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I haven’t thought about charging my Logitech wireless gaming mouse for two and a half years because I have a magic mouse pad that does it automatically. But the Logitech mice that work with the Powerplay mouse pad are expensive, heavy, or both, and none of them also double as Bluetooth mice so I can wirelessly pair them with my laptop, handheld, or phone.
Today, Logitech is changing that with the Logitech G309an $80 mouse that does almost everything. It’s the first Powerplay mouse this cheap, the first with Bluetooth, the first that lets you use an AA battery when you’re on the go — and the first Logitech wireless mouse with a supercapacitor inside so you don’t have to worry about charging. necessarily I don’t need a battery at all.
Even without Powerplay, the G309 is a dual-mode wireless gaming mouse that promises up to 300 hours of battery life using its Lightspeed wireless dongle, or up to 600 hours via Bluetooth, while you move around its 86-gram frame.
But if you have that $120 Powerplay pad, you can remove the AA battery to achieve a total mouse weight of only 68 gramsalmost as light as the 60-gram $160 Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 This made me want a mouse last year. That’s possible because the supercapacitor acts like a small battery that’s constantly charged wirelessly by the Powerplay mouse pad underneath. “It’ll never run out of power at all; the battery life is infinite,” promises Nicolas Métral, Logitech’s global senior product manager.
This isn’t the first wireless gaming mouse to test the waters with a supercapacitor — but when Mad Catz and Razer tried this in 2018, those expensive wireless power mice didn’t have one. other There was a way to recharge them. You had to use them on their included stand or with a cable. Until now, Logitech used internal rechargeable lithium batteries to allow you to make its Powerplay mice somewhat portable; here, an AA battery takes over.
While it sits in the budget end of Logitech’s gaming mice, the G309 also features the same Hero 25K sensor and hybrid optomechanical switches that the company has been offering in high-end mice for some time, both of which could be welcome improvements over the $60 G305 mouse it’s based on.
But it’s still missing the one Logitech mouse feature I’d be hard-pressed to live without: the company’s dual-mode, ratcheting/free-rotating scroll wheel that I use constantly to navigate documents and web pages when I use my gaming mouse for work. Among gaming mice, this remains exclusive to its G502 and G903 from what I can tell.
And it’s kind of a shame that Logitech is still selling its Powerplay mouse pad for $120 with only very rare and minimal discounts. If the company really wants to deliver on the G309’s promise of “wireless gaming for everyone” (Logitech’s tagline), I’d recommend making the whole thing more affordable.
Logitech has announced that it will continue to sell the G305 alongside the G309. The G309 can also share a single Lightspeed wireless dongle with several of Logitech’s wireless keyboards, including the new G515 TKL, G715, G915, G915 TKL, Pro X 60, and Pro X TKL.