Performance In Games

The Krait is supposed to be a "budget" gaming mouse, without the frills found in more expensive gaming mice. However, as we found in our 3-month long tests, its performance was hardly budget-like.

It was very responsive in all the games we tested and worked well even in FPS games like Doom 3. Although Razer claims the Krait was designed more for RTS games (due to the lack of side buttons), we honestly think it really depends on your preference.

If you like to use side buttons, you need not even consider the Krait. It doesn't have any. But if you are not a fan of side buttons, then the Krait will let you enjoy the performance of the Razer Diamondback without the cost.

In fact, if you don't use side buttons, you will actually appreciate the lack of side buttons in the Krait. In the heat of the battle, you can accidentally click on a side button and swap to a different weapon or change the sensitivity of the sensor. Either way, the distraction could get yourself fragged in the process. You don't have to worry about that with the Krait.

However, the Krait has a flaw - a marked sensitivity to mobile phone signals. Whenever a nearby phone receives an incoming call, the Krait "dies". It just stops working, which is more than a little inconvenient when you are trying to frag someone. We had to replug the Krait to get it working again.

You definitely do not want this happening to you. So, if you are using the Krait, keep all mobile phones at a distance. Watch out for your rivals' mobile phones. They could be cheeky enough to "call-kill" your Krait in the middle of a battle.

Performance In Applications

While the Krait is marketed as a gaming mouse, the same properties that made it a great gaming mouse are the very same properties favoured by many at the workplace.

Improved precision allows for quicker and more accurate work while faster speed helps reduce wrist movement. This reduces stress and the incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome.

To test the Krait's performance in applications, we pitted it against the other mice in Adobe Photoshop CS2. We also ran through pages of text in Adobe Acrobat Reader to test its scroll wheel.

We are happy to report that the Krait did very well in Photoshop. Once we adjusted its sensitivity, it was sensitive enough to move the cursor across the large 1600x1200 workspace without moving the wrist too much, and yet accurate enough to do pixel-by-pixel work.

As with games, you will need to play around with the sensitivity of the mouse. What works right for games may not work right for applications. So, you will need to play around and adjust it according to your preference.

The scroll wheel has several click stops and softly clicks as you rotate the wheel. Initially, it was smooth and worked very well. But after several weeks of use, we noticed that the scroll wheel occasionally got stuck when we tried to move it downwards by just one step. Increased pressure merely resulted in the movement of several steps, scrolling the document several pages down instead of just one page.

Needless to say, it was quite an irritating problem when it happened. However, we cannot be sure if this is a problem prevalent in all Kraits. From what we have seen in the other Razer mice, we would think that this is an exception, rather than the norm.

Other than this problem though, we loved using the Krait in our work applications. The same qualities that made it a great gaming mouse certainly made it a great work mouse too.