Introduction

During one of my busiest days at CES I had a meeting to make, that I was very late for, with SteelSeries. As I got to the hotel I realized that I didn't even have a room number or a telephone number to make contact with them once I made it to the lobby. Out came the phone and I made a call to Chris and Cameron who sent off an email informing them that I was waiting in their lobby. Just as I was about to give up hope, a young lady walks around the corner and introduces herself as Tori from SteelSeries. I thought I had all but blown the opportunity, but they welcomed me into the suite, "after hours", to take the time to explain to me what that had in mind when designing products.

As it pertains to mice, the logic was very simply put to me. I was told that SteelSeries has the concept of lighter mice, with personally adapted sensors for their needs working with Pixart to perfect their needs. After I was asked to waive a few mice around on the mats of the samples they had on the desk, at first I thought to myself these are super light and are almost effortless to move. As I said it out loud grins went around the table, as they could tell I was picking up on what the concept was here. Never mind the fact that I saw these mice can be balanced on a finger and that all of the samples I touched just "felt right" when I messed around with them.

I briefly mentioned the adapted sensors, but to add to that, there is also a bit of software to add some really cool functionality to what is already an impressive mouse to use. With the software in action you can create custom game profiles with various bindings to the buttons, you can add macros and you can swap the right and left handed controls because their mice are ambidextrous in design. The sensor itself is made to be more accurate with less DPI/CPI. Where most companies offer 6000+ DPI sensors and a mouse with added weight that feels like pushing a brick, SteelSeries goes for light, lean and accurate to give you the edge in competitive or armature level gaming, for a good price.

Today we are going to be looking at the Kana in the black and orange variation. There is also a white variant, but I do believe it is this black on orange combination that won the Facebook competition for the user's pick of best looking combination. There is a lot that this middle child of the smaller Kinzu, which we will see real soon and the larger Sensei mice. I've taken the pictures, I've played many hours of FPS games and used it daily - stick around and see what I think about the SteelSeries Kana Black 1.1 gaming mouse.