Pontiac, and Saturn. 

QUALITY & CONSTRUCTION

This little car is very well made out of heavy plastic, and it has a good weighty feeling to it without being hard to budge. There are no moving “car parts” (the doors are closed, the wheels are fixed in place) so the car look doesn’t interfere at all with the functionality of the 800dpi mouse. 

The hood is divided into the right and left mouse buttons, and when you press a button the corresponding headlight lights up. There is a switch on the bottom to turn this functionality off and conserve the batteries. There is a scroll wheel in the middle of the hood that lights up red when the mouse is on. 

The buttons click very smoothly and do not stick. The scroll wheel is very pleasant to use, has a slight ridged texture, and has only the slightest bit of that ‘gears turning’ feeling when you use it to scroll- a feeling that is good for its feedback, but which becomes annoying in mice that have too much of it. Not a problem with this mouse at all. The scroll wheel allows you to “click” it as a third/middle mouse button as well. 

The battery compartment is located at the bottom of the mouse and does not require a screwdriver to open. 

PACKAGING

The RoadMouse is packed in a plastic bubble pack that has to be cut open with scissors. However, this just takes one quick cut across, and the plastic material is thin enough that you can use normal safety scissors to cut through it instead of the superduper tin-can cutting scissors needed for some packages.

Also in the package are the wireless USB dongle, two AAA batteries, a product registration card, and a list of other products made by Roadmice. Roadmice gets a major round of applause for including batteries. 

INSTALLATION

The operating instructions are included on the back of the packaging, make sure you read them before tossing the packaging otherwise you might end up unable to get the mouse working. (You have to press the little button on the USB dongle until the light starts slowly flashing, hold the road mouse near the dongle, press the button on the bottom of the road mouse, the light on the dongle will flash rapidly. Hold the mouse near the dongle until the light stops flashing. I had to move my Corvette to the left of the dongle to get it to recognize the mouse, as it wasn’t happening when I held it to the right. Once I got the two parts synced up, the Roadmouse worked immediately and didn’t require a reboot. I found that it was a bit too speedy on my system, but a few seconds of tweaking in the Mouse control panel had it slowed down to my preferred speed. 

BOTTOM LINE 

This mouse would make a great gift for a car-obsessed young’un, or his or her dad. (Since we all know that no dad ever really grows up. Keep it out of reach of your toddler, though, as he WILL end up driving it all over your house. And even though the recommended range for this mouse is only 1.5M I can testify that it works on my laptop up to 10 feet away. Awesome news for those of us that want to use it to connect to a Media PC in the living room. Not so awesome news for those of us whose toddlers possessed their computer for 10 minutes before we.. err… I… realized why my mouse had lost its mind. Oops!