Sparkles and Feet
Despite the shape, size and texture of the new Everglide Attack Pad Optical and Giganta Optical, there is one major feature that I have yet to mention; the Optical’s are transparent, and look really cool. Obviously if the mouse mats were completely clear and shiny, an optical mouse would have a hard time, and probably not work. So the Everglide Opticals are filled with thousands of little silver flecky-things. The “clear” Everglide Optical mats contain “4% reflective particles”, and the grey-brown “smoke-tinted” Optical’s contain “8% reflective particles”. Note: Everglide’s website does say that both the clear and smoke pads contain 4% reflective particles, but the blurb I received, and the photographs indicate that the smoke has more sparkly stuff.
The Everglide Optical ‘clear’ - 4% reflective particles.
The Everglide Optical Smoke – 8% reflective particles.
The addition of reflective particles, combined with the matte textured surface means that the Everglide Optical’s work well with optical mice, as you would expect, given the name of the product range. The printed blurb that I received with the Everglide products contained some mumbo-jumbo-science-trickery about the special surface, red LED’s and mouse power saving features.
While I am not going to attempt to prove or disprove this science-trickery, I do wish to point out that my corded MS Explorer and MS Optical mice appeared to operate with the same LED brightness on the Everglide mouse mats as every other surface they were used on. In fact, as far as I know, the MS corded mouses do not have any LED-brightness-saving-features. That’s not to say the LED does not turn off/low when the mouse is not being used, but when the mouse is in use, the LED operates at the same brightness. Where this power-saving feature could be useful, is if you are using a cordless mouse – with LED brightness adjustment technology - and were dependant on battery power. But how many people are going to use a slow-refresh-rate cordless mouse, with an uber-cool-but-expensive mouse mat?
One minor detail that did disappoint me about the Everglide Optical Pads was the little rubberised feet. The Attack pads have 6 little feet; two located along the top edge, two at the bottom of the convex curve, and one on each side. For the smaller pad this is adequate. However the Giganta has only 5 little feet, three along the top edge, and two at the base of the convex curve. I would have preferred to see more feet, along the sides and one or two in the center of the Pad, this would help reduce any tendency for the pad to sag in the middle due to long-term usage. My Ratpadz, in contrast to the Giganta, has 9 little feet.
The second gripe I had about the feet, was that on the Giganta Optical Smoke, we received, the feet were not positioned correctly. The base of the Everglide pads has a small round indent, designed to position the little rubberised feet, however three of the five feet were not positioned within the indent correctly. This raised the height of the mat in three locations, and caused a little bit of side-to-side rocking when positioned on a hard surface. It would be a trivial matter to peel off the feet and position them correctly with a dab of superglue, but it would also have been nice for them to be correct in the first place.
 
The feet on the Giganta Optical Smoke were not quite positioned correctly.
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