Hordes of hardcore gamers have used Razer mice and keyboards to beat their opponents, and Razer is serious about using its experience to beat Logitech and Microsoft when it comes to productivity gear. After scoring a PCMag Editors’ Choice award for its first productivity mouse, the $99.99 Razer Pro Click, the company has unveiled a $79.99 shirt-pocket or laptop-bag model, the Pro Click Mini. Combining its bigger sibling’s multi-device wireless connectivity with better battery life, the Mini is a quick, comfortable, first-class mobile mouse that easily earns an Editors’ Choice award of its own.
More Generic Than Ergonomic
Besides costing $20 less than the Pro Click, the Pro Click Mini is obviously smaller, measuring 3.94 by 2.47 by 1.34 inches (LWH) versus 5.06 by 3.13 by 1.88 inches. Depending on whether you like a lighter or heavier mouse, it uses one or two AA alkaline batteries (two included) and weighs 3.1 or 3.9 ounces; the Pro Click uses a micro USB recharging cable and weighs 3.7 ounces.
Instead of the Pro Click’s right-handed ergonomic design, the white-and-gray Mini has an ambidextrous shape (though to my eyes it’s curved just a bit to favor righties). It doesn’t break any new ground but it’s easy to hold, with gently indented, rubberized sides and barely perceptible ridges on its left and right edges. The Razer name is lettered on top but the bag-of-snakes logo and RGB lighting of the firm’s gaming mice are absent.
The Pro Click Mini has seven programmable buttons (one fewer than the Pro Click): the main left and right panels, a clickable scroll wheel, left and right scroll-wheel tilt, and small Forward and Back thumb buttons on the left side. A tiny rocker switch behind the scroll wheel shifts between tactile (with detents or clicks for steps) and free-spinning scrolling for when you want to cover a lot of vertical distance. The mouse is almost silent in operation and has a life expectancy of 15 million clicks.
Besides a power and wireless switch, the Mini’s bottom has a button for switching among up to four devices such as a laptop, desktop, and tablet or phone, using one 2.4GHz wireless and three Bluetooth connections. The diminutive 2.4GHz USB Type-A dongle, which can also control one of Razer’s productivity keyboards, stores for travel in a slot between the batteries if you lift the top lid.
In the Long Run
The Pro Click Mini approximately doubles the Pro Click’s battery life, with Razer estimating you’ll get up to 465 hours from two AAs with a 2.4GHz link or 725 hours with Bluetooth. The battery gauge in Razer’s Synapse 3 software barely budged during my week of testing; I used mostly 2.4GHz with a few hours’ trials with Bluetooth, both working seamlessly.
The Mini might not be the best choice for navigating a desktop array of multiple 4K monitors; its optical sensor features a maximum resolution of 12,000dpi and can track at 300 inches per second, versus 16,000dpi and 450ips for its larger relative. But as a portable or laptop mouse, its precision, responsiveness, and accuracy are faultless (though its feet gather dust and dirt no matter how I scrape with a fingernail or pin; see the image below). Synapse 3 lets you adjust its resolution or sensitivity (the default is 1,600dpi) and choose a polling rate of 125, 500, or 1,000 updates per second.
The mouse offers to download and install the Synapse software as soon as you connect it to your Windows 10 or 11 PC. The app provides excellent control and customization options such as using a left or right scroll-wheel tilt to decrease or increase sensitivity instead of scrolling sideways. You can program buttons to perform keyboard shortcuts (including macros with an optional download), launch apps, switch among paired devices, adjust audio volume, and more.
As an avid browser, I found one minor annoyance: Synapse 3 doesn’t list the words “Back” and “Forward” anywhere among the button-programming options, referring to those functions as Mouse Button 4 and Mouse Button 5. A larger annoyance is that Synapse also obliges you to sign up for a Razer account, prominently links to the Razer Store, and touts the Razer Gold in-game purchase currency and Razer Silver loyalty rewards programs. It’s awfully pushy, for mouse software.
But otherwise, about the only possible gripe with the Razer Pro Click Mini is that a mouse with disposable AAs is worse for the environment than one with an onboard rechargeable battery. The reduced Razer vaults into the top rank of portable productivity mice.
