Last week I bought the Logitech MX Vertical mouse to see if it will be better at preventing repetitive strain injury to my wrist and hand. Somehow working from home because of the pandemic means fewer breaks and more intense work, so I could feel it in my hand and wrist (particularly my thumb has been bothering me).
The MX Vertical is a vertical mouse with a “handshake” grip. This means your hold on the mouse is almost like when you’re giving a handshake. (Remember handshakes? Those aren’t going to be a thing anymore.) This means your wrist is in a more natural position than the twisted angle needed for a regular mouse.
I really wanted to like the MX Vertical because I thought it could help me and because it is crazy expensive, so I wanted to be able to rationalize my decision to buy it. But when it arrived, I hated it. There were stupidly terrible software problems with it that I’ll cover later, but more importantly, it didn’t feel good.
The biggest problem I had with the MX Vertical is because of my big hands. The side of my hand rests on the desk when I grip the mouse in its handshake position. This makes movement terrible. My normal Logitech MX Master mouse is large enough that my hand stays clear of the desk so movement is very smooth. Not so with the MX Vertical. I think if it had an attachable extension to support the hand, it could be improved.
So I gave up on the MX Vertical. I tried to convince my wife to try it, but after my experience with it, she had little interest. But then I had the thought that a wrist rest might keep my wrist high enough that my hand wasn’t dragging on the desk, so I ordered a foam wrist rest (yes, I’m buying accessories for my accessories).
The wrist rest helped, so I used the MX Vertical all day yesterday and found it to be pretty good. I quickly got used to the vertical hand position, and I think it plus the wrist rest will help with my hand and wrist issues.
So does that mean I’m happy with it and it is the perfect mouse? No. Not at all.
It is a fairly light mouse, particularly for its size, so clicking a button requires that I hold the opposite side with my thumb to prevent the mouse from moving off where I wanted to click. I never had to do that with a normal mouse. The button positions are OK, but not great, though again my big hands have an influence on that. The biggest ergonomic mistake is the position of the scroll wheel. It is between the buttons pretty much where it would be on a normal mouse, but that makes it fairly far behind my fingertips, so to use the mouse wheel requires significant finger movement and isn’t as natural as on a normal mouse.
The MX Vertical has lots of fancy features, but that means it requires software to use them. The problem is that because I had an older Logitech mouse, I already had the Logitech Options software loaded. Well, the older software completely fails when this mouse is plugged it and it even disables the scroll wheel. Of course, installing the new version of the software over the old one means things are still broken (I installed on 2 different PCs, so it wasn’t a fluke). The only was I could get it to work is to uninstall the Logitech software, uninstall the device, then install the latest Logitech Options software, then it worked OK.
Because clicking requires holding the mouse firmly, I wouldn’t think the MX Vertical would be good for gaming, but it seems ok for normal usage. For the moment, I will use it on my main work PC. With a wrist rest, it seems comfortable, so if you feel like your old mouse is causing trouble, the MX Vertical could be a good option.
