Nu MTE - Sanwa Gravi Wireless Trackball Review
What spurred me on to buy this trackball despite being quite satisfied with my MTE, was actually my dissatisfaction with one of it's modern derivatives: the Elecom Huge.
I was moving in a few days and anticipating being without my main desktop setup for up to two months whilst I was staying in temporary housing. I broke out my Huge with the expectation it's wireless functionality would make it easier to travel with. Since I was also travelling with my Mac Pro, it's compatibility with macOS easily filled a need the MTE couldn't.
God, I forgot how much I disliked this thing.
After months of daily driving the MTE, the Huge just felt terrible in my hand. The shape is awkward, the button placement sucks and for the form factor, the 52mm ball is frankly too big. Even after swapping the notoriously sticky factory bearings with smoother chrome steel replacements, the ball still felt lethargic compared to the MTE's buttery smooth 46mm unit. I immediately wanted something better.
Having recalled the Gravi existed from my earlier research, I decided to pull the trigger on the wireless model. It has nearly all the same basic features as the Huge - plus Bluetooth, and reviews have praised it's striking similarity to the MTE's design. They aren't kidding.
While I don't have my MTE on hand at the moment for a direct comparison, I can confidently say that the Gravi's shape and button placement is remarkably similar to the MTE. This thing immediately felt right the second I set my hand on it for the first time. It has that same moderately angled, high-arched and rounded shaped of the MTE with a few notable differences.
The body of the Gravi is plastic, with a soft-touch matte rubber coating that feels incredibly nice in the hands. If the Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman was anything to go by though, I do worry about how this coating going to age. Here's a hint: not well.
The thumb buttons are also set slightly further back, and the ring and pinkie buttons are much larger than on the MTE. Also the more squared off front means your pinkie and ring fingers tend to hang over the edge when you rest your hand on the shape naturally. These are all pretty subtle differences though, and I don't think they really detract from how nice the shape is on the whole.
The switches are also a big step up from the MTE. They are silent switches so there's very little audible click and they also have a lot less lead in, so the Gravi's buttons feel much less spongey and easier to press than the MTE's - especially the left-click thumb button. Apart from the use of a silent switch, the notched scroll wheel feels about the same as the MTE. Not a bad thing, mind you.
The Gravi also just feels generally better put together than the MTE. I found the MTE's plastic housing to be rather thin and creaky, and some of it's buttons rattled when I lifted my fingers off them. That hasn't been the case with the Gravi. It's still not really anything to write home about, but the casing feels solid and the buttons are tight and don't rattle at all. I can't complain.
The ball is a modestly sized 44mm; slightly smaller than the MTE but close enough to where they honestly aren't going the feel any different in actual practice. In fact, I find the Gravi's ball to actually feel smoother than the MTE's - even on fresh bearings. Perhaps the level of wear on the ball has something to do with that obvious difference but Sanwa appears to have used ceramic bearings instead of chrome steel for the Gravi. By most accounts ceramic shouldn't feel smoother than chrome steel, but these feel genuinely great and they should hold up much better with prolonged use.
Connectivity is achieved by either 2.4 GHz wireless, or Bluetooth supporting up to two devices. In theory, this means you can have the Gravi paired to up to three different devices at once and switch between them at the press of a button. There is no wired capability for the wireless model however, and Sanwa doesn't specify how long the trackball's two AAA batteries are supposed to last.
So call me nuts, but I think this trackball actually feels better than a mint MTE. It has the same general shape that made people fall in love with the original trackball but with several enhancements that in my opinion, elevate the overall feel and usability of the device to new heights. If Microsoft had ever updated the MTE, this is what I'd expect it feel like.
If this all sounds too good to be true, well... you'd be sort of right. There are some problems.
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| These buttons really should be labeled. |
For whatever reason, Sanwa opted for the Gravi to inherit the same exact default button mapping as the MTE which places right click on the thumb cluster immediately above left click. This arrangement sucks; mostly because it doesn't feel as natural as having right click under the ring finger like virtually every other finger operated trackball - but also because it strips you of the ability to do mouse chording, and that's a real problem if you game.
