Top-tier comfort and performance.
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Logitech’s new G703 (See it on Amazon) is one of its first mice to support the company’s POWERPLAY mouse pad, and is meant to offer a little respite for those who think the $150 G903 is a little too expensive. But at $100, this isn’t a cheap mouse, either. If you don’t need the extra features of the G903 (ambidextrous design, customizable side buttons, free-spinning mouse wheel) you might not need to spend the extra money.
Compared to the G903, the G703 is a little boring, but it’s comfortable, well-made, and performs just as well, which is what counts the most.
Design and Features
While the G903 takes a kitchen-sink approach to design with an ambidextrous design and all sorts of features, the G703 is rather pedestrian. It is shaped like…well…a mouse. If you were to say, “generic PC mouse” to a stranger, this is the shape they would imagine.
It has a mid-profile curve that is sloped upwards toward the left, comfortably fitting a right-handed grip. A pair of large thumb buttons with satisfying click action adorn the left side. Unlike the G903, which can switch-hit for lefties, the G703 is for right-handed users only. The shape will work in a claw grip for those with large hands, or a palm grip for those with smaller hands.
Up top, the rubbery mouse wheel has a comfortable rubbery coating and knurling, with scrolling action that has soft detents—it doesn’t audibly “click” as you scroll it, but you can feel the notches just fine. The wheel doesn’t wobble, and has a very firm click action, but it can’t be clicked to the left or right like on the G903. Below the wheel is a single DPI switching button.
The main left and right buttons have shallow travel and a nice audible click with quick return. It’s well-suited to plenty of fast clicking. It uses the same Omron switches, rated for 50 million clicks, as the G903. Around the front you’ll find the micro-USB charge port, with the same custom shape as the G903. This design makes it easy to get the plug in and out quickly and keeps it secure even during heated gaming sessions.
The bottom is adorned with a simple on/off switch and the circular coin-shaped dock for the POWERCORE module, should you opt to buy the $100 POWERPLAY mouse pad. If you don’t there’s just a simple plastic cover and an optional 10-gram weight.
Without it, the G703 weighs 106 grams, or 108 grams with the POWERCORE module. That’s quite light for a wireless mouse, and is on par with a lot of wired gaming mice.
Of course, these days we can expect a $100 gaming mouse to have RGB lighting. The G logo on the back and a stripe along the middle of the mouse wheel will glow to any color you set it to, or can be set to a pulsing “breathing effect” pattern or to cycle through colors. As with all Logitech’s G series gaming products, optional integration between the software and Overwolf can allow your games to control the lighting.
The extra $50 you spend on the G903 gets you quite a few additional features. That mouse stores five on-device profiles, but the G703 only stores three. The G903 is ambidextrous and has customizable buttons on the left and right. It has two programmable DPI switches, rather than one. The G903's mouse wheel also has a clutch to allow free spinning, and can click left and right, whereas the G703's mouse wheel is not customizable. But in some important ways the two mice are very similar. They both use the same Pixart PMW 3366 optical sensor, the same Omron switches on the left/right mouse buttons, and have the same wireless technology. Oh, and one other way the G703 differs from the G903: it is available in a two-tone white and black design.
Software
All of Logitech’s G series gaming products utilize the same Logitech Gaming Software app. If you’ve invested in a lot of Logitech gear, it’s handy to have it all in the same place, and Logitech has done a great job of keeping the app lean and efficient so it doesn’t suck away resources from your games. You can choose to store up to 3 profiles in the mouse’s onboard memory, or you can use the PC-based software to load up per-game profiles automatically as soon as you launch them. You can switch between these two modes of operation at any time.
When setting button configurations, you can re-map every function except the up and down scrolling of the mouse wheel and the left and right mouse buttons (you can reverse those but you can’t change their function). The thumb buttons, mouse wheel click, and DPI adjustment button can each be set to one of 22 different mouse functions, or any keystroke or key combo, or a detailed programmable macro.
You can set up to five DPI sensitivity levels from 200 to 12,000. You can also tune the mouse movement to different surfaces; there’s a significant difference between the sensitivity and accuracy when using the presets for a hard or a soft surface, so you’ll want to make use of this.
Logitech’s gaming software syncs with your phone, too, through a feature called Arx Control. You grab the app for your iPhone or Android, sync with your PC, and then you can adjust mouse functions or monitor PC stats (CPU utilization, RAM usage, that sort of thing) from your phone. It can appreciate that you might want to do this stuff without leaving your game, but I don’t find it very useful. Looking down to fiddle with my phone isn’t any less hassle than ALT-Tabbing out of my game. If you don’t like it, you can easily ignore it.
