I'm now a true convert after using a Vertical Mouse

After using traditional PC mouse for most of my computing life, I decided to finally see what all the fuss was about with a Vertical Mouse and I'm sold.

I've been through a lot of mice over the years from cheap stuff with no branding, to the "gamer" stuff full of RGB lighting and more. Not only that, I've used Trackball mice before and found them interesting to try but thoroughly weird and just too bizarre to keep going with. After growing up with the likes of the Amiga, I've pretty much seen it all when it comes to inputs like this.

Why the change? Well, a little known fact is that I have a permanent injury in my main hand (skateboarding hurts, kids). Often it causes issues and longer periods of using a traditional mouse really quite badly brings out the pain. After researching for some time and gathering some opinions, I went for a Vertical Mouse to see if it would make a difference — and I'm a little bit blown away.

The model I went for to test the waters was the CSL TM137U from CSL-Computer (Amazon), which only cost £13.99 so it felt like a reasonably entry point to try one out.

As it turns out, there's a lot of variants of this design and model, with Anker being one of the most well-known and both the Anker version and the CSL were highly rated, so I thought I couldn't really go wrong with it. As it turns out, it seems CSL simply have an unbranded version (sold out) of what Anker sell so they're pretty much the same. CSL was just the cheaper option at the time.

The benefits of using a Vertical Mouse are surprising. Instead of flattening your arm which twists your muscles around (causing some strain), it gives you a nice handshake-style grip that just feels so much more natural and ends up reducing the strain often felt using a traditional mouse. You don't feel the need to clinch your fingers up on the main buttons because there's no need with how your hand rests on it too. I don't want to jinx anything but honestly, it's completely stopped any hand and wrist pain I was having - it's absolutely marvellous for that.

So it sorted out my main issue but is the mouse overall any good? After using it now for a few weeks I have a few thoughts on it. Overall, it is a genuinely good mouse. However, there's a few points for me that go against it:

• The size - it's a bit bigger than what I am used to (small hand problems) and so if it was a bit shorter and thinner, it would have been perfect.
• Retraining my brain for clicking in the middle button is still a work in progress. I keep going to click it directly down like you would a normal mouse, but flicking against it to the side is the sweet spot for this model. It also feels at times a bit too sensitive and feels like it can double-click sometimes.
• It's a bit slippery. A nice texture due to how you grip it would have been much nicer

Minor gripes aside, overall it's a good choice to start with if you're looking into picking one up. With a single-click button to switch it between 1000-1600 dpi it works well there for different uses. Two extra buttons by your thumb are ideally placed too, makes switching back and forth in your browser easy and using them in games is great too. On top of all that, it looks pretty nice too.

I've enjoyed using it so much that my Razer DeathAdder Chroma is going off to the retirement home. I shall continue using this, at least until a find a slightly smaller version.