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Quality Mat Glass Mousepad |
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Introduction, Features, Package
Long gone are the days when a strip of wetsuit material would suffice for any mouse user. Large hard-plastic mousepads have been favoured for some time now, but lately there's been some attempts at making a mousepad out of glass. Quality Glass from the Netherlands have entered this market with their Quality Mat. It's constructed of 4mm thick safety glass with a ‘fencing printed’ surface. It ships with a foam wrist rest and a strip of Teflon tape for your mouse feet.
The 4mm safety glass used to make the Quality Mat gives it a very solid feel – there is no way that this surface should bend, warp or distort. On the base of the mat are four small clear feet, which means the mat sits about 5mm above the desk surface. The soft plastic rubber feet ensure the Quality Mat sits firmly and securely on almost any surface, with almost no lateral movement. Since the safety glass construction of the Quality Mat is so rigid, it does not need more feet to support the middle, as are often found on many other mouse mats.
The mouse mat is 280mm wide and 200-220mm from top to bottom. It has a curved base - designed for the use of a wrist rest - a slightly curved top and rounded corners. This makes the Quality Mat a bit larger than your generic cloth mouse mat or Everglide Attack Pad (review here), but smaller in total area than a Ratpadz or Everglide Giganta (review here).
As you can see in the photograph above, my MS Explorer mouse looks quite large when used with the Quality Mat and several times while using the mat noticed my mouse slip off the edge of the surface. Usually I was pushing the mouse off the top edge of the mat – so I was left with the feeling that the mousing surface is a little small. However, I was quite surprised when I compared the size of the Quality Mat’s mousing surface to my much used Ratpadz, or the Everglide Optical Giganta that I reviewed some time ago.
While the shape of the mats is different, the actual mousing surface area of the Quality Mat appears to be about the same as the Ratpadz or Everglide Optica. As you can see in the photographs below, the mousing surface area of the Quality Mat is even a little higher than the Ratpadz that I am used to using. So while the Quality Mat looks – and feels, to me – quite small, the actual useful mousing area is in fact about the same or even larger than some of the other premium mouse mats.
 
The major difference between the Quality Mat and the other two mousing surfaces is the edge treatment. Both the Ratpadz and the Everglide have gradually tapered rounded edges, whereas the Quality Mat has a nicely smoothed but quite sharp edge in comparison. I expect that the rounded edges on the Everglide or Ratpadz improve mousing comfort and hence ‘mouse runoff’ is not so noticeable as when using the Quality Mat.
The edges of the Quality Mat have been machine rounded and well finished, but the top edge does have a sharp feel to it. This is only a concern if you are using the mat without a wrist rest, as it tends to dig into your wrist. However this should not be a problem, given that the Quality Mat ships with a wrist rest included.
The wrist rest included with the Quality Mat is actually a shaped piece of fairly dense-cell foam rubber. I have been using an Everglide wrist boobie for quite a number of years now and have found that it significantly improves comfort when using a mouse.
The foam rubber of the Quality Mat’s wrist rest feels quite hard when used but it definitely provides an improvement over using no wrist rest at all. I also found that foam rubber material of the wrist rest tended to stick to my skin when using it for some time, and that the square-cut edges did not provide for much comfort.
However, I was conscious of the fact that I am comparing something that came free with the mouse mat, to a product that I paid a few dollars for and have become used to over a number of years. For this reason I asked two other people to test the Quality Mat and the wrist rest. While they were both impressed with the performance and feel of the mousing surface they tended to agree with my assessment of the wrist rest.
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