Gaming Performance
With the same sensor (PMW 3366), same processor, same wireless technology, and same main button switches as the G903, one could reasonably expect this mouse to perform just as well. And it does. It’s every bit as fast and accurate as that mouse, with pixel-perfect tracking that doesn’t suffer from any smoothing or pixel rounding. As this mouse uses the same major components as the G903, Logitech claims that it too has lower movement and click latency than even the best wired mice. In my experience, the wireless latency is as close to imperceptible as you can get. I never once felt a difference between running the mouse in wired or wireless mode. Whether I was desperately scrounging for gear in PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds, trying to keep my team alive in Overwatch, or madly clicking all over the place in Diablo III, I never once “felt” the wireless nature of the mouse.
Whether plugged in or not, it always delivered a feeling of immediacy and precision on par with the best mice I’ve ever used. Logitech claims battery life from 24 to 32 hours of use, depending on your lighting settings. That seems like a good estimation to me. I went 3 days from a full charge before I had to plug in again, with at least 10-12 hours a day of both desktop productivity use and gaming. The “charge it every few days” lifespan is on par with most other wireless gaming mice. This is far behind the weeks or months of life you get with non-gaming wireless mice (which, admittedly, feel sluggish and unresponsive by comparison). Charging up from empty to full takes about two hours.
Plugging in every few days is a pain the butt, and (along with lighter weight) is one of the reasons so many gamers stick with wired mice. Logitech is hardly alone in having this problem, but they’re one of the only companies with a great solution: the POWERPLAY system.
The POWERPLAY System
The G903 and G703 are the first Logitech mice to support the company’s new POWERPLAY accessory. It’s a mouse pad that integrates both wireless charging and a wireless receiver. You plug your mouse cable into the pad, then snap in the little coin-shaped POWERCORE module into the bottom of your mouse. Just like that, you can forget about charging your mouse. You never have to plug it in, put it on a stand, or swap out the battery.
The POWERPLAY surface is a good size at about 13.5 by 11 inches: big enough to allow plenty of mouse movement without being absurdly large. It comes with two surfaces to place on top (hard or soft) depending on your preferences. Logitech does not officially support other mouse surfaces, but any other mouse surface should work fine without disrupting the wireless charging system, as long as it’s pretty thin and has no metal in it. I tried two other thin mouse pads, one from SteelSeries and one from Razer, and both worked fine. You’ll want one that roughly matches the dimensions of the base, though, or it could get uncomfortable to mouse around near the edges. The base itself is rubbery and grippy enough not to slide around on your desk or to let the mouse surface move around.
Charging with the POWERPLAY is a little weird. While using the mouse, the charge would always remain the same, never rising nor falling. As long as the mouse in in use, the pad supplies just enough juice to keep it from losing charge. But leave it alone in the middle of the pad and walk away for a few hours, and it charges up, albeit still very slowly. Plugging the mouse into the cable directly will charge up fully in a couple hours. But the charging speed hardly matters. The whole point is to use your wireless mouse as you would a wired mouse—just walk away without ever thinking about batteries—the POWERPLAY system accomplishes that. So what if it takes two days to charge up using the pad? The charge never goes down, so you’re effectively on infinite wireless mode. Note that the POWERCORE module is only required for charging. If you pop it out, the mouse still works fine in wired or wireless mode. It just doesn’t charge via the POWERPLAY pad.
Unfortunately, the POWERPLAY system is $99.99, which turns this $100 mouse into a $200 mouse. It’s a really fantastic solution to a common problem with wireless gaming mice, and the best way to use the G703, but that’s a lot of dough for a mouse and a charger.
Purchasing Guide
The Logitech G703 has an MSRP of $99.99, and since it just recently launched that's the same price it is currently offered for online:
• See the Logitech G703 on Amazon
The Verdict
$100 seems like a lot to ask for a G703 that has one meaningful upgrade: the ability to use a proprietary wireless charging mouse pad that costs another $100. If you want the POWERPLAY system, and you’re going to drop $200 on the mouse and pad, you might as well spend $50 more for the G903, which is more full-featured and customizable. High price and rote design aside, you’re sure to be pleased with the G703’s performance, which is excellent.
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