When Mionix started back in the day, they made a name for themselves by offering comfortable shapes equipped with one of the best sensors on the market at the time. At some point, however, they stopped innovating, and basically vanished in the last few years. With the Naos Pro, Mionix aims to offer an upgrade of one of their classic shapes. Unfortunately, while a successful upgrade overall, the Naos Pro fails to justify its price tag.

To be sure, not everything is bad on the Naos Pro. First of all, the shape hasn't received any changes, so those who like the Naos shape will immediately feel at home. Furthermore, the cable is up there with the best of the bunch, being very flexible but not overly floppy. The same goes for the mouse feet, which are 100% PTFE and glide very well. There is also little to complain about when it comes to sensor performance. By default, there is no smoothing across the entire CPI range, ensuring the lowest-possible motion delay at all times, but it can be enabled if desired. All polling rates are perfectly stable, and there are no issues with onset motion delay, tracking, or lift-off distance. Some CPI deviation is present, but somewhat easily accounted for. I'm saying "somewhat" since manually entering CPI values in the otherwise pleasantly resource-friendly software is a surprisingly difficult undertaking. For whatever reason, the box where those values are entered doesn't work properly, so getting the intended value can be a lengthy endeavor. As for the main buttons, Mionix opted for Kailh GM 8.0 switches, which provide a snappy and firm button response. The scroll wheel even comes with an ALPS encoder, resulting in nicely defined steps and matching tactility, but scrolling itself is fairly noisy nonetheless. The side buttons are decent, but nothing more: The back button in particular suffers from an uneven actuation point, and both the forward and back buttons have quite a bit of travel.

Unfortunately, Mionix dropped the ball when it comes to weight. At 107 g, the Naos Pro may not be excessively heavy, but it's definitely far from lightweight, especially by today's standards. To my mind, there is little point in having high-quality mouse feet and a highly flexible cable when the mouse itself is severely limited in its maneuverability by its high weight. What's more, it's not like that added weight has been used to make the Naos Pro as premium or durable as possible. Build quality is good no doubt, but 70 g mice such as the Endgame Gear XM1r or ROCCAT Kone Pro feel higher quality while weighing substantially less. Upon closer inspection, one can see that shaving off unnecessary weight simply wasn't a concern at all when designing the Naos Pro. Instead, Mionix opted for extra thick PCBs, lots of unused PCB space, and lots of superfluous plastic. By simply not doing that, Mionix could have easily saved 15 g, and landed around the 90 g mark, similarly to the Dream Machines DM2 Supreme.

Originally, the Naos Pro suffered from another issue, which was click latency. At +17.0 ms (Ikari scaling), the Naos Pro wasn't even close to being competitive. Thankfully, a recent firmware update provided to me by Mionix has addressed this issue convincingly, lowering click latency to a very good level of +3.0 ms. Accordingly, updating the firmware on the Naos Pro is strongly recommended.

The biggest issue with the Naos Pro is easily the pricing. At $79.99, the Naos Pro costs more than even some top-tier wireless mice despite being a regular wired mouse with good, but not outstanding specifications, and suffering from a seriously weighty build. Not even a set of replacement mouse feet was thrown into the box—just the mouse, and that's it. While charging $79.99 for a mouse like this would already be a bold move on its own, it quickly becomes even more stunning when looking at the competition, which is the Dream Machines DM2 Supreme. Not only is the DM2 Supreme the exact same mouse with the exact same shape, a similarly flexible cable, lower weight, and effectively the same performance, it also only costs $29.99. Sure, the feet aren't as good and the build is a bit worse, but at a $50 premium, I don't think I need to further elaborate whether the Naos Pro is worth it. It isn't, and that concludes this review.