Fnatic BOLT Gaming Mouse Review 10

Fnatic BOLT Gaming Mouse Review

Value & Conclusion »

Software


The software for the BOLT is called OP and explicitly labeled as a Beta, which is without any doubt a most fitting description. In terms of stability, the software wasn't too bad actually, aside from JavaScript errors being a common occurrence when terminating the application. More troubling are the fairly frequent bugs, which range from settings not being saved correctly, the mouse no longer being recognized, and the software straight up ceasing to work. In addition to that, the design itself is flawed, too. First, button remapping is entirely absent. Second, all settings are tied to profiles, which are cycled by pressing what typically would be the CPI cycle button. As a result, if one wants to make use of all four available CPI steps, one has to adjust every single setting for each of the steps individually, which quickly turns into a test of patience and endurance. Lastly, from a UI design perspective, I cannot help but notice the mismatch between the size of the picture of the mouse and settings side bar, which has to be scrolled to show all the settings. Surely, making the utterly useless picture smaller and the settings bar bigger would have been a more sensible choice. The biggest handicap, however, is that the software does not permit changes when using the mouse in wireless mode. As such, one has to plug the mouse in each and every time one wants to change any setting. This is further compounded by the fact that the click latency setting, for instance, will only save after unplugging and then re-plugging the mouse.

All of the available settings are accessed through two tabs. The first tab includes all the performance-related settings. CPI can be adjusted in a range of 100 to 12,000, for x and y-sensitivity separately, and in increments of 100 even though the 3370 natively supports increments of 50. Further options include angle snapping (on/off), lift-off distance (medium/high), and polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz). "Debounce" effectively controls click latency and can be set from 1 to 12 ms in increments of 1. Lower values will result in lower latency, yet higher likelihood of double-clicking. "Sleep" defines the amount of idle time that has to pass before the mouse enters sleep mode. This setting applies to wired mode as well due to all setting changes only being possible in wired mode. The second tab houses lighting settings and is detailed below.

All setting changes are saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 137 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized, be it to the taskbar or system tray. Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be. Terminating the application reproducibly resulted in a JavaScript error on my system.

Lighting

The BOLT has but a single lighting zone, which is the scroll wheel. A total of five pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Colour Editor, Fade, Heartbeat, Pulse, and Reactive. For most effects, colors, brightness, and the speed of transitions can be adjusted. Disabling the lighting is possible by reducing brightness to zero.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are decent throughout. Below is a short demonstration video in which I go through the Pulse and Fade lighting effects. Please note that illumination was set to 100% brightness:

Battery Life

Fnatic states a maximum battery life of up to 110 hours using 2.4 GHz wireless and 210 hours using Bluetooth (5.1). Both of these figures are without illumination, but at the maximum applicable polling rate (1000 Hz for 2.4 GHz, 133 Hz for Bluetooth). While Fnatic OP does include a battery charge status indicator, it only works when the mouse is plugged in. Furthermore, the indicator isn't reliable as the percentage will vary each time the mouse is plugged in. With that said, after 20 hours of continuous use without illumination and at a polling rate of 1000 Hz, the indicator showed either 98 or 100%, which of course is impossible. Accordingly, I'm unable to gauge anything.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I measured the charging speed during the constant current stage, which sits at around 0.341 A. The model number of the battery is 582535. It comes from FUJI Electronics and has a capacity of 470 mAh.
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Sep 29th, 2024 05:16 EDT change timezone

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