Okay, I know this thread's months old by now, but it warrants a bump because this Kickstarter has delivered and I now have one. Hey, someone's gotta review an overengineered mouse like this, right?
To give you an idea of the overall size, here it is next to some popular Logitech mice, a G502 and an MX700 that I believe has the same dimensions as the famed MX500/MX510/MX518.
https://s18.postimg.org/cmhja3svd/Swiftpoint_Z_unboxing_imminent.jpg (linked because I feel like it breaks up the flow of the post too much)
On to the first impressions, shall we?
-The right side of this mouse takes some serious getting used to for me. The pinky rest, assuming it's not actually a ring finger rest, is a centimeter forward of where it would feel most comfortable for me, and gripping the side with the pinky alone feels odd.
Keep in mind that I've historically gripped mice with my ring finger resting on the right button while my middle finger rests on the wheel, and one of the Kickstarter shots showed the Z being held with middle finger on right button.
Also with that in mind, switching my grip to two fingers on top is pretty much necessary if I want to use the pull function of the two-way triggers in the middle.
-Mouse wheel notches don't feel very defined; it's like a WMO with more resistance. Of course, coming from a G502 where each tick of the scroll wheel with notching engaged is a solid thunk, it's like going from buckling springs to MX Browns in terms of tactility. Still, I wouldn't call it unusable, just different.
-Also speaking of the mouse wheel, it was not initially advertised as one of the "deep click" pressure-sensitive buttons, but sure enough, it's got all the pressure sensitivity of the main mouse buttons and fingertip buttons around it.
-The vertically-oriented thumb buttons look worse than they actually feel; it's easy to click one without clicking the other, and the bottom one doesn't require much thumb movement to hit.
-I have to use the short fingertip button caps (those buttons being the small ones between the main left/right and the two-way triggers in the middle) because the long caps rest right where my fingertips would normally rest on the main buttons. The good news, at least, is that those buttons actually don't get in the way at all!
-From a palm grip standpoint, the two-way triggers make great slap switches for the push functions, but pulling them forces me to shift back into a weird claw grip. I'd save the pulls for non-critical functions.
-All the buttons have a nice microswitch click, and yes, that includes the pressure-sensitive "deep click" buttons. The tactile click is such that it generally starts at 0% of the pressure curve, so you have a lot of room past that if you wish to use the deep click functionality.
-Wow, practically anything on this mouse could be a mode shift for all the other buttons - even the rotational axes, by varying degrees! In fact, the programming mode they show for DPI adjustment is really just a tilt/pivot trigger at some extreme angle you wouldn't normally move the mouse to without lifting it, and you're free to remap which buttons change DPI (and by how much), which programming profile is selected, or even start an IMU re-zero calibration from there.
Just keep in mind that if you decide to use the tilt/pivot features in your other profiles, you have to manually re-program said programming mode in those profiles all over again, lest you be forced to use the driver software to switch profiles and make adjustments.
By the way, those buttons beside the left mouse button, normally used for DPI shift on other mice, won't actually shift the DPI outside of the preset config mode by default. This means that it's perfectly possible to use them for more mouse binds while using the mouse conventionally. In fact, I like to use the mouse wheel for DPI shift in config mode now, with the left edge buttons now being profile switching.
-I was hoping the mouse pad they promised for Kickstarter backers would be the hard pad they showed off on the page. Not so; you can see that it's a soft cloth/rubber pad rolled up in the box. It seems pretty nice for a cloth pad, but there's a reason I have that Steelseries I-2/Icemat on my desk! But hey, at least that sweet aluminum cube mouse bungee isn't fixed to some specific pad and can now be paired with any pad you want. "No lag, no drag" indeed; Swiftpoint could probably make a tidy sum just selling those cubes by themselves.
-This mouse is surprisingly light, especially for the size. Being lighter than the G502 probably isn't much of an achievement, but it's also a smidge lighter than the older G500 going off feel. It's no featherweight WMO, though.
I also suspect that this difference in weight is why it glides a lot smoother on that glass pad. I guess we'll see if that holds up after the usual wear and tear on the mouse feet.
-Speaking of mouse feet, the default tiltable ones are surprisingly unintrusive! I don't feel like it gets in the way of normal mousing since I have to be pretty deliberate with tilting it, and it's only a bit under two degrees of physical tilt on either side
I find the flight sim base attachment to be useless, though. Let's face it: if you care about that genre enough, you'll get yourself a proper flight stick. It's not like a T.16000-M or even a second-hand SWFFB2 is that expensive. Cheaper than the Z, at any rate, whose official MSRP would buy you a pretty good HOTAS already, probably with pedals on top.
-The software does not appear to be complete. That part where they tilt the mouse right for Swiftpoint GT-style smooth touch-esque scrolling, and hold the right mouse button down for continuous scrolling? That's not in the current release. You can fudge it through emulated mouse wheel ticks, including left and right, but it's just not the same.
The "Tactile Steps" feature for pixel-perfect adjustments is also missing, since I can't find any actions that let me shift the mouse cursor around. That's something I could see being useful for artists and designers.
Oh, and if you're on macOS instead of Windows, they still haven't released any drivers for you. The Z is programmed at the firmware level, so it would presumably work as intended once you've programmed it, but you'll have to do all your initial programming from a Windows environment until the software gets released.
-Also speaking of the Z's software,
why is the driver software using up 65 to 75 MB of RAM!? Look, just because I'm using it on a system maxed out with 32 GB of RAM doesn't mean I'm going to excuse software bloat. This is a first pass on the release software, so I'll let it slide for now, but I see no reason for a simple firmware macro programmer without much in the way of graphics to consume more than a few megabytes.
I mean, look at what Kinesis is doing with the Freestyle Edge. The SmartSet programming app takes up a mere 805 KB (important when the embedded flash drive holds all of 4 MB for the software and plain text profiles), handles pretty much all the firmware functions it needs to, and doesn't force me to tab around too much to get to everything. That's the sort of efficiency that's lost on peripheral programmers these days, and the Z isn't that much more complicated of a device when it comes to programming its various features.
All right, with all that off my chest, I need to play some games for a while, figure out how I'm going to remap them after years of being accustomed to a three-thumb-button layout. Maybe I want grenades, melee, grappling hooks and/or special abilities on the fingertip buttons instead of the thumb buttons? Only time will tell what I feel most comfortable with, but I know I'll have a use for all those buttons.
Heck, I can shift everything else with the two thumb buttons; that's 8 buttons and the scroll wheel that I can easily shift twice for a MMORPG hotbar or two's worth of commands.