I also found the default sensitivity levels of the trackball to be set way too high. Sanwa opted for 1000, 1600, and 2400 DPI levels, which - especially for users not on ultra-high resolution displays - is just completely mental. Even on it's lowest setting, the ball just feels too twitchy and without any kind of pointer speed adjustment or mouse acceleration enabled, the cursor just flies across the screen at the slightest touch.
I would expect then, all of this can be fixed via the trackball's customization software and for the layout at least, that's true. You can remap the layout to what feels the most comfortable, however there are no settings for adjusting the sensitivity stages or for setting program specific profiles. This forces you to use Windows' internal pointer speed and acceleration settings, and do all your remapping program-side - neither isn't really an ideal solution. I also find that I need to manually start the software to regain my settings whenever I reboot the computer, and that's very annoying.
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| This just sucks. |
Actually, this all ends up being a lot worse for macOS and Linux users since Sanwa didn't even bother to port the customization software for either operating system. This reared it's ugly head when I tried using the Gravi with my Mac Pro and found myself unable to fix the stupid default mapping without the use of third party software. I found LinearMouse to be the best free option to fix this on macOS, but it's unfortunate that Sanwa haven't addressed the lack of support for operating systems other than Windows.
Even then, the software experience for this trackball is just bad. It's missing a lot of useful features that even the old MTE had, and I would forgive it for not having proper sensitivity adjustment if the default DPI stages weren't set so stupidly high. For users who can't be bothered to work through those issues, I'd call this a massive deal breaker.
That said, if you can grapple with the lousy software (or lack of) and the overly-high sensitivity, this is still a pretty darn nice feeling peripheral in actual use. The 2.4 GHz wireless polling rate seems to top out at 130 Hz, which is pretty run-of-the-mill and the tracking feels plenty smooth otherwise. Even though it's a little too fast for my liking in raw input, I'm still generally enjoying using the Gravi on it's lowest 1000 Hz DPI setting.
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| It's like the Spider-Man imposter meme, but in trackball form. |
The Gravi also makes for a genuinely compelling value argument with the wireless model retailing at just $45 at the time of writing, while the wired model is only a dollar less. This is roughly half the price of what most decently conditioned MTEs go for on the used market, and $5 less than the wireless Elecom Huge. Compared to the latter, the Sanwa is just a way better feeling device, even though Sanwa's software is pretty lacking compared to Elecom's.
The only trackball that gets closer to the general feel of the MTE than the Gravi is the Ploopy Classic, and that's literally a 3D printed clone of the old trackball, and open source to boot. That said, a Ploopy Classic 2 kit's $145 price tag makes it prohibitively expensive for most potential users, and it only comes in wired form.
Other alternatives include the Nulea M505, ProtoArc EM03, and the Porlei fingertip trackball; all nearly identical to the Gravi and might even be made by the same underlying manufacturer. The Nulea and ProtoArc are of particular interest to me because while they completely lack customization software, they feature the "correct" button mapping by default, more DPI stages than the Sanwa, and also a rechargeable battery. However, the button layout is slightly different than the original MTE, lacking the pinkie button and having forward and back buttons in place of the upper thumb button.
Overall, the Sanwa Gravi is a really solid trackball despite some annoying faults. While those issues are prevalent enough to where they might turn off buyers who just want something that's plug and play with no fuss, especially in regards to the software experience - I think in terms of overall feel this is about as good of a Microsoft Trackball Explorer substitute as you can find, and it's cheap! I'd imagine I'll be having quite a hard time finding a good excuse to pull this one off my desk in the foreseeable future.
What's Good
- Remarkably similar feel to the legendary MTE.
- Smooth ball feel with durable ceramic bearings.
- Crisp feeling and quiet buttons.
- Good amount of connectivity options.
What's Crap
- Bad software experience.
- Same awkward default layout as the MTE.
- No wired connectivity option.
- Default sensitivity levels are too high.
Verdict
Might just be the Microsoft Trackball Explorer substitute you've been waiting for - so long as you're not a Mac or Linux user and happy with the default button mapping.